🚨Paper alert: So great to see this published. Our review on the predictive processing account of psychosis!

Thanks to the amazing team 🧠 - it was so much fun writing this piece. 🤩

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Here is the chess analogy by Ros Picard, 10K possible expressions (given the degrees of freedom of the face) and in response to 10K possible expressions of the other = 100 million interaction paths after one exchange, decided in milliseconds.

Congratulations to @jadynpark.bsky.social and colleagues for winning the #SANS2026 Innovation Award for their paper:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New from us:

A special issue on secondary ("organic") psychosis just published in Schizophrenia Research - edited by Graham Blackman and me, but very much led by Graham:

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Excellent articles on pressing clinical and scientific issues from a host of authors👇

Open-mindedness was the strongest predictor of *rejecting* conspiracy theories in a sample of 46,745 participants in 68 nations

In particular, participants who were threatened by people who disagree with them were the most likely to believe conspiracy theories.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Next up, the faculty blitz - Dr. Jon Freeman on the neural dynamics of impression updating

Here is an example that I presented at the recent MOSAIC meeting organized by @pablo-arias-sarah.bsky.social

So that's closer to a transformer architecture where temporal attention needs to be learned, requiring more data. So the space+time piece.

Great question! Hmm 🤔 I think IDing familiar faces is a very close analogy. I think temporal dynamics might play a role, because while ID stays the same in a facial expression, every frame in a video adds another potential dimension for attention/salience and meaning.

Revisiting delusion subtypes in schizophrenia based on their underlying structures A clear understanding of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and related spectrum disorders has been limited by clinical heterogeneity. We investigat…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Component Process Model (CPM; Scherer, 2001) – Psychology of Human Emotion: An Open Access Textbook Turns out, both theorists are somewhat right.  The current thought is that cognitive appraisals which developed earlier in our ancestral past might be universal.  These…

psu.pb.unizin.org/psych425/cha...

1/ Delusional mood, for example, seems to affect salience, where everything seems to take on significance.

2/ The persecutory subtype of delusion is connected to higher hostile-suspiciousness symptoms.

3/ Grandiose delusions may correspond to a subjective feeling of invincibility, control, power.

And then emotion is decided.

So my thought of the day: variations, in normal bounds or pathologically extreme, on any of these 3 axes could weigh on affective ToM.

And this might relate to psychosis...?

Then, we check implications:

2/ Is it hostile or friendly? This axis is really interesting because it depends on the individual's priors.

The next bit is:

3/ Coping potential, relating to the individual's perception (whether accurate or not) of control, power they have in the world.

Scherer's appraisal model suggests a few steps - first, we check for:

1/ Self-relevance. Saliency is important, and not just saliency, but saliency to You.

How are we able to perform affective theory of mind so quickly? Out of all the hundreds of possible socio-emotional states, how are we able to make a judgment of what a person is expressing (e.g. in their facial expression) in less than a second?

AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we humans speak – and think | Bruce Schneier Large language models aren’t trained on real-life conversations. As we encounter their language, it could affect our own

Oh:

A 2022 study found that children in households that used voice commands with tools like Siri and Alexa became curt when speaking with humans, often calling out “Hey, do X” and expecting obedience, especially from anyone whose voice resembled the default-female electronic voices.

Our event is tomorrow! Join us!! :)

Excited to host @hamiltonmorrin.bsky.social to speak about AI-associated delusions in this online seminar! It's free to join, simply DM @pablo-arias-sarah.bsky.social

Missed our NeuroAI workshop?

Watch the full recording on YouTube led by Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social and Payam Jome Yazdian from Simon Fraser University.

Watch the full recording on YouTube: youtu.be/E6N0u4iCJ4c

#NeuroAI #ArtificialIntelligence #Neuroscience #Research #SFU

📣 Next week we'll have an online seminar entitled “Perceptual flexibility in social theory of mind”. It will take place on the 16 Apr 2026 at 14:00 to 15:30, GMT+1 on Zoom, and we'll explore the theory of mind of humans and machines! The session will be hosted by @petitegeek.bsky.social !

Embodiment in multimodal large language models Kadambi et al. propose a dual-embodiment framework for multimodal large language models based on internal and external embodiment. Such biologically inspired principles may help inform next-generation...

Embodiment in multimodal large language models: Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Coupled neural timescales in social interaction

Review by Annemarie Wolff & Guillaume Dumas (@introspection.bsky.social)

Free access before May 14: tinyurl.com/cpahjmv9

Some parents seem to have "good sleepers" so in case it helps, your experience might be colored by your baby's specific behavior! I had a horrible time in the first year, but it did get better after year 1.

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model Interpretability research from Anthropic on emotion concepts

www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

This is disclaimer is for real. So Copilot is actually like Netflix and people need to turn on their "I'm watching a movie" brain while using it?

Reminder: Deadline 1 May for ISRE2026 late-breaking abstract submissions!

The abstracts will undergo a rapid review process, and authors should receive a decision within approximately 1 week.

The submission deadline: 1 May 2026!

For details & submission: www.isre2026.org/call-for-abs...

[Angelica Lim & Payam Jome Yazdian] NeuroAI Workshop YouTube video by SFU Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology

Youtube recording now available! youtu.be/E6N0u4iCJ4c

Symposium at #SIRS2026 on Responsible use of GenAI in psychosis.
Eric Lin presented a great paper & found users can enter lengthy spirals of conversation with chatbots where the validation from GenAI can lead to much longer conversation.
Preprint here arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16567

Heartbeat tuning increased during both appetitive and aversive emotion states, a process not simply explained by increases in heart rate. Manipulation of sympathetic cardiac arousal using beta-adrenergic blockade disrupted neuronal encoding of emotion states in the pInsCtx and blunted behavioral and bodily emotion expression

Exciting new work by @merylneuro.bsky.social et al unpacking how sensory info from the heart impacts the processing of emotions in the brain, focused on one of the most mysterious and fascinating brain regions, Insula.

#GoTeamInsula

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...