I also wrote a blogpost about our paper, non-technical at all! psywalkeryanxy.github.io/posts/scienc...

The tower that never fell: how one brain holds two languages – Xinyuan Yan

In Genesis, humanity’s shared language is scattered at Babel. But inside the bilingual brain, we found something the story leaves out: a single, hidden map of meaning that English and Spanish both rea...

psywalkeryanxy.github.io

Cell Press@cellpress.bsky.social · last mo.

For many bilingual people, switching between languages feels effortless. Now, scientists have figured out how bilingual brains accomplish this feat at the single neuron level. spkl.io/633297EUXJ Xinyuan Yan, Benjamin, Y. Hayden, @sameershethmd.bsky.social & colleagues @cp-cell.bsky.social

😀Excited to share the new preprint!!!🥳 We show preserved self–other integration in social decision-making among individuals with elevated autistic traits (N = 1,621), highlighting the importance of large samples to validate null effects. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Preserved self-other integration during social decision making among individuals with elevated autistic traits

Autistic people can find social interactions difficult to navigate, traditionally attributed to difficulties in taking others' perspectives. However, we have a limited understanding of how autistic pe...

biorxiv.org

What roles do #brain regions play in disruption of action control by #Pavlovian biases? @johalgermissen.bsky.social @efouragnan.bsky.social &co show that anterior #insula stimulation reduces learning bias, while #dACC stimulation increases perseveration bias @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4tfY8nu

In a new preprint w/ @tianqizhan.bsky.social & @smfleming.bsky.social, we developed a new measure of metacognitive bias (over/under confidence in individual decisions)! doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧠 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/...

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.

science.org

Very happy our first paper using ultrasound stimulation (TUS) to stimulate the human amygdala (BLA) got out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social today! 🎉🥳🔊Great FUN with co-first authors @mirunmigyu.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social in @mkflugge.bsky.social 's lab! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Low-intensity focused ultrasound to human amygdala reveals a causal role in ambiguous emotion processing and alters local and network activity

The amygdala shows abnormal metabolism in depression, a disorder marked by altered emotion, motivation, and learning. Yet its causal role in these pro…

sciencedirect.com

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch

Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion

Making decisions on behalf of other people reduces decision confidence, which leads to responsibility aversion.

science.org

Do check out this amazing opportunity to join the brilliant @lilweb.bsky.social's lab 🤩! Do apply, deadline is 4th Jan

Lilian Weber@lilweb.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚀 Excited to announce that I'm looking for people (PhD/Postdoc) to join my Cognitive Modelling group @uniosnabrueck.bsky.social. If you want to join a genuinely curious, welcoming and inclusive community of Coxis, apply here: tinyurl.com/coxijobs Please RT - deadline is Jan 4‼️

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human nucleus accumbens impacts reward sensitivity - Nature Communications

This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

nature.com

Very proud to be part of this team! 🤓Our new preprint is out, where we examine how social basis functions develop during adolescence. 🥳🥳

Simon Ciranka@simyciri.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳 We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence. osf.io/preprints/ps... I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing. Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br... Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...

Brain Injury During Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation for Substance Use Disorder

sciencedirect.com

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Causal necessity of human hippocampus for structure-based inference in learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.664920v1

Join us！ Cool lab, exciting projects in social neurosicence 👩‍🏫+👥+🧠+⚡️+🇬🇧.

Marco K Wittmann@mkwittmann.bsky.social · 12mo ago

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢 🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method. Please RT www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

We are super excited about the first human transcranial ultrasound study from our lab which is now on BiorXiv, showing the amygdala‘s role in processing ambiguous emotions and showing TUS changed resting-state connectivity and metabolite concentrations (GABA) in the amygdala - a huge team effort! 🥳🙏🏼

Johannes Algermissen@johalgermissen.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Very happy to share my first preprint from @oxexppsy.bsky.social @oxneuro.bsky.social ! We (me + co-first authors @lilweb.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social + PI @mkflugge.bsky.social + many others) used transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS/tFUS/LIFU) of the human amygdala ... (1/15)

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... Perceptual Metacognition Beyond Confidence - a little commentary piece by Tomoya Nakayama & yours truly (on @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social, Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social, & @smfleming.bsky.social’s recent Neuron paper) 🧠📈

Perceptual metacognition beyond confidence

In this issue of Neuron, Dijkstra et al. showed that deciding whether a perceived stimulus is actually present or whether it is just one’s own imagination depends on specific signals in the fusiform g...

cell.com

Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️

Genetic foundations of interindividual neurophysiological variability

Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.

science.org

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits. The result? Not really. A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health

Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

doi.org

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Social knowledge about others is anchored to self-knowledge in the hippocampal formation

The hippocampus maps how other people’s attributes relate to each other, but are these map-like representations anchored to self-knowledge? This study shows other people’s preferences are represented ...

journals.plos.org

[Highlight of the Month] Murphy et al. A practical guide to transcranial ultrasonic stimulation from the IFCN-endorsed ITRUSST consortium. Clin Neurophysiol 2025;171:192-226. Open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.cl...

Thrilled to be a co-author on this amazing work published in Nature! Grateful to be part of such a fantastic team @mkwittmann.bsky.social.

Marco K Wittmann@mkwittmann.bsky.social · last yr.

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... ...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ucl.ac.uk

New paper out in @pnas.org today with lovely colleagues including Hailey Trier, Nima Khalighinejad, @caro-harbison.bsky.social, @marklaubach.bsky.social, Jacquie Scholl & Matthew Rushworth (most not on BlueSky yet!) 

www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Our review out in TiCS spearheaded by Mathilde Bonnefond on the latest ideas on the functional role of alpha oscillations and distractor inhibition - e.g. we highlight that alpha increases might reflect perceptual target load rather than distractor anticipation authors.elsevier.com/a/1kFXN_V1r-...

Neurons in the human brain multitask! Shared neurons fire in bursts for multiple stimuli, but their firing order shifts to create stimulus-specific sequences. A clever, dynamic way the brain encodes complex info. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex - Nature

The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this ...

nature.com

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

Abstract representations emerge in human hippocampal neurons during inference - Nature

A task in which participants learned to perform inference led to the formation of hippocampal representations whose geometric properties reflected the latent structure of the task, indicating tha...

nature.com

How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? Check it out: 👶🧒🧑🧓🧠 with the amazing @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social @alexwiesman.bsky.social & Margot Taylor www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵(1/3)

The Lifespan Evolution of Individualized Neurophysiological Traits

How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? To address this question, we analyzed brief, task-free magnetoencephalographic recordings from over 1,000 ind...

biorxiv.org

Real pleasure to be part of this. State inference is clearly fundamental to learning and rl in particular so great to see this progress in terms of understanding how the hippocampus contributes. It will be great ti see if thus can explain some rl learning deficits in humans too.

Andrew MacAskill@macaskillaf.bsky.social · 2y ago

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

Delighted to share a new preprint with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social! We combine human psychophysics and evolutionary constraints to propose a new hypothesis about the functions of conscious vision. This has been in the pipeline a long time- exciting to get it out in the world! osf.io/preprints/ps...