🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

science.org

📢 PhD opening in comp. cog. neuro. in Toulouse: thalamo-frontal model of cognitive control. Modelling/EEG experience is welcome but not required. Application deadline: 8 Sept. 2026 Details: sdrive.cnrs.fr/s/eDrkeXfjdW... #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #EEG #neuroskyence #compneurosky

Our latest work indicates that when we have to choose how to act to reach our goals, we do not just select the correct motor commands; we select between integrated representations of goals, actions, and expected sensory outcomes. Our results invite us to rethink how the brain controls action!

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last wk.

Goal-directed action selection relies on conjunctive representations that bind goals, actions and expected sensory outcomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.24.740508v1

How quickly we update our beliefs depends on the environment. This recently published work, shows that humans adjust their learning rates both rapidly, from recent prediction errors, and gradually, through environment-specific meta-learning—supported by representations in the orbitofrontal cortex.

Ghent Center for Cognitive Neuroscience@ghentccn.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Excited to see this paper on learning about how to learn out in eLIFE, spearheaded by Jonas Simoens and the team from Ghent incl @sebraem.bsky.social @pieterverbeke.bsky.social and Tom Verguts)

Ghent Center for Cognitive Neuroscience@ghentccn.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates

Humans adapt learning rates on both a fast and a slow time scale, and the central orbitofrontal cortex may represent the slow time scale.

doi.org

Join us at @mpicbs.bsky.social as a fully funded 4-year PostDoc (m/f/d) in Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience (Area: Functions of the Perirhinal Cortex). Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by 17 August: recruitingapp-5218.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/44...?

Look how far we've come in just a few years! We're fast as well! It turns out, recruiting reviewers is much easier when they're not being used as free labor for massively profitable publishers Support free-to-publish and Open Access science by submitting to Open Mind today! direct.mit.edu/opmi

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Check out @jonathannicholas.bsky.social 's new preprint measuring eye movements to infer individual memory retrievals during decision making, plus a cool RNN modelof that process. Can't express how excited I am about this new technique!

Jonathan Nicholas@jonathannicholas.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We make flexible choices in new situations by knitting together information from separate relevant memories. But what governs which memories are retrieved and when? In a new preprint, we captured how people build decision variables from different memories by tracking their gaze on a blank screen.

I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join my lab at Sabancı University in Istanbul for a 2-year TÜBİTAK-funded position, with possible extension. Interested candidates can email me with a CV and a brief note about their research interests. More details on gunselilab.com soon.

Second preprint, with Elizabeth Bonawitz, one of my favorite studies children search the hypothesis space more broadly and variably than adults. osf.io/preprints/ps...

📝 New preprint (co-led with Hannah Hamling as her NYU honors thesis!) 📝 🧠 Do adolescents learn differently in volatile versus stable environments? 🧠 Yes, and they seem to adapt their learning computations to a greater extent than adults! 😮 🤔 Preprint for deets (+ 👁️ data) osf.io/preprints/ps...

✨ VERY excited to share our new paper led by Holly Bowen (SMU) & former ugrad Kyle Thurmann "Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis" finally in press @ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 💵🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thread 1/n

Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis

Extensive evidence suggests that cognitive performance is typically enhanced under increased motivation, often in the form of reward anticipation. Whi…

sciencedirect.com

🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.

#PuG crowd: interested in cognitive control? Come to our symposium “Cognitive Control: Domain-General, Domain-Specific, or Neither?” happening on Friday at 2 pm (room: HS07). We have a fantastic line-up: @annalschubert.bsky.social, Linda Bräutigam, @sarahdepue.bsky.social, Daxun Zhu, and myself. 👇

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

In 2011, my interests in cognitive neuroscience converged on one stubborn intuition: it made no sense that how the brain learns and how it pays attention should be two fundamentally different processes.

Ignacio Saez, PhD@ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵

Narrowing Boundaries: Mental Fatigue Reduces the Amount of Evidence that People Use when Making Decisions under Risk: https://osf.io/x5zys

New preprint w/ @fredcallaway.bsky.social! How does the brain decide which computations to run? We combine rational meta-reasoning with a meta-learning algorithm to build a recurrent network that learns to select computations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-lived adjustments and slower, more enduring adaptations. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Cognitive flexibility versus stability via activation-based and weight-based adaptations - Communications Psychology

This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-liv...

nature.com

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

We’re hiring! Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me? We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven. RTs much appreciated! www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

PhD researcher for the project: Cognitive Control and Multitasking in the Digital Age

We are looking for a motivated PhD researcher to study the behavioral and neural dynamics between cognitive control and multitasking in young and aging populations.

kuleuven.be

Uni to students: Don't use AI bc it's important to make mistakes & fail to learn, it'll improve your long-term growth. Also uni: Do *not* fail a single class or you're out. No chances for PhD if you have to re-take an exam. No more summa cum laude if you don't get consistently exceptional grades.

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

Protect Academic Life in Iran

We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

sites.google.com

I'm SO pleased to announce that I'll be starting as an Asst Prof at @psychiowa.bsky.social this August. The lab will focus on neural & computational mechanisms of motivation, affect, & decision-making, with the aspirational goal of translation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 🧠 yeelabneuro.com

CAMP Lab | about

The CAMP Lab at the University of Iowa uses computational, neuroimaging, pharmacological, and neuromodulation approaches to understand motivation, affect, and decision-making — and how these processes...

yeelabneuro.com

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

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.

Our work exploring how we can resolve ambiguous visual inputs has now been accepted in Communications Psychology. Many thanks to the reviewers for their time and insights! Open-access link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Juan Linde-Domingo@lindedomingo.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, broadly construed. EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI or related methodological experience preferred. Apply here: jobs.uiowa.edu/jobSearch/po... Lab website: wessellab.org

The lesson for all the students out there is that science is a community project. Most of us make individually small contributions to this project. Success is measured at the collective level. Many of our professional (and personal) dysfunctions could be fixed by more fully embracing this view.