Apparent food selectivity reflects multiple non-food image properties https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.18.751020v1

I think it comes down to opportunity cost. In our recent paper (Zhang et al., PNAS, cond. accepted), data from a few months ago suggest some people are already doing this (caveat: some may be non-compliant humans, and things move fast).

I just had Opus 5.5 one shot a Human-Like mousetracking driver by looking at my code on cognition. Right now it's choosing left or right randomly. It's still not perfect but this took it literally a simple prompt and 1.5 mins to code a script. It can then be randomized and used across bot accounts.

Like I've been saying - many of the tools we've been using for bot detection are no match for today's LLM agents. We need to work together to build new standards!

Heather Urry@heatherurry.io · 2d ago

holy fucking shit - see Claude Code (Opus 5.5) rip through a survey eligility test I was really proud of... It requires tracing a route through designated points on a map with server-side Javascript applying eligibility criteria. (1.5 min video)

I'm excited about this work that an amazing undergrad, @ariazhang.bsky.social, did with me and @tomerullman.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Aria showed how a neural net can discover abstractions for intuitive physics and use its own reliability estimates to decide when to deploy them.

Reliability-guided meta-control in intuitive physics

Intuitive physical reasoning is an important part of daily life, but the computations underlying it remain debated. Some prominent accounts propose intuitive physics relies on mental simulation, with ...

biorxiv.org

Tired of the centrality debate? Of seeing one application where centrality is influential & others where it's more arbitrary? We have the article for you: osf.io/preprints/ps... Turns out centrality can indeed matter; but when it does depends on underlying network structure & mechanism of spread 🧵

Been raising that alarm internally at Sinai and Yale, but if our field wants to continue to rely on virtual data collection then we need to develop better bot detection tools. Glad to be collaborating with @kiante.bsky.social on these efforts. His work at UCLA is leading the way survey-shield.com

Micah G. Allen@micahgallen.com · 4d ago

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

New paper in Nature Communications 🧠 Rapid Changes in Risk Attitudes Originate from Bayesian Inference on Parietal Magnitude Representations. Why the same person can flip between a safe bet and a gamble, and what parietal cortex has to do with it. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Announcing two tenure-track faculty openings in the Psych Dept at Northwestern University: Cognitive/Affective Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology psychology.northwestern.edu/people/facul...

Job Opportunities: Department of Psychology - Northwestern University

psychology.northwestern.edu

Sharing this event - looks very interesting! Interpretability in Psychological Models Online, 15 October 2026, 15:30–19:20 CEST tmmpsych.vercel.app/events/inter...

Interpretability in Psychological Models | TMM - Theory, Model, Measurement

Four talks and four panel discussions on what it means for a psychological model to be interpretable, and whether the idea still holds in an era of machine-learned cognition.

tmmpsych.vercel.app

📣 NEW PREPRINT ALERT! 📣 📝Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... When choosing between options with multiple attributes, what does the brain actually compare - individual attributes or integrated option values? We combined EEG + eye-tracking to find out... and found evidence for the latter 🧠

Fixation-evoked potentials reveal neural signatures of hierarchical value-integration during decision-making

Many decisions require maintaining beliefs across multiple levels of representation, from sampling and integrating information to forming action plans. To elucidate these processes and reveal the neur...

biorxiv.org

Incredibly excited to host this event next week! Dr. Rust's work is both rigorous and inspiring

The Friedman Brain Institute@sinaibrain.bsky.social · last wk.

ONE WEEK AWAY! On Thursday, September 24, 1pm, the #FBISeminarSeries and host Dr. @bshev.bsky.social welcome @upenn.edu's Dr. @nicolecrust.bsky.social. Dr. Rust will present "From Subjective Feelings to Brain Mechanisms: Advancing the Science of Mood through Epistemic Iteration". ✨NOT TO MISS!

ONE WEEK AWAY! On Thursday, September 24, 1pm, the #FBISeminarSeries and host Dr. @bshev.bsky.social welcome @upenn.edu's Dr. @nicolecrust.bsky.social. Dr. Rust will present "From Subjective Feelings to Brain Mechanisms: Advancing the Science of Mood through Epistemic Iteration". ✨NOT TO MISS!

We are hiring a data engineer! If you are interested in working with human intracranial data, processing pipelines, and an awesome team, please apply! neurojobs.sfn.org/job/39840/sc...

📣We are hiring!! I am accepting applications for a postgraduate research associate (PGA) position. If you are interested in pursue research experience in computational psychiatry, plz apply here - yalesurvey.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #Computation #MentalHealth #Neuroscience #Yale #Jobs

DMs are open if you have questions or candidates www.teamworkonline.com/basketball-j...

Data Scientist, Basketball Operations - Los Angeles Sparks

POSITION SUMMARY:The 3-time WNBA Champions Los Angeles Sparks are seeking a Data Scientist to help elevate the team’s competitive decision-making through statistical modeling, automated reporting, and...

teamworkonline.com

new paper out, led by @jobeneuro.bsky.social , exploring 5HT dynamics in cingulate and central amygdala, and how a history of alcohol consumption changes them! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Selective dysregulation of serotonin dynamics in the anterior cingulate cortex and central amygdala following binge alcohol consumption - Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology - Selective dysregulation of serotonin dynamics in the anterior cingulate cortex and central amygdala following binge alcohol consumption

nature.com

I expect to recruit a PhD student this cycle! The Control and Decision Making Lab at WashU studies control, effort, and decision making, combining behavioral experiments with modeling and neuroimaging. If that sounds cool, check out our work: cdmlab.wustl.edu. How to apply: psych.washu.edu/apply

Another preprint! This one from my postdoc with @ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social and @xiaosigu.bsky.social. Here we asked how the reward outcomes driving trial-by-error learning leave a lasting imprint on memory strength in the human brain. We used iEEG/computational models of cognition to find:

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Hippocampal-cingulate dynamics in the human brain link reinforcement-learning and memory https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750374v1

OUT NOW! Study of #WorldTradeCenter responders shows that how the brain anticipates positive experiences may contribute to #Resilience after #Trauma, pointing to potential new targets for #PostTraumaticStressDisorder (PTSD) treatment. 👉 www.mountsinai.org/about/newsro...

First preprint from the lab from postdoc Carlo Cerquetella! Demonstrating that neuronal spiking in the human medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex cohere into a redundant, low-dimensional neural correlate of visual attention (captured mostly by saccades) during naturalistic movie viewing.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Human single-neuron recordings reveal population coding of attentional dynamics during naturalistic movie viewing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.08.748346v1

A new version of rtdists is now on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=rtdi... Big thanks to @kiante.bsky.social who added a new distribution, the racing diffusion model, fixed a number of long-standing bugs, and increased the speed of the diffusion model. All news: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

rtdists: Response Time Distributions

Provides response time distributions (density/PDF, distribution function/CDF, quantile function, and random generation): (a) Ratcliff diffusion model (Ratcliff &amp; McKoon, 2008, &lt;<a href="https:/...

cran.r-project.org

We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...

Gender-affirming care saves lives, respects the rights of patients, and reflects that healthcare is supposed to be between providers and patients, not between providers and the Trump Administration. (1/3)

Mount Sinai reaches deal with Trump DOJ to end gender-affirming care for minors

Mount Sinai is the latest in a string of U.S. hospitals to reach similar agreements with the Trump administration.

gothamist.com

How many women’s careers were sidelined or destroyed by this man, who was basically rewarded with a settlement and another prestigious job at a different university? captimes.com/news/educati...

UW-Madison students, records detail investigation of professor

Dietram Scheufele resigned after investigators determined he had sexual relationships with two students and engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct with one.

captimes.com

📣 We're hiring! The Saez Lab at Mount Sinai is seeking a postdoctoral researcher with experience in intracranial recordings, electrophysiology, BCIs, mood disorders, and/or computational modeling, to explore the neural basis of human cognition. 🗓️ Apply by September 30, 2026. Please share widely!

📣 Out now in Translational Psychiatry 📣 We show a metacognitive paradox in OCD: patients report persistently lower confidence than controls at comparable accuracy, yet their confidence is more sensitive to feedback and tracks a Bayesian observer more closely. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Very excited to share our new work (my first @arxiv-cs-ai.bsky.social!) We compared mentalising abilities across human and LLMs across two games and models. We thought the field'd re-embrace the interdisciplinarity of cognitive science. Curious? Read here! 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2608.26291

Heads-up: Doris Tsao is hiring 15 scientists/engineers to work on the neuroscience of consciousness at her new venture (Astera). astera.org/careers/#box...

I'm super excited to share a new preprint in which @kevinmking.bsky.social and I propose an update to the affect regulation theory of alcohol use: "A mathematical and computational formalization of the affect regulation hypothesis of alcohol use" doi.org/10.31234/osf...