The Computational and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab (ballardlab.org) at UC Riverside is recruiting psychology PhD students to join our team! Check out the flyer to learn about the lab and our stellar research community at UCR. Apply by 12/1! drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...

🎧 New Decision & Aging Insights🎙️ episode ‪@vpmurty.bsky.social describes his research for an SRNDNA Pilot Grant and finding inspiration at a haunted house. He also talks about moving his lab across country and the impact of a single line in his presentations. Listen now: srndna.utdallas.edu/podcast/

🧠👀 Do goals & desires shape what we see—or just what we say we see? In our review, we outline a neurocomputational framework where motivation biases perception and action via distinct neural systems: 👉 Amygdala & LC-NE boost what we want to see. 👉 Striatal dopamine biases what we choose to report.

Yuan Chang Leong@ycleong.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#RLDM2025 officially starts tomorrow! 🚀 Have you checked out our program? See details below, full program is available at rldm.org 👀 New to RLDM? Join our first-timers gathering tonight, 6-7pm, at Kennedy's Pub (30-32 Westland Row) 😊

Only ONE WEEK until #RLDM2025 ☘️ We can’t wait to welcome brilliant minds from AI, neuroscience, psychology & beyond for cutting-edge talks on reinforcement learning & decision making. Spaces are disappearing quickly so grab your spot before it’s gone! Register now 👉 rldm.org

Excited to share our upcoming workshop on neuroscience, reinforcement learning, and decision making at RLDM 2025 in Dublin, Ireland — June 11–14! Check out the terrific speaker lineup: 🔗 sites.google.com/view/neurorl... Co-organized with @angelaradulescu.bsky.social @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social

📢 #RLDM2025 is nearly here – 11–14 June at Trinity College Dublin ☘️ Join researchers from AI, neuroscience, psychology & beyond to explore the latest in reinforcement learning & decision making. 🎟️ Register now to secure your spot: rldm.org #ReinforcementLearning #AI #Neuroscience #CognitiveScience

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it. We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory

Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

biorxiv.org

Excited and thrilled and humbled that our work is now out at Nature Human Behaviour linking Memorability with Time Perception! I hope you all find it of interest 🙂 Memorability shapes perceived time (and vice versa) #academicsky #neuroskyence #psychscisky #science

Memorability shapes perceived time (and vice versa) - Nature Human Behaviour

In this Article, Ma et al. show, across a series of experiments, that time and memorability (the probability of recalling a visual stimulus) mutually influence one another, suggesting that time is a f...

nature.com

Big milestone for the Ballard Lab—we scanned our very first neuroimaging participant today! Grateful to be collaborating with my UCR colleagues @halledz.bsky.social and @brenthughes.bsky.social. I love the excitement of new data rolling in...

So excited to see this come out!

Regina Lapate@lapate.bsky.social · last yr.

In keeping with the theme of time travel… now into the future: 🕰️ Another recent paper from the lab—a preregistered study with Isabel Schuman, Jingyi Wang & Ian Ballard @iancballard.bsky.social —is now published. Here, we looked at future orientation, decision making & anorexia nervosa risk.

Are you at CNS: hot* symposia alert featuring myself, @aaronbornstein.bsky.social, @chelseahelion.bsky.social, and @iancballard.bsky.social talking about uncertainty resolution across learning, memory, social cognition, and decision-making. See you Monday at 10:00 AM. *I sweat a lot giving talks

Excited for my lab’s first CNS! Catch us at: Saturday 10:30–12:00: Datablitz Session 3 (Xinxu Shen) Monday 10:00 AM: Symposium – Uncertainty resolution across learning, memory, and decision-making Posters: Saturday 3:00–5:00 (A133), Monday 8:00–10:00 (D156), Tuesday 8:00–10:00 (F145)

Interested in dopamine? Have fMRI data? We’ve identified a temporal BOLD feature that carries rich information about dopamine physiology. This measure, obtainable from resting-state and task fMRI, opens new ways to indirectly probe dopamine’s role in cognition and disease. 1/n tinyurl.com/bddyz67b

Temporal fMRI Dynamics Map Dopamine Physiology

Spatial variations in dopamine function are linked to cognition and substance use disorders but are challenging to characterize with current methods. Because dopamine influences blood vessel dilation,...

biorxiv.org

New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications

Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.

nature.com

Exciting news - early bird registration is now open for #RLDM2025! 🔗 Register now: forms.gle/QZS1GkZhYGRF... Register now to save €100 on your ticket. Early bird prices are only available until 1st April.

Advancing Inclusive AI in Women’s Brain Health 🧠✨ We are thrilled to announce a $1.5M award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support the Women’s Brain Health Initiative in advancing inclusive AI through multi-modal biomedical datasets.

New lab paper out now in JEP:G! From Juliana Trach, @mdebettencourt.bsky.social , @angelaradulescu.bsky.social , and myself. "Rewards Transiently and Automatically Enhance Sustained Attention." t.co/r72fZRn3Nh 👇

New paper with Johanna Jarcho, Isabel Leiva, and Sam Reisman looking at distortions in perceived liking and its relationship with bullying (in adults!). Don’t worry we collected memory data for future analyses! www.jmoodanxdisorders.org/article/S295...

Peer victimization but not social anxiety negatively influences predicted enjoyment during peer interactions

We often underestimate how much others enjoy initial interactions with us - a phenomenon known as the liking gap. While widely documented, less research has explored how individual differences such as...

jmoodanxdisorders.org

The RLDM workshop list is now up! Have a look: rldm.org/call-for-wor... More workshop details coming soon :) There were so many wonderful submissions---this was really tough for the committee. Huge thanks to all involved, and looking forward to seeing folks in Dublin

Some tips for making and keeping New Year's resolutions! @ucriverside.bsky.social news.ucr.edu/articles/202...

Will you keep your New Year’s resolutions?

A UC Riverside psychologist shares his thoughts on how to make them last

news.ucr.edu

In our recent preprint, we unveil a new role for neural activity in the human dopaminergic system in reward learning - at the single neuron level! 🧠🖥️ #EEG #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do rewards influence how we select and pursue goals? Our study finds that rewards can create 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 in goal selection and execution—similar to habits—but without reducing cognitive flexibility. Check out our paper for more! @jocn.bsky.social direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

Reward Reinforcement Creates Enduring Facilitation of Goal-directed Behavior

Abstract. Stimulus–response habits benefit behavior by automatizing the selection of rewarding actions. However, this automaticity can come at the cost of reduced flexibility to adapt behavior when ci...

direct.mit.edu

Get your abstract submissions ready for RLDM 2025, at Trinity College in Dublin (abstracts due 1/15). Tutorial submissions close on 12/20. RLDM is a terrific interdisciplinary conference at the intersection of computational theory (AI, ML, robotics), cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience.

RLDM@rldmdublin2025.bsky.social · 2y ago

📢 Call for Abstracts 📢 Submit your extended abstracts on "learning and decision-making over time to achieve a goal" to #RLDM2025. Successful applications will be selected for poster or oral presentation to an interdisciplinary audience. 🗓️ Deadline: Jan 15th 🔗 Learn more: rldm.org/call-for-abs...

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

Starter pack for researchers studying the control of cognitive processes e.g., attentional control, inhibition, task switching, working memory, error adaptation etc go.bsky.app/12KTqED

Representational spaces in orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex: task states, values, and beyond www.cell.com/trends/neuro... #neuroscience

Representational spaces in orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex: task states, values, and beyond

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial-prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) play a key role in decision-making and encode task states in addition to expected value. We review evidence suggesting a conne...

cell.com

Are you tempted to orthogonalize the regressors in your fMRI model? @jeanette-mumford.bsky.social tells you why this is almost never a good idea, and is likely to wreck the interpretation of your model. mumfordbrainstats.tumblr.com/post/1337933...

Collinearity...is orthogonalization the answer? (No)

If I had a dollar for every time I read a paper purporting to have repaired a multicollinearity issue by orthogonalizing regressors...  Unfortunately, once collinearity is there and the data have been...

mumfordbrainstats.tumblr.com

ALSO in this month's @jocn.bsky.social Special Focus: Neural and Computational Mechanisms of Motivation and Decision Making Debbie M. Yee Tyler J. Adkins, Taraz G. Lee Ian C. Ballard, Michael Waskom, Kerry C. Nix, Mark D’Esposito Yue Zhang, Xiamin Leng, Amitai Shenhav