We’re hiring two postdocs! Join the our Lab @unibirmingham.bsky.social to uncover how the brain resolves behavioural conflicts. Deadline: 22 September 2026 @wellcometrust.bsky.social Please share! www.rezavallab.org

Research Fellow (Postdoctoral) at University of Birmingham

Apply for the Research Fellow (Postdoctoral) role on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board for academic positions in higher education. View details and apply now.

jobs.ac.uk

@uobles.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Professor Carolina Rezaval has been awarded a Wellcome Discovery Award for £2.9 million to investigate how the brain makes decisions under competition. www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2026/2....

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

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

New paper out in J. Neuro! We used MEG and pattern classifiers to ask: if a memory is reactivated in the brain, does that mean you'll recall it? Short answer: no. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... Read on for the details! [1/7] #neuroscience #memory

Alpha Oscillations Track the Projection of Reactivated Memories into Conscious Awareness

By definition, episodic memory is a conscious phenomenon. Memory traces reactivated by the hippocampus and reinstated in the sensory cortices need to enter conscious awareness for them to be re-experi...

jneurosci.org

Job! My lab is hiring a pre-doctoral research assistant to work on the neural computations of foraging, seeking common cross-species algorithms. In collaboration with @brainapps.bsky.social & Nathan Lepora. Closes April 21st Pls share! jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

New paper out now 🙂👇 link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Computational signatures of exertion and rest underlie moment-to-moment dynamics of subjective perceptions of effort and fatigue - Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

Everyday we perform tasks that make us feel fatigued. Theoretical accounts predict that fatigue not only develops due to exertion of effort but also increases how effortful the same action will feel s...

link.springer.com

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉 rdcu.be/e24jT Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

I'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪

Mick Bonner@mickbonner.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

We are hiring a new Ph. D. student on neuroimaging and/or computational modeling on motivation and emotion. Tübingen is a great place to pursue work on these topics!! uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

*PhD funding through the @mrcaimdtp.bsky.social* interested in doing a PhD aimed at understanding the brain mechanisms underlying how sleep impacts on motivation in health and Parkinsons Disease? Want to learn computational modelling & brain imaging? Get in touch. more.bham.ac.uk/mrc-aim/phd-...

*PhD funding through the @mrcaimdtp.bsky.social* interested in doing a PhD aimed at understanding the brain mechanisms underlying how sleep impacts on motivation in health and Parkinsons Disease? Want to learn computational modelling & brain imaging? Get in touch. more.bham.ac.uk/mrc-aim/phd-...

My very first paper is finally out in @pnas.org, with Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Patrick Haggard! Interoception, exteroception, the self and more, it's got it all. Also it should go open access at some point www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Interoception vs. Exteroception: Cardiac interoception competes with tactile perception, yet also facilitates self-relevance encoding | PNAS

Internal bodily signals, notably the heartbeat, influence our perception of the external world—but the nature of this influence remains unclear. Di...

pnas.org

🌎 New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com 🌍 doi.org/10.1038/s442... There is an urgent need to choose behaviours that mitigate climate change, but these are often more effortful. Can we increase pro-environmental motivation? Joint w/ Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta & amazing international team 👇🧵

How can we encourage people to put in effort to benefit the climate? Our new task can help tell us how...

Jo Cutler@drjocutler.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🌎 New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com 🌍 doi.org/10.1038/s442... There is an urgent need to choose behaviours that mitigate climate change, but these are often more effortful. Can we increase pro-environmental motivation? Joint w/ Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta & amazing international team 👇🧵

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience From the amazing @lauragrima.bsky.social and colleagues - definitely looking forward to reading this! #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience

The study of foraging is central to a renewed interest in naturalistic behavior in neuroscience. Applying a foraging framework grounded in behavioral …

sciencedirect.com

Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!

Mark D Humphries@markdhumphries.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🧪Preprint! How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions. A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches. A 🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025... With @emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

I’m thrilled to share that our paper is now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General!🧵👇 psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Does dopamine modulate the willingness to help? New Psychology Today post, "How Dopamine Affects Our Motivation to Help Others", written by me, with special thanks to @drjocutler.bsky.social and @thepsychologist.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-...

How Dopamine Affects Our Motivation to Help Others

New research shows patients with Parkinson's disease were more willing to help others after taking their dopamine-boosting medication.

psychologytoday.com

🎉 New paper alert! In this collaboration across 6 countries 🇧🇬🇬🇷🇳🇬🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸 (n = 3,055), we developed a new pro-environmental behavior task and tested which psychological interventions actually make people more willing to put in real effort for mitigating climate change. Fully OA: tinyurl.com/2s46fppb

Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change - Communications Psychology

Pro-environmental actions often require effort. Participants were less motivated to help the climate than a food charity, but two interventions removed this bias. Computational modelling linked climat...

doi.org

Read more about the story behind the project here - communities.springernature.com/posts/boosti... Thanks to all the co-authors across @sdnl.bsky.social, @msnlab.bsky.social, @thechbh.bsky.social, @uob-sop.bsky.social, @scanunit.bsky.social & others

Boosting climate motivation with psychological interventions

Actions that protect the environment are crucial but often require effort, which people avoid. In a large international collaboration, we identified psychological interventions that can effectively bo...

communities.springernature.com

Finally, we found that people who believe climate change is man-made and support policies to protect the planet had higher pro-environmental motivation specifically. People lower in trait apathy and who rated the task as less effortful were more likely to help both causes.

Using computational modelling, we showed that these effective interventions changed how rewards 💰 for the climate 🌍 (vs. food charity) were devalued by effort 💪. This was independent of how noisy participants' choices were 🤔

Two interventions robustly decreased the preference to help food over climate, across measures and analyses. These interventions: - decreased psychological distance to the negative effects of climate change - used system justification theory to promote pro-environmental action

We tested the 11 expert-sourced interventions from the International Climate Psychology Collaboration led by @madalina.bsky.social, @kimdoell.bsky.social, @jbakcoleman.bsky.social & @jayvanbavel.bsky.social See doi.org/10.1126/scia... & doi.org/10.1038/s415... (all the data are freely available!)

The International Climate Psychology Collaboration: Climate change-related data collected from 63 countries - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - The International Climate Psychology Collaboration: Climate change-related data collected from 63 countries

doi.org

People were more willing to exert effort when: 💪 the effort required was 🔽 💰 the reward available was 🔼 In the control group without intervention, motivation was higher to provide food than mitigate climate change 🌍 ➡️ Interventions that promote climate motivation are key

3,055 ppts from 6 countries 🇧🇬🇬🇷🇳🇬🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸 did our new online Pro-Environmental Effort Task ✨ the PEET ✨ On each trial, they choose between rest or work: exerting effort by clicking boxes to earn more credits 💪 Credits were donations to a climate charity 🌍 or a matched control food charity

How can we encourage people to put in effort to benefit the climate? Our new task can help tell us how...

Jo Cutler@drjocutler.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🌎 New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com 🌍 doi.org/10.1038/s442... There is an urgent need to choose behaviours that mitigate climate change, but these are often more effortful. Can we increase pro-environmental motivation? Joint w/ Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta & amazing international team 👇🧵

Day 2 starts with a keynote from Susan Healy on learning from mistakes!

Had a brilliant day at the Mechanistic Basis of Foraging conference in Birmingham so far - presenting @johalgermissen.bsky.social’s work and listening to many great speakers 🥳🧠🐠

Matthew Apps@brainapps.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Nearly ready to go! Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025!