Glad that we could celebrate the end of a great #SANS2026 before I caught the red-eye back to Chicago with impromptu karaoke

Thank you collaborators @jinke.bsky.social @kruthig03.bsky.social @matthiasnau.bsky.social and Ioannis Pappas!

Deeply honored that our paper was recognized with the #SANS2026 Award!

SANS was an important part of this paper's journey! @jadynpark.bsky.social first presented this work at SANS2023, and again in SANS2025, and we benefited greatly from the feedback and discussion!

CASNL and Bakkour Memory and Decision Lab excited for the SANS main conference starting tomorrow!

@mikezhu.bsky.social digesting his win for the #SANS2026 logo competition at Haidilao!

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 this work led by @marinewang.bsky.social where we use fNIRS to study how hand gestures help kids learn math concepts!

Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

My first paper with @jkragel.bsky.social and Joel Voss came out yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! It’s real! :D

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Great work by @nwrim.bsky.social applying word-embedding models to Reddit and news data to show how we are affectively divided on partisan identity, but less so on contentious political issues!

Hope everyone is getting excited for #SANS2026 next week! 🧠

Quick reminder that you can still sign up for the NIH Roundtable over lunch at the main conference. Open to all attendees.

First 100 signups get complimentary lunch! 🍱

More info here: t.e2ma.net/click/b2zckk...

SOOO happy to hear this!!!! Congratulations!!!

I just checked - it's just four hours away, hopefully that means we'll be able to catch up more often now!

CAMP Lab | about The CAMP Lab at the University of Iowa uses computational, neuroimaging, pharmacological, and neuromodulation approaches to understand motivation, affect, and decision-making — and how these processes...

I'm SO pleased to announce that I'll be starting as an Asst Prof at @psychiowa.bsky.social this August.

The lab will focus on neural & computational mechanisms of motivation, affect, & decision-making, with the aspirational goal of translation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 🧠
yeelabneuro.com

What I think is really cool about the paper is that it suggests how our affective representations can build on the learned structure of the visual world; we might still need to attribute affective meaning, but there is already useful structure there!

More broadly, my thought is that the brain (and the ANN) is likely able to categorizes objects along different dimensions, some of which will agree with our intuitions, others less so. Affect might covary with some of them and not others, but a classifier can pick up on the relevant dim for decoding

Ah, I think it might be related to the granularity of categorization; e.g. one could further group faces into happy and sad faces - the two categories would share visual features within category, and be distinguishable between categories; and that might be enough for a linear decoder to pick up on

Emotion schemas are embedded in the human visual system Human visual cortex contains distributed representations of emotion categories identified by a convolutional neural network model.

to be clear, this doesn't take away from how cool we thought the paper was - if anything, it revealed something about how affect might be embedded in natural vision

and it brought to mind Phil Kragel's work on decoding emotions from visual cortex www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...?

I assigned this paper for class recently (had learned of it through you sharing the paper), and what we landed on is that affect shares structure with object categories (or vision more broadly), so the representations of a model that is predictive of objects would predict affect as well

Congratulations Matthias!!!! 🎊

Huge congrats to @monicarosenb.bsky.social, an amazing scientist and even better friend

Register now for the trainee focused (pre-grad → postdoc) #SANS2026 Pre-Conference Workshop: Building a Thriving Research Career!

NIH staff from OBSSR, NICHD, NIA & NINDS will be there to talk about funding opportunities, career development programs, and to answer YOUR questions directly.

Ever wonder how much your fMRI preprocessing choices shape your results? 🤔

Register now for the #SANS2026 pre-conference workshop: Navigating the fMRI Multiverse

Learn best practices in fMRI preprocessing and explore how analytic variability affects reproducibility through multiverse analyses

Sad to miss #CNS26, especially when @monicarosenb.bsky.social receives the young investigator award 🎉

But for all attending, do go see postdoc extraordinaire @atabk.bsky.social's poster B121 "Tracking sampling strategies during value construction to guide novel choice" on Sunday morning.

Congrats Zach! So happy to hear this!

Great news! ✨ The Early-Bird registration rate for SANS 2026 has been extended to March 15th!

This year we have two fantastic pre-conference workshops you won't want to miss - on fMRI preprocessing and building a thriving research career.

The inferred value of unchosen options spreads to related items in memory Counterfactual thinking — considering what could have come of choosing the other path — can facilitate inference. Previous studies have demonstrated t…

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!

Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?

In short, yes!

Final version now in press at Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience! Congratulations to Rachel for her hard work on this ☺️🧠⚡
trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/...

Thank you Eric!

I'm not going to CNS unfortunately :(! Do you mean you're going to APS as well? If so, we should definitely hang out there!

Thank you Jeongjun! Hope to see you again soon!

Thank you Hayoung! Very honored by the award!