ARC Talk: Lilian Weber, Osnabrück University: Rethinking reinforcement learning in biological agents: the role of internal states and inference in generating reward signals

🚨Next week's talk at ARC

Join us for a talk by Professor Lilian Weber (@lilweb.bsky.social, Osnabrück University).

📅 23 April 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online

See the link for details👇
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/45441...

I have just finished reading The Technology of Teaching by Skinner it confirmed two ideas for me.
First, the image of Skinner as an “evil” behaviorist is false. Reading him directly, I find a profoundly humanist thinker.
Second, he may be more useful than expected in our AI-powered era
Few takeaways

World Parkinson’s Disease day 2026, April 11th. Image of a person struggling to walk. WiNUK logo in corner.

Symptoms of PD disease. Average diagnosis is 60 with symptoms occurring from age 50. Outline of tulip to represent Parkinson’s disease. WiNUK logo in corner.

Example drugs to treat PD. Discusses how these help to manage symptoms but, as disease progresses, treatment may be less effective. Icon of medication and WiNUK logo in corner.

PD symptom difference between men and women. May be due to effect of estrogen on dopamine pathways in brain. WiNUK logo in corner.

🧠🌍 April 11th was World Parkinson’s Day.

We recognise the global impact of Parkinson’s and the urgent need for continued research. Women in Neuroscience UK proudly supports the scientists and healthcare professionals working to transform Parkinson’s treatment.

Amazing study and the coolest results (from my point of view!) is that LC norepinephrine neurons projecting to the frontal cortex encode reward prediction error

We're so proud of this one - great to see it out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social now! See Johannes' threads for what we did & found. Excited to be using TUS and what it will teach us about the neural basis of affective cognition ✨

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...

⭐️PhD Cognitive/Computational Psychology ⭐️ Use Reinforcement Learning + computational modelling to study how we form beliefs in the face of unreliable information (with me +Tali Sharot). Full funding for those eligible for UK home fees. Deadline 18/5. Please share!
@queenmarycbb.bsky.social

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits.

Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

Childhood electroencephalographic signatures predict distinct developmental trajectories to adolescent anxiety and depression Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the onset of anxiety and depression, yet their neurodevelopmental origins remain unclear.

My close friend/colleague (Dr Pengfei Xu) has published an impressive 7-yr prospective study with nearly 400 young people, showing that functional brain dynamics in early childhood relate to adolescent anxiety and depression. www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000... #PsychSciSky

Excited to share that @russpoldrack.org will be speaking at @princeton.edu this Tuesday, March 24!

Talk: "The Promise and Perils of AI-Assisted Coding in Science" 12:00 PM ET

Workshop: "Testing and Validating Code Developed Using AI" 11:00 AM ET

The Zoom is open to all (see flyer for details)!

*** New paper from the lab in Nature Comms !! *** “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” by the amazing @reneecabbage.bsky.social in collab. w labs of Jill O’Reilly, Will Clarke, and modeling from Prakriti Parthasarathy and @tpvogels.bsky.social, see below!

Happy to share our latest study on domain specificity in interoceptive psychophysics!

Happy Birthday!!!

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research!

Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

Incentives are skewed in research publishing. eLife looks for better ways to share and assess research and researchers by focusing on public peer reviews and eLife Assessments rather than publishing decisions.
buff.ly/WfmVvbP

Interview with Erdem Pulcu at @oxfordpsychiatry.bsky.social

Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful behaviour - Nature In the nucleus accumbens, acetylcholine boosts dopamine release to promote effortful behaviour.

Block that acetylcholine and just doesn't feel worth it any more...

Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇

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

Congrats!!!

DOPAMINE 2026 Room Sharing Interested in finding fellow delegates to share hotel rooms with during Dopamine 2026? If so, please fill out the form below! Once you complete your information, you will be sent an email with inform...

🚨DOPAMINE2026 (Sevilla, Spain)

Looking for someone to share a room with?
Here’s the room-share form👇🏻

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign ALT: a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign

Passionate about women's mental health?

Interested in brain stimulation?

Excited by cutting edge neurotech?

Come do a PhD with me!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

(thread)

Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’ Hans Eysenck A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a profe…

Diederik Stapel was a massive watershed moment in psychology.

However, he was -- and let's be slightly glib here -- some guy from The Netherlands who wrote social psychology papers.

The full accounting of the Eysenck case is approx, at minimum, TWO STAPELS.

retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/n...

‼️Now published in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social‼️
(with @judithschepers.bsky.social & @benediktehinger.bsky.social)

Do you have RTs in your 🧠📈-data? Fixation durations?

How do event-durations affect your data? And how to deal with this?

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

🧵 ⤵ 1 / 7

🧪 #EEG #fMRI #neuroimage

Counting down to friday! 👀

Integrating cognitive neuroscience and clinical perspectives on metacognitive mechanisms in psychopathology - Nature Reviews Psychology Cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology have made substantial advances in knowledge about metacognitive processes, but these fields have progressed in parallel. In this Review, Seow et al. inte...

Very pleased to share our new review in @natrevpsychol.nature.com on integrating cognitive neuroscience and clinical perspectives of metacognition in mental health! With @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, Lena Jelinek, and Steffen Moritz. (1/3)

Web: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
PDF: rdcu.be/ePxUG

Without monkeys, neuroscience has no future Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of BCIs, ANNs. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk.

Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao.

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/47MXYLH

The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

Thx!!!

4/4 We showed that a negative coupling between Hb and VTA when encoding NPE, which is associated with a negative learning bias. These interactions, in turn, could affect downstream NAcc responses to NPE. Structural equation modeling suggested that Hb drives activities in this network encoding NPE.