The human amygdala in threat learning and extinction Ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human amygdala provides causal evidence for its role in forming persistent threat memories.

🧠 What makes threat memories so hard to forget? 🐍😱

Using focused ultrasound we provide causal evidence that the human amygdala drives rapid threat learning 🐍⚡ and determines how resistant those memories become to subsequent extinction 🐍🚫

🆕📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Low-intensity focused ultrasound to human amygdala reveals a causal role in ambiguous emotion processing and alters local and network activity The amygdala shows abnormal metabolism in depression, a disorder marked by altered emotion, motivation, and learning. Yet its causal role in these pro…

Very happy our first paper using ultrasound stimulation (TUS) to stimulate the human amygdala (BLA) got out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social today! 🎉🥳🔊Great FUN with co-first authors @mirunmigyu.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social in @mkflugge.bsky.social 's lab!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉

building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion Making decisions on behalf of other people reduces decision confidence, which leads to responsibility aversion.

Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch

Do check out this amazing opportunity to join the brilliant @lilweb.bsky.social's lab 🤩! Do apply, deadline is 4th Jan

Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human nucleus accumbens impacts reward sensitivity - Nature Communications This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Very proud to be part of this team! 🤓Our new preprint is out, where we examine how social basis functions develop during adolescence. 🥳🥳

Brain Injury During Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation for Substance Use Disorder

A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing.
Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br...
Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Join us！

Cool lab, exciting projects in social neurosicence 👩‍🏫+👥+🧠+⚡️+🇬🇧.

We are super excited about the first human transcranial ultrasound study from our lab which is now on BiorXiv, showing the amygdala‘s role in processing ambiguous emotions and showing TUS changed resting-state connectivity and metabolite concentrations (GABA) in the amygdala - a huge team effort! 🥳🙏🏼

Perceptual metacognition beyond confidence In this issue of Neuron, Dijkstra et al. showed that deciding whether a perceived stimulus is actually present or whether it is just one’s own imagination depends on specific signals in the fusiform g...

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Perceptual Metacognition Beyond Confidence -

a little commentary piece by Tomoya Nakayama & yours truly (on @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social, Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social, & @smfleming.bsky.social’s recent Neuron paper)

🧠📈

Genetic foundations of interindividual neurophysiological variability Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.

Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Social knowledge about others is anchored to self-knowledge in the hippocampal formation The hippocampus maps how other people’s attributes relate to each other, but are these map-like representations anchored to self-knowledge? This study shows other people’s preferences are represented ...

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

[Highlight of the Month] Murphy et al. A practical guide to transcranial ultrasonic stimulation from the IFCN-endorsed ITRUSST consortium. Clin Neurophysiol 2025;171:192-226. Open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.cl...

Thrilled to be a co-author on this amazing work published in Nature! Grateful to be part of such a fantastic team @mkwittmann.bsky.social.

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational
Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)

New paper out in @pnas.org today with lovely colleagues including Hailey Trier, Nima Khalighinejad, @caro-harbison.bsky.social, @marklaubach.bsky.social, Jacquie Scholl & Matthew Rushworth (most not on BlueSky yet!) 

www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Our review out in TiCS spearheaded by Mathilde Bonnefond on the latest ideas on the functional role of alpha oscillations and distractor inhibition - e.g. we highlight that alpha increases might reflect perceptual target load rather than distractor anticipation authors.elsevier.com/a/1kFXN_V1r-...

Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex - Nature The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this ...

Neurons in the human brain multitask! Shared neurons fire in bursts for multiple stimuli, but their firing order shifts to create stimulus-specific sequences. A clever, dynamic way the brain encodes complex info.

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

Abstract representations emerge in human hippocampal neurons during inference - Nature A task in which participants learned to perform inference led to the formation of hippocampal representations whose geometric properties reflected the latent structure of the task, indicating tha...

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

The Lifespan Evolution of Individualized Neurophysiological Traits How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? To address this question, we analyzed brief, task-free magnetoencephalographic recordings from over 1,000 ind...

How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? Check it out: 👶🧒🧑🧓🧠

with the amazing @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social @alexwiesman.bsky.social & Margot Taylor

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵(1/3)

Real pleasure to be part of this. State inference is clearly fundamental to learning and rl in particular so great to see this progress in terms of understanding how the hippocampus contributes. It will be great ti see if thus can explain some rl learning deficits in humans too.

Delighted to share a new preprint with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social! We combine human psychophysics and evolutionary constraints to propose a new hypothesis about the functions of conscious vision. This has been in the pipeline a long time- exciting to get it out in the world!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share our new commentary paper discussing Ma et al.’s fascinating results on how the brains ‘smartly’ coordinate multiple predictions about other’s behavior to adapt one’s own actions! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The brain hierarchically represents the past and future during multistep anticipation - Nature Communications Memories for event sequences are represented hierarchically in the brain, with further-reaching representations of both the past and future in higher-order brain areas. In the hippocampus, these repre...

The brain hierarchically represents the past and future during multistep anticipation

#neuroscience #neuroai #compneuro

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

Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility in humans - Nature Communications Adaptive learning is difficult in noisy environments, yet people often succeed. Here, the authors show that humans do this by distinguishing between two easily confused types of noise—volatility and s...

Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility

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

Quantifying decision-making in dynamic, continuously evolving environments Human behaviour in a continuous decision making task adapts to the overall statistics of the sensory environment, and these adaptations are also reflected in changes in neural responses to incoming se...

While it’s *deeply* unfashionable to be publishing in
@elife.bsky.social right now - do humour us for advertising a study that was several years in the making (submitted way back when it was still possible for reviewers to reject us!). We’re rather proud of it.🧵👇 elifesciences.org/articles/82823