Excited about our Perspective @natrevpsychol.nature.com on the role of hippocampal learning and memory in pediatric PTSD and its treatment! Led by @jordancfoster.bsky.social & a wonderful collab w/ @evgoldfarb.bsky.social 🧠 @wutsaiyale.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Katie Insel
@katieinsel.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @ Northwestern Director of CATS Lab (nucatslab.com)
How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)
Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...
nature.com
How do children’s exploration strategies change across development? New preprint with Azzurra Ruggeri, Silja Kessler, and @ericschulz.bsky.social: “Tiny Alchemists: The Developmental Emergence of Empowerment in Exploration” osf.io/preprints/ps... Paper summary below 1/6
I'm starting a lab at the University of Notre Dame! 🎉🍀🧠 Doors open Jan 2027. I'm most excited to meet my future students (recruiting psych grad students for 2027!), help grow a budding neuroscience area, and head home to the midwest after many years away. Please reach out! @notredame.bsky.social
Postdoc job ad is now live! faculty-emory.icims.com/jobs/168298/...
The LUMeN Lab at Emory is hiring ✨ We’re seeking a full-time RA/lab manager and a postdoc to work on new NIH-funded studies! Formal job ads/apps forthcoming. We’re eager to hit the ground running so please share these flyers and/or reach out if interested!
Paper is now out in Nature Comms doi.org/10.1038/s414... If you are at @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social , come check out our poster about Simpson’s paradox in neurodevelopment. Poster number 998 Monday, June 15 | 14:45-15:45 Tuesday, June 16 | 13:30-14:30
Convergent and divergent brain–cognition development in early adolescence - Nature Communications
As children enter adolescence, thinking becomes more abstract, coinciding with large-scale changes in brain network organization. Here, the authors show that stable brain network organization plays a ...
doi.org
Our new preprint is out! doi.org/10.1101/2025... How do brain networks and cognition co-evolve as children enter adolescence?
What matters most for childhood brain organization? We analyzed 649 variables. The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers. Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES. In Science today: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I'm super excited for @psychscience.bsky.social this week! If you're interested in how motivational, emotional, and social contexts shape decision-making, come see computational models from @ninarouhani.bsky.social @hayleydorfman.bsky.social @katieinsel.bsky.social at our Thursday symposium. 💰😨👯⚖️⚙️
Check out our new review titled "Contributions of default mode network to subjective valuation and maladaptive decision making" now out in Current Opinion in Behavioral Science! @dfareri.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1n8Js8MqMi...
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authors.elsevier.com
(1/5) Our paper is out now in Neuron! bsky.app/profile/cp-n... The LPFC has fine-scale organization that gets missed in group-averaged data because of inter-individual variability. It is visible in individuals in both resting-state and task data.
Dr. Alexandra Rodman seeks a postdoc (Fall ’26/Spring ’27) for the Social Development & Wellbeing Lab, focused on leading independent research on adolescent social neurodevelopment with a focus on fMRI pipelines, mentorship, & dissemination! Learn more here: www.socialdevlab.com/prospective-...
Prospective Postdocs — Social Development and Wellbeing Lab
socialdevlab.com
🚨🚨 Job Alert! 🚨🚨 We are seeking a full-time Study Coordinator for a NIMH-funded project that aims to uncover cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying maladaptive food-choice behavior in anorexia nervosa using behavior, eye tracking, fMRI, and computational models. Pls spread the word!
Study Coordinator
Department SSD Institute for Mind and Biology: Staff and Temporary Employees About the Department The Eating Disorders Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Univer...
uchicago.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com
I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.
Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is
The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...
annualreviews.org
As we read this about the Roberts Court let’s remember the shadow docket grievously harmed American scientific research, cancer cures, and public health over the past year. For ex, KBJ’s “Calvinball” quote was in an NIH case. More, short 🧵 1/
If you are as infuriated as you read this as I am, know that Congress not only has the power to fix the abuse of the Shadow Docket but also that the legislation is already drafted. We just need to get it to the floor. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
Excited to be at #SANS2026! Looking forward to talking about information seeking about threat and reuniting with lovely colleagues. Come say hi!
I'm thrilled to be attending #SANS2026 this week! I'll be presenting "Prospection Explains Age-Related Increases in the Use of Situation Selection for Emotion Regulation" (P1-A-f-62) on Thursday, 4/16. Catch the highlights at the 3pm spotlight or come chat at the boards from 3:30-5pm!
New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task
Modulation of feature attention by reward prediction error explains value learning behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717847v1
How can researchers better champion evidence-based policy? Join us on Monday in Guild Lounge for a conversation with Dean Karlan, @katieinsel.bsky.social, and @statstipton.bsky.social on engaging policymakers and advocating for research-informed policy. Register ➡️ spr.ly/63321B6xywD
Research in Action: Lessons from Policy Advocacy
How can researchers better champion their work and make the case for evidence-based policy?
spr.ly
This is finally out as Version of Record 🎉 Read to find out how and when humans strategically switch between approaching and avoiding uncertainty with Michael Shadlen and Daphna Shohamy elifesciences.org/articles/94231 🧵:
Human exploration strategically balances approaching and avoiding uncertainty
Strategic avoidance of uncertainty emerges under high cognitive demands, enabling faster decisions without impairing learning.
elifesciences.org
NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October. No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out. Why...? 1/x source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv... 🟦🧠 #academicsky
Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron! Here is a download link (free for 50 days): authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH... Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social 🧵
🚨 🧠 We have a new preprint out where we studied which brain networks are engaged during mental imagery and self-generated thought. We used a precision fMRI approach along with multidimensional experience sampling (mDES) to get trialwise self-reports from each participant about what they imagined.
Check out this @nature.com paper on how the brain’s functional hierarchy evolves from birth to 100. Infants' gradient architecture is anchored by sensory systems, differentiates along association and control axes during childhood/adolescence & dedifferentiates in aging www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan - Nature
fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan...
nature.com
New preprint!🚨 How do people learn how to search the visual world? Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.
OSF
osf.io
When I retired only around 25% of Full Professors in STEM were women. I was proud be one of them, and to support the success of fellow women in STEM through mentoring. This was not an organic process. It took hard work and persistence. And now The Regime is setting us back decades.
NIH grant terminations affected women scientists more than men, study finds
A new paper shows that women, particularly those early in their careers, have been disproportionately affected by NIH grant terminations.
statnews.com
NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18. osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...
Comment Form: Draft NIH Controlled-Access Data Policy and Proposed Revisions to NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy (OSP): Request for Information on Draft NIH Controlled-Access Data Policy and Proposed Revisions to NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy
osp.od.nih.gov
Longitudinal changes in T1w/T2w estimates of cortical myelin with age and pubertal timing | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...
New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...
Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability
Abstract. We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N =
doi.org
New paper in Nature Neuroscience! We developed personalized fMRI-based predictive models tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in chronic pain patients—trained on 6+ months of densely sampled data. A true team effort. Deeply grateful to our participants! doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02221-3
Personalized brain decoding of spontaneous pain in individuals with chronic pain - Nature Neuroscience
Lee et al. show that personalized brain-decoding models derived from intensive longitudinal fMRI data can track spontaneous pain in individuals with chronic pain, highlighting the potential of precise...
doi.org