Learn about all things modeling in psychiatry!
Get a feeling for what computational modeling can be useful for in psychiatry
Learn about good practice in comp. modeling in psychiatry
Use models in hands-on tutorials
-Connect with like-minded people
www.translationalneuromodeling.org/cpcourse/

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller

@lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social

#neuroscience #neuroskyence

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

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

📘 Excited to share that Decision Making: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) is now available online (PDF for subscribers):
doi.org/10.1093/9780...

What is it about?

Understanding how humans (and other agents) make choices.
Below a bit more information👇

When recording experimental data, have you ever:
1) overwritten data?
2) changed the experiment and forgot when?
3) had a student leave the lab leaving a mess of dataset?
4) noticed how everyone has their own way to transfer data?

We published a solution: LSLAutoBIDS - open science by design.

🧵

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/...

🚨Last week to apply for a 3 year postdoc with me and @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, embedded in theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de Focus is on developing innovative experiments and computational models to understand social & cultural learning. Deadline is March 30th 👉 hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni...

When we acquire multimodal MRI data, they give us complementary views on the same tissue. How can we combine this rich information to improve the specificity of tissue modelling in MRI?

💥New paper out! Why do some people generalise threat more than others? We show that anxious people generalise more strongly, even after accounting for perceptual mistakes.

A huge (!) thanks to @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social and @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social

Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉

Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy.
Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.

🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.

But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?

We tested this directly.

🧵1/8

Looking at the program again 👀 I can't wait for this! Stoked to contribute a talk on ✨the interoceptive basis of reinforcement learning✨

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Ultrasound gives our brain a nudge in the right direction 🧠

👀 Look to your left, look to your right!

We used #ultrasound to stimulate the brain and it changed human choice behavior within a fraction of a second. No surgery, no implants.

Link to paper ⬇️

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

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...

I went to BAMB a few years ago and learned a ton! Do consider applying if you're looking for a summer school on advanced behavioural modelling.

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉

rdcu.be/e24jT

Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

Applications will be opening soon for BAMB! 2026

The summer school will take place from 12 - 23 July 2026

www.bambschool.org

Now online in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social CNNI - our paper showing that reliance on habitual responding in transdiagnostic compulsivity may be underpinned by uncertainty about learned environmental structure

📃 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Huge thanks to my co-authors @jscholl.bsky.social and Matthew Rushworth, as well as Hailey Trier, Jill O'Reilly, @nilskolling.bsky.social , @mkwittmann.bsky.social , and to our reviewers and funders!

Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions - Nature Communications In social settings, people need to establish how much they contribute to shared outcomes. Here, the authors show that people strategically alter their actions to establish their level of control and i...

🌟 Overall, our study provides novel insights into the mechanistic and neural basis of how humans perceive their control in social contexts.

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

@oxexppsy.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk

🩺 Understanding how we perceive control isn't just interesting for cognitive neuroscience - it has important implications for mental health. Misestimations of control have been linked to depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia.

👥 Activity in this brain region also signals a second learning mechanism, by which individuals attribute prediction errors to themselves versus others in proportion to their perceived control.

🧠 Our fMRI results show that the supramarginal gyrus plays a crucial role in establishing controllability during social interactions.

It tracks not just active disambiguation, but also inferred controllability and the components necessary for this inference.

We formalised this intuition using computational models.
Only a Bayesian learner that recognises AD as an informative intervention can explain human behaviour.
Models that ignore AD - or misinterpret it - fail to infer controllability correctly.

Why would deliberate mistakes help?

By temporarily removing their own contribution, people can compare outcomes with vs. without their input - revealing whether results were driven by them or someone else. It’s an efficient way to uncover one’s own control in social settings.

We observed a striking behaviour: People purposefully make mistakes to gather information about their control over ambiguous joint outcomes. We refer to this behaviour as “active disambiguation” (AD).

In line with their behaviour, they also report employing AD after the task.

🎉 My PhD work has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com!

How do we learn who caused what - and how much control we had - when outcomes depend on multiple people? We studied how humans do so using a new social learning task, computational modelling and fMRI.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵👇

Fantastic position for a Research Lab Manager in EP - please pass this on to anyone interested and apply by Friday!

🚀 Deadline for this is this Sunday! 🏃‍♀️