New preprint✍️😃🥳. An attenuated 'we' alongside a heightened 'they' in borderline personality disorder.

Marco K Wittmann@mkwittmann.bsky.social · 8h ago

New preprint with @yongling.bsky.social and @anrei.bsky.social on asymmetric social structure representation in participants with Borderline personality disorder.

New commentary! Are scientists and laypeople alike under persistent illusions of understanding? Shiffrin, Stigler, & Keil (2026) seem to think so. I argue this isn't the case w/ @sharonchungsl.bsky.social, Adam Harris, @davidlagnado.bsky.social & @singmann.bsky.social: rdcu.be/3swzbgH3ePva

🎈 Happy to announce that I was awarded the ERC StG for my project CHASM-Meta which will aim to close the chasm (👀) between our understanding of neurocognitive and clinical metacognition, and its role in mental health. Lots to look forward to in this space 🚀

European Research Council (ERC)@erc.europa.eu · 4w ago

📣 Good news! 📣 Results of the ERC 2026 Starting Grant call are out! Funding worth a total of €705 million will go to 421 early-career researchers across Europe. Discover who, what and where 👉 link.europa.eu/9M3MmN 🧪 #ERCStG #FrontierResearch #HorizonEurope 🇪🇺 @scienceinnovation.ec.europa.eu

My main PhD paper is finally out in Nature Human Behaviour! The question: what cognitive strategies do people use when they teach, and can we nudge them toward a better one? Work with my PhD mentors @yaelniv.bsky.social, @markkho.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social. 1/5

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · last mo.

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

Out now @natcomms.nature.com. how do deadlines shape effort processing? We show that deadlines cause us to seek high effort rather than avoid it. Why? Becease effort makes progress towards completing goals, making it valuable, a process coordinated by fronto-striatal computations.

Neural and computational mechanisms of effort under the pressure of a deadline - Nature Communications

People are effort-averse in most situations but can exert effort for little reward when progressing towards goals. Here, the authors show that under deadline pressure people become effort-seeking whil...

nature.com

Andrea Pisauro@andreapisauro.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Under pressure? It may not be bad. We think of pressure when there is too much of it, but in the right doses it is what makes us reach our goals on time. That's the idea @brainapps.bsky.social & I developed in this paper finally in press at @natcomms.nature.com nature.com/articles/s41467-026-75987-6

Congratulations to this year's S4SN @s4sn.bsky.social early career award recipients Felix Leroy @leroyfelix.bsky.social and Marco Wittmann @mkwittmann.bsky.social !!!

Beyond excited to be flying to Montreal today for @s4sn.bsky.social www.s4sn.org/s4sn2026 to give this year’s Early Career Award lecture for human research! I will speak about my lab's work on abstract representations. Let me know if you're around and would like to meet up! @s4sn.bsky.social

S4SN 2026 — S4SN

Montréal, Canada

s4sn.org

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 · 3mo ago

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 · 9mo 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 · 10mo 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 · last yr.

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 · last yr.

📢 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 · last yr.

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 · 2y ago

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