Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

PhD researcher for the project: Cognitive Control and Multitasking in the Digital Age We are looking for a motivated PhD researcher to study the behavioral and neural dynamics between cognitive control and multitasking in young and aging populations.

We’re hiring!
Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me?
We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven.
RTs much appreciated!
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Uni to students: Don't use AI bc it's important to make mistakes & fail to learn, it'll improve your long-term growth.

Also uni: Do *not* fail a single class or you're out. No chances for PhD if you have to re-take an exam. No more summa cum laude if you don't get consistently exceptional grades.

Protect Academic Life in Iran We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.

Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...

#IranWar

Awesome news, congrats!!

CAMP Lab | about The CAMP Lab at the University of Iowa uses computational, neuroimaging, pharmacological, and neuromodulation approaches to understand motivation, affect, and decision-making — and how these processes...

I'm SO pleased to announce that I'll be starting as an Asst Prof at @psychiowa.bsky.social this August.

The lab will focus on neural & computational mechanisms of motivation, affect, & decision-making, with the aspirational goal of translation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 🧠
yeelabneuro.com

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

New preprint!🚨

How do people learn how to search the visual world?

Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.

Our work exploring how we can resolve ambiguous visual inputs has now been accepted in Communications Psychology.

Many thanks to the reviewers for their time and insights!

Open-access link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I am looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, broadly construed. EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI or related methodological experience preferred.
Apply here:

jobs.uiowa.edu/jobSearch/po...

Lab website: wessellab.org

The lesson for all the students out there is that science is a community project. Most of us make individually small contributions to this project. Success is measured at the collective level. Many of our professional (and personal) dysfunctions could be fixed by more fully embracing this view.

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures?

Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham

arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432
I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

Academic life is just repeating this to one another until we retire
@jamiecummins.bsky.social

If you haven't been paying attention to Iran, please look now. Massive protests have erupted everywhere. And people are getting KILLED.
They need the world to be watching. Please share this and help keep the spotlight on them. #FreeIran

Inspiring talk at our research colloquium yesterday! 🧠
Using very cool games (🦀🎰🐷🃏),
@sebraem.bsky.social showed when and how individuals flexibly adapt their learning across different environments.
We enjoyed a day packed of valuable discussions and delicious food!

Infinite hidden Markov models can dissect the complexities of learning - Nature Neuroscience Bruijns et al. present a modeling tool that enables the tracking of learning dynamics across subjects to reveal how behaviors emerge and adapt. Applying the tool to a decision-making task in mice unco...

On a more positive note, this NN is worth a read. It takes a similar approach to Ashwood, Calhoun etc to explore diff behavioral states using HMM, but here using a hierarchical Dirichlet process to infer number of states www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yeah! Let's get this year started off right.

A new theoretical model for everyone's favorite sensitive and specific neural marker.

So why is it a marker of goals if it is called the Reward Positivity? 1/4

The Reward Positivity signals a goal prediction error The Reward Positivity (RewP) is an electroencephalogram (EEG) feature that emerges following performance feedback and is commonly understood to index both positive and negative reward-prediction error (RPE+ and RPE−, respectively) signals. In contrast to this dominant perspective, we argue that the RewP is an independent EEG feature that selectively responds to positive RPE and is superimposed on a common background signal. We further propose that the RewP signals a goal prediction error: it is elicited by abstract signals instead of by hedonic 'rewards'. This goal prediction error appears to be produced by a critic-like architecture that is associated with the actor–critic framework in reinforcement learning. This perspective emphasizes the role of the RewP in goal attainment and cognitive control as opposed to being a simple indicator of reward receipt.

Online Now: The Reward Positivity signals a goal prediction error

Continual decision‐making dynamics across biological organisms Decision-making is a central function of adaptive behaviour in biological agents. However, strategies for adaptive decision-making can vary substantially across species. Here, we aim to extend the co...

Now published in Biological Reviews!

Continual decision‐making dynamics across biological organisms onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Modeling Speed–Accuracy Trade-Offs in the Stopping Rule for Confidence Judgments! Now out in #PsychologicalReview (aka we can finally say we do comp models)! Led by @stefherregods.bsky.social @lucvermeylen.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, pref...

New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS:
Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly?
(or why does it hurt to think)

never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience

A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning Nature Human Behaviour - In this study, Collins proposes an alternative dual-process (working memory and habit) model of reinforcement learning in humans.

My paper is out!
Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets.
rdcu.be/eQjLN

Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4

Very happy to have presented our work on the computational basis of doomscrolling at the CocoFlex seminar (organized by @sebraem.bsky.social) in Ghent today!!!
More information about our work on the lab website sites.google.com/site/ireneco...

Latent variable sequence identification for cognitive models with neural network estimators - Behavior Research Methods Extracting time-varying latent variables from computational cognitive models plays a key role in uncovering the dynamic cognitive processes that drive behaviors. However, existing methods are limited ...

New paper out in Behavioral Research Methods! We introduce a simulation-based method using RNNs to infer trial-varying latent variables from computational cognitive models.
Link: doi.org/10.3758/s134...
#ComputationalCognitiveModeling #SBI

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals:
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

🧵 A thread:

Image of brain networks in a group average and individual LPFC. Individuals show: 1) smaller FP network 2) more interdigitation 3) conserved motifs 4) idiosyncratic features This was validated with task and rest fMRI

The lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied.

👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky