❤️‍🔥 Exciting new preprint ❤️‍🔥 #Pupil constriction causes, by itself and independently of visual stimulation, activity in the human #retina and #visual system. w/ @anavili.bsky.social @veerahelmisofia.bsky.social @hakankarsilar.bsky.social @olaf.dimigen.de 1/4 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats Debbie!! 🎉

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

Opportunities and pitfalls of data contextualization in neuroimaging - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Despite rapid exploitation of the opportunities that contextualization of brain maps affords, potential limitations have received little attention. In this Roadmap, Royer et al. provide practical guid...

Correlating brain maps across datasets is everywhere in neuroimaging. Here we ask: when you contextualize a brain map against genes, metabolism, or connectivity... What can you really conclude? How can we do better? We explore these questions here: tinyurl.com/2dudkevc

Simulator of the following (attentional) models:
🔎 Rescorla-Wagner
🔎 Pearce-Kaye-Hall
🔎 Mackintosh Extended
🔎 Le Pelley’s Hybrid
🔎 Rescorla-Wagner with a unified variable learning rate (integrating Mackintosh’s and Pearce and Hall’s quasi-opposing conceptualisations).

github.com/cal-r/PALMS-...

#BIDS has been extended to #EyeTracking data!

There is now a standard for organizing and sharing eye tracking, covering gaze position, pupil size, meta data, messages, and more. Great news for #OpenScience! 🎉

Martin Szinte et al: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share our new work:
A simple measure of motor control and fitness is very informative...
Transdiagnostic Patterns of Grip Strength in Schizophrenia, Current Depression, and Remitted Depression url: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

What's the relationship of apathy to depression and anhedonia? Sijia Zhao led our work on this to show that many individuals qualify for the diagnostic criteria of 2 or even 3 of these syndromes. But factor analysis reveals that the syndromes are highly dissociable
jnnp.bmj.com/content/earl...

Some thoughts on @franziskaknolle.bsky.social recent paper on speech expectations, hallucinations, and glutamate: illness and chronicity may be important in understanding the role of glutamate in prior weighting www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

In the process, we made use of @thenewstats.bsky.social's helpful re-analysis of the original paper, and @lakens.bsky.social's primer papers on equivalence testing 🤌

All our analyses were pre-registered (first study was an RR) and the code and data can be found via the papers. A massive achievement of Charlotte Kroll who lead the study like a pro. 💪

Variation in DNA methylation of the oxytocin gene is associated with prosocial, reward-related, decision-making Human and animal studies suggest a critical role for central oxytocin (OXT) in social behavior. While experimentally manipulating central OXT levels v…

Having said this, our recently-published companion paper (👇), which looked at DNA methylation 🧬 of the OXT *synthesis* gene (in n~200 on average), does suggest a modest role for OXT in trust in this condition.

#neuroscience #Neuroskyence #cogpsyc #AffectSci #psychscisky

Overall, we find that the effect of intra-👃 OXT on trust within a minimal social contact condition is too small to be of interest for typical lab-based human OXT studies.

A small step toward clarifying the boundary conditions of a widely discussed finding.

Absence of a meaningful effect of intranasal oxytocin on trusting behavior: a registered report with pooled equivalence testing The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) is thought to modulate important aspects of prosocial behavior. In a seminal paper, Kosfeld et al. (2005) reported tha…

Two new papers out! 🎉

We revisited the idea that oxytocin promotes prosocial behaviour by collecting new data (n=211) and pooling it with data from another recent large-scale replication attempt (n=321).

Thank you for sharing. This was a fun but challenging project to replicate some of the key findings in this literature (all to first author Charlotte Kroll's credit!). Your re-analysis turned to be extremely helpful for an informed power calculation!

Absence of a meaningful effect of intranasal oxytocin on trusting behavior: a registered report with pooled equivalence testing The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) is thought to modulate important aspects of prosocial behavior. In a seminal paper, Kosfeld et al. (2005) reported tha…

More evidence that intranasal oxytocin does not reliably impact trust: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cool work from @wviechtb.bsky.social, @leonieseidel.bsky.social, @dhernaus.bsky.social and others.

#neuroskyence #stats.

#JNeurosci: Carvalheiro et al performed 3 studies exploring the relationship between punishments & money-related reward learning in a gambling task, finding punishments may promote reward learning by targeting activity in a reward-related brain area https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1631-25.2026

Looks interesting Pete, looking forward to reading!

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

New neuromapr #rstats package is available from GitHub! Highly experimental, early adopters and bug identifiers are super welcome to report issues!

github.com/lcbc-uio/neu...

#neuroscience #rstats #neuroimaging

Pharmacological enhancement of fear extinction Pharmacological agents theorized to modulate fear extinction could enhance treatments for anxiety and trauma-related disorders, but fear conditioning and treatment studies testing these agents often yield null or conflicting results. We review principles of extinction learning relevant to the design of studies that test pharmacological enhancements of extinction. We then critically review the methodologies of existing studies for three pharmacological agents [d-cycloserine (DCS), glucocorticoids (GCs), and L-DOPA] with respect to key learning principles. While each agent has promising support in rodent models, many human studies are not designed to adequately detect an agent’s effects on extinction learning. We provide specific recommendations, informed by these learning principles, for future study designs that may clarify whether, how, and under what conditions agents impact extinction.

Online Now: Pharmacological enhancement of fear extinction

𝗳𝗠𝗥𝗜 (𝗕𝗢𝗟𝗗) 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻?
Something that everyone using fMRI will be hoping is not very solid, please please...
Please BOLD don't go down if oxygen metabolism (neurons?) goes up...
And it had to affect "default" regions???
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
#neuroskyence

This is an important study but psilocybin potentially promoting brain tumor growth is consistent with human studies suggesting SSRIs may worsen survival outcomes in glioma

Misinterpreting the horseshoe effect in neuroscience Dimensionality reduction methods are frequently used to analyze high-dimensional activity of cortical neuron populations during behavior. The resulting oscillatory trajectories that consistently emerg...

You will find this paper interesting and relevant too:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Structural covariance network topology in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis: the ENIGMA-CHR Study - Molecular Psychiatry Molecular Psychiatry - Structural covariance network topology in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis: the ENIGMA-CHR Study

New ENIGMA-CHR study examining network topology differences in 1282 controls and 1582 individuals with clinical high risk for psychosis, led by Drs Siwei Liu, Helen Juan Zhou, Jimmy Lee with @dhernaus.bsky.social, Maria Jalbrzikowski and colleagues. Link to article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Statistical evidence in psychological networks - Nature Human Behaviour Psychometric network models have become increasingly popular in psychology and the social sciences. Huth et al. show that a large proportion of reported network findings are based on weak or inconclusive evidence inviting caution when interpreting results.

A new take on the limitations of "psychometric networks" now out in Nature Human Behavior. You don't want to put too much confidence in individual edges. Something we cautioned against in 2017.

1/2

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

Published now (after long last & 10 citations). Although tVNS does not alter food reward ratings in healthy people, it acutely improved liking ratings in patients with MDD (also correlated with anhedonia). #neuroskyence 🩺

Work w/ @akuehnel.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With over 7000 participants @ecnp.eu annual meeting in Amsterdam is kicked off by President @martienkas.bsky.social - Congrats to program chair Barbara Franke on an excellent program starting with an impactful keynote from Eveline Crone on the mysterious adolescent brain. #ecnp2025

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

This one looks intriguing. Arousal "embedding" whole-brain dynamics. 🤯

#neuroskyence #compneurosky

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

'Memento', but it's every plot you make in R