New paper alert: @nicglewwe.bsky.social connects the explore exploit tradeoff to cognitive flexibility!!

A fun paradox: Female mice in our lab do "better" at this cognitive flexibility task because they commit to exploit behavior sooner

In @npp-journal.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are you or someone you know graduating soon and looking for an exciting Post Bac opportunity? Come join us at Dartmouth!

Come check out our poster "[2-018] Predictive pursuit emerges in high dimensions" Friday from 1-4p if you are at #cosyne2016! This work was led (and is presented) by the amazing @wtredman.bsky.social alongside an awesome team incld. @xiaoxiao-lin.bsky.social, @fatihdinc.bsky.social, and May Chan.

Back translation of value-modulated attentional capture from humans to mice (experiment 1) and rats (Experiment 2). Very nice work by @bradfield-neuro.bsky.social et al.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The image is a promotional graphic for the 73rd Annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. On the left side, bold black text is displayed on a soft red gradient background. The text reads: "The Intersection of Interoception, Conditioning, and Motivation on Addiction, Health, & Well-Being." On the right side, there is an abstract illustration of a head in profile. The head is composed of blue and red segments, connected by lines and nodes resembling a neural network.

The deadline to submit a poster for the 73rd Annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (NESOM) is quickly approaching! ⏳

The poster submission portal closes Tuesday, March 17, 2026, at 11:59 PM CT.

🔗 Submit a Poster: ow.ly/1tW050YqsJj

🔗 NESOM Info: ow.ly/Uvzk50YqsJh

great team effort:
@sophiepeterson.bsky.social; @margole.bsky.social; @neilmdundon.bsky.social

New preprint 🚨🧠🔬
@sophiepeterson.bsky.social + @margole.bsky.social dissect the roles of 2 major OFC subcortical pathways in context-dependent reward prediction.
TLDR:
OFC→CDS: critical for hierarchical gating of predictions.
OFC→MDT: more modest role, possibly limiting non-hierarchical predictions

Dopamine Supports Reward Prediction to Shape Reward-Pursuit Strategy Reward predictions not only promote reward pursuit, they also shape how reward is pursed. Such predictions are supported by environmental cues that signal reward availability and probability. Such cue...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper 📃🚨

Out today, Melissa Malvaez, Nick Griffin, Andrea Suarez & team discovered that dopamine can enable reward predictions to shape how we pursue reward.

Surprisingly, we find that dopamine can constrain instrumental reward seeking.

www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8...

🧵👇🏻

Congrats!!!

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

People outside of Minnesota, in
case you are wondering how to help the current situation, this website has many current opportunities to donate and support people who need help in Minnesota. Help pay rent, get groceries, and provide other support for people in hiding.
www.standwithminnesota.com

Alex Pretti, wearing a green sweater with his VA badge on.

This is Alex Pretti.

This morning he was murdered by ICE. Six ICE agents held him down and shot him at point blank range. Alex was a nurse and researcher at the VA.

Our thoughts are with his loved ones and we stand united in action calling for the abolishment of ICE.

#ScientistsAgainstICE

We recently posted a new review preprint: “Ventral hippocampus and the contextual control of Pavlovian and instrumental behavior”, written with fantastic collaborators Samantha Moriarty (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Travis Todd (University of Vermont).

lnkd.in/dJ5ydAaZ

Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence - Nature Communications The role of ventral tegmental area GABA neurons in behavior is unclear. Here, authors show that VTA GABA but not dopamine neurons integrate positive and negative valence to encode motivational conflic...

So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking

Flyer of Saunders lab posters in the Saturday and sunday sessions at the 2025 society for neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

#SfN25 attendees - make sure to head to the posters when you get to the meeting on Saturday afternoon (V7-V11: Gretchen, Megan, Margaret, Louisa, Bella) and Sunday morning (KK17: Micaela) to hear about our work. We're printing the posters now and they look rad.

Folks at SfN come see the first Fraser Lab poster ever at FF6 on Tuesday Nov 18, 8am. Serena Miller has oodles of data to share on a new direction for us. Also, that day happens to be my birthday so you have to come say hi or else

Superior colliculus projections drive dopamine neuron activity and movement but not value To navigate dynamic environments, animals must rapidly integrate sensory information and respond appropriately to gather rewards and avoid threats. It is well established that dopamine (DA) neurons in...

Check out our latest, online now at @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Really excited to have this paper accepted for publication now in @natcomms.nature.com - stay tuned for the final version and huge congrats to @margestelzner.bsky.social!!!!

More info about Neuroscience PhD programs at UCSB:
neuroscience.ucsb.edu/graduate-pro...

🧠 Curious about grad school in Psych & Brain Sciences?
Join UC Santa Barbara’s PBS Department for a virtual open house on Oct 14 — meet faculty, connect with grad students, and learn more about the program!

Congrats!!!

Neural coding of choice and outcome are modulated by uncertainty in orbitofrontal but not secondary motor cortex - Nature Communications Neural mechanisms underlying flexible learning and decision-making are not fully understood. Using single-cell calcium imaging, authors here found that neurons in orbitofrontal and secondary motor cortex exhibit complementary roles in reward learning, with neurons in the former exerting a sustained role in conditions of uncertainty.

🎇 Excited to finally share JL Romero Sosa’s publication! Results are from single-cell imaging in different subregions of rat frontal cortex during ✨de novo learning. Spoiler: everything is not everywhere all at once www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Drug‐Related Engrams and Their Role in the Persistence and Recurrence of Drug‐Related Behaviors Memory is a cornerstone of human behavior, and addiction offers a compelling model of its persistence and plasticity. The scope of engram research has rapidly expanded to include addiction-related ph....

First lab paper out today! Student authors: Mikayla Cutler and Abhi Thati 🎉🤩

Hippocampus | Neuroscience Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I'm recruiting a PhD student to study how enkephalins affect cognitive processing in the rodent frontal cortex. The project uses pharmacology, multi-electrode recordings, and fiber photometry, and is funded by NIDA. Please share with trainees applying this cycle. Thanks!

Postdoctoral Scholars - Ostlund Laboratory - Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

We have an open NIH-funded postdoc position in the lab to study circuit and neurochemical mechanisms of cognitive and motivational deficits in opioid withdrawal. Apply here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09885 or message/email for more information.

Honored to be elected to serve as the next vice co-chair, along with the amazing @sciolinolab.bsky.social, for the Catecholamines Gordon Research Conference. I first came to this meeting in 2011 as a grad student and it was transformative for my career. Excited to help cultivate that for others.

K.M. Costa Lab

If you are a highly motivated grad student (@uabneuro.bsky.social) or a prospective postdoc with experience in behavior, neural recordings, or programming, and would like to contribute to this project, just contact me. Details on kmcostalab.com

My hero!!!!

We are thrilled to announce that OneNeuro Co-Director Patricia Janak, Ph.D., has been elected as the 2026-2027 President of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). @janaklab.bsky.social

View the official announcement: www.sfn.org/publications...