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).

and incredible support from an outstanding team of co-authors: @carinaheller.bsky.social , @tervoclemmensb.bsky.social, rae McCollum, @amarojha.bsky.social, @ericfeczko.bsky.social, Will Foran, @finncalabro.bsky.social, and Beatriz Luna!!!

This work was a huge team effort co-led by Ashley Parr, with amazing mentorship from @bart-larsen.bsky.social , tool development led by @erikglee.bsky.social

To demonstrate the method's scalability, we derive ∆R2* from resting-state fMRI in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study baseline cohort and demonstrate that ∆R2* captures expected age-related increases in basal ganglia iron at population scale.

To enable broad adoption, we provide an open-source, lightweight, publicly available processing tool for deriving ∆R2* from standard fMRI datasets, enabling scalable investigation into basal ganglia neurophysiology and its contribution to neuropsychiatric risk across the lifespan.

‼️ ∆R2* offers a practical and widely deployable method for quantifying iron-related variation in the basal ganglia across both legacy and prospective datasets ‼️

Brain tissue iron provides a biologically grounded proxy for this system. However, existing MRI-based methods for quantifying iron require specialized acquisitions that are rarely available in large-scale or legacy neuroimaging studies.

Dysregulation of these systems contributes to neuropsychiatric conditions that often emerge during development. Although adolescence is marked by profound reorganization of these circuits, direct in vivo assessment of dopaminergic maturation remains limited in pediatric populations.

Brain tissue iron is essential for dopamine synthesis and a foundational metabolic resource supporting basal ganglia function and maturation, which are central to reward learning, motivation, and cognitive control.

This paper presents the development & validation of a non-invasive, scalable marker of basal ganglia tissue iron, ∆R2*, that can be derived from conventional fMRI, enabling large-scale neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental investigation of basal ganglia neurobiology in large and existing datasets.

🚨Preprint Alert🚨

Our new preprint 'A Scalable fMRI Estimate of Basal Ganglia Brain Tissue Iron for Use in Developmental and Translational Neuroscience' is live!!

lnkd.in/gpG9naba

Minneapolis has by far the most interesting Lyft rides convos of any of the cities I’ve lived in

Precision reward/affect fMRI study out now in HBM! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

@dvsmith.bsky.social @olinotom.bsky.social @coopersharp.bsky.social and @shenghanwang.bsky.social

Intensively sampled task + rest fMRI data with behavioral manipulation openly available on OpenNeuro!
(1/2)

In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration - Bolts A change in how mail is postmarked could lead some voters to miss key deadlines, including voter registration. Advocates worry the people most affected will be those already facing voting barriers.

USPS announced that it would no longer postmark mail automatically on the date it is received.

Voting rights advocates fear that this may end up disenfranchising voters who rely on postmark dates, and they’re urging people to get ahead of election deadlines.

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Transdiagnostic latent factor models of psychopathology are widely assumed to improve brain-behaviour associations. So we decided to test this directly and found that they don't. A short 🧵

Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/10

New preprint from the lab! Led by @martingell.bsky.social .

There is something for everyone: brain-behavior prediction, latent variable modeling, test-retest reliability. 🧠📈📊

"Disentangling Brain-Psychopathology Associations: A Systematic Evaluation of Transdiagnostic Latent Factor Models"

Threading the needle: Practical considerations for merging theory-driven computational psychiatry with data-driven analytics to enhance precision health at scale The rapidly evolving field of computational psychiatry enables quantification of specific cognitive processes, and their underlying mechanisms, in a translational and potentially scalable manner, usin...

Excited to share our latest paper in which we discuss merging theory-and data- driven computational psychiatry in a large transdiagnostic cohort study (N=2400)

www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...

Christopher Pittenger, Godfrey Pearlson @annierhcheng.bsky.social @sobp-org.bsky.social

The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls

🚨🚨New paper day!🚨🚨
Wonderful work from the longitudinal arm of our cannabis-users study showing how brain reward-system function changes over 12 months in regular users. 🧵⬇️ #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

🧵👇🏻

Haha, well, my running speed is basically a walking speed but the new temp achieved means I can get out more in winter than I thought which is awesome!!!

I’ve got a list too……only willing to share the highlight reel right now: I went for a run in 35 degrees, which I didn’t know I could do!! And I’ve got an idea I’m in love with….but now to turn it into something…

#eNeuro: Findings in rats from Boven et al. reveal that the cerebellum doesn't just fine-tune our movements but can also actively compute our internal sense of time, helping link between what we perceive and how we act. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0198-25.2025

#eNeuro: Findings from Soma et al. reveal how reward-related information is hierarchically distributed across the rat's brain. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0256-25.2026

OK I swear a saw a cartoon about a mediation analysis being 3 correlations in a trench coat but I can't find it

and searching online just gives me a lot of trench coats 😂

does anyone have this? @dingdingpeng.the100.ci in my mind you were involved but I might have made it up

I also really like working with new researchers!! Their enthusiasm is better than coffee!!!

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

Rent assistance is a HUGE need right now. People have drained their savings in hiding for months and now they’re losing their homes too.

If you need ideas about where to send your money:

Prefrontal neural geometry of learned cues guides motivated behaviours - Nature The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes the value, salience and valence of learned stimuli along distinct neural dimensions, and the geometry of these representations shapes motivated behaviours in ...

Can you easily distinguish between value, valence, and salience?

Probably not, but the prefrontal cortex of mice seems to achieve this by creating a sort of multidimensional orthogonal neural space, where each dimension corresponds to one of these subjective elements

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

The Role of Memory in Temporal Discounting A widely observed phenomenon in intertemporal choice is temporal discounting; people prefer to have rewards sooner rather than later, even if the delayed rewards are larger. Despite the universality o...

So excited that this textbook, edited by @dfareri.bsky.social @dvsmith.bsky.social & @thepsychologist.bsky.social is out now! And so happy to have been invited to contribute. Here’s my chapter on the role of memory, esp. semantic memory, in temporal discounting: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Nina Raduner, Silvia Brem, et al:

Neural and behavioural differences in multisensory statistical and reinforcement learning across development and task variants

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Third immigrant detainee at facility in El Paso has died, ICE says Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso is one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country.

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Watch MADDOW

"IF THEY BUILD THEM
THEY WILL FILL THEM"

This detention center is at Fort Bliss near El Paso TX. Houses roughly 3K human beings
They're in TENTS
Horrendous conditions
3 PEOPLE DIED THERE, ONE DEATH now a homicide

Call Your Reps PLS
202 224-3121