Are you attending @cogdevsoc.bsky.social 2026? Come join us for an afternoon pre-conference workshop on motivation in development! We'll bring together developmental, educational, and computational perspectives to ask: Can we build a unified account of motivation across the lifespan? ✨
Continuing strong on Friday, come check out our three lab members giving talks and posters!
@affectscience.bsky.social
Last but not least, on Saturday we have a fantastic lineup of speakers to close out SAS weekend. Hope to see you at SAS!
@affectscience.bsky.social
Announcement from Hypatia regarding second-round investment from the Wellcome Trust and 2026 hiring for five roles: Project Coordinator, Backend Engineer, UXUI Engineer, Artist/Designer, and Director of Operations. The graphic showcases Hypatia's international presence in the UK and Australia, featuring team photos and logos of partner institutions including King's College London, UWA, C-FIT, Orygen, and Emyria.
Excited to say that Hypatia has secured a second round of funding thanks to the @wellcometrust.bsky.social 💫
This milestone allows us to build the technology and team and conduct validation efforts across the UK and Australia to bridge the ecosystems.
🚨 If you are at Mind & Brain Symposium 2026 in Berlin, come check out our ongoing work on modeling structure learning under uncertainty using a combination of active inference and particle filtering! Done and presented by Julia Senfft.
📃 Poster C30!
#minandbrain2026 #MBB2026
Slight but exciting departure from typical projects for me: I’m happy to share our paper finding that frontal beta event characteristics predict antidepressant response to sertraline (SSRI) has been accepted at J Psychiatric Research! 1/
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
#psychscisky #neuroskyence
If you are at #CNS2026, come check out Jingyi Wang's talk in the symposium "Neural Time Machine: Temporal Organization of Experience in the Brain" (starting now!), and tomorrow PM I will be sharing some of our new work at the symposium "Emotion and the organization of temporal context in memory".
So excited to have my whole lab at @affectscience.bsky.social this year! Come see what the IDEA Lab is up to!
Looking forward to expanding our small team a bit as the lab prepares for its 2nd year.
We will be hiring 2-3 more volunteer, in-person RAs for our team to start in the fall. Details and application info are at our website.
share.google/O1hvtUpPLIlp...
How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs?
Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com
Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Excited to share our latest paper in which we discuss merging theory-and data- driven computational psychiatry in a large transdiagnostic cohort study (N=2400)
www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...
Christopher Pittenger, Godfrey Pearlson @annierhcheng.bsky.social @sobp-org.bsky.social
Thanks!
I'm heading to CNS in Vancouver! Come check out my poster Sunday morning for some fun work (🐁?)
DM me if youll be there and want to link up!
Thanks Dennis! Would love your thoughts/feedback
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)
If you're headed to #sas2026 next week, check out work from 3 lab members:
Friday:
* Sissi Li on expectation setting + mood in worriers (P2.C.139)
Saturday:
* Tess Gilmartin on an RL perspective on self-monitoring (P3.C.248)
* Sandarsh Pandey on capturing latent self-schemas (P3.C.251)
I'll be giving a talk in the #CNS2026 Rising Star session on Saturday. Come say hi if you're around!
Our crowdsourced megastudy comparing a diverse set of 12 single-session interventions for depression is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com!
Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/e6pzz (no paywall)
We also published a brief non-academic piece about the study today: theconversation.com/free-10-minu...
📢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!
Personalized Prediction of Momentary Affect with Passive Smartphone Sensing Data in a Clinically Heterogeneous Sample: An evaluation of machine learning and mixed effects approaches: https://osf.io/2g8dp
Changes in our feelings, or "affective surprise," may act as a learning signal that influences what we remember. Large magnitude deviations in experienced valence during encoding relate to better long-term associative memory.
🚨New pre-print🚨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?
This Wednesday February 25! Dr. Michael Treadway (Emory University) is presenting in
@motcogmeet.bsky.social series: "Effort-Based Decision-Making and Its Discontents: Precision medicine approaches for understanding the pathophysiology and treatment of motivational deficits in mental illness" 1/
The project started pre-Covid, so it’s especially exciting to finally see it in print. Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators who made this possible: Bas van Opheusden, @fredcallaway.bsky.social, @cocoscilab.bsky.social and James Hillis.
Paper here:
direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵
🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?
That’s awesome! Very cool and much needed
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 love this. And periodically you accidentally eat a blazing wing and black out for a few minutes.
Yeah and it does seem to have the effect of making them catastrophically unforgettable
