Nicola Sambuco

Affective Forecasting Accuracy in Everyday Life - Affective Science Affective Science - People often predict how they might feel in the future, with varying degrees of accuracy. Such affective forecasts can centre around periods of time (e.g., tomorrow, next week)...

In work recently out in Affective Science we investigated how accurately people can forecast their emotions in everyday life. Study 1 focused on forecasts for specific time periods (tomorrow, next week). Study 2 focused on forecasts for daily unpleasant events. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy to share our new study about how cortical and thalamic inputs engage cholinergic interneurons in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core, all done by my graduate student Emily Jang:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reviewer notes: In a randomized experiment, the pre-post differences are not effect estimates Reviewer notes are a new short format with brief explanations of basic ideas that might come in handy during (for example) the peer-review process. They are a great way to keep Julia from writing 10,0...

P.S. Pre-post differences are *not* valid treatment effect estimates. Why? Here's a post by @statsepi.bsky.social: statsepi.substack.com/p/one-simple..., here's a post by me: www.the100.ci/2025/01/22/r... >

Find someone who believes in you like researchers believe in pre-post differences as valid treatment effect estimates.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

#RewardSignals

The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls

🚨🚨New paper day!🚨🚨
Wonderful work from the longitudinal arm of our cannabis-users study showing how brain reward-system function changes over 12 months in regular users. 🧵⬇️ #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multisensory coding of audiovisual movies in the human hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.01.708855v1

In tandem, the Heersink School of Medicine is recruiting up to 16 individual Investigators in an open-rank search.
uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/27132

Recruitment for this strategic initiative will be at two levels:

Program Leaders will help to build new programmatic research areas, and will be provided additional funds to help hire 3-4 neuroscientists in these areas.
uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/27135

A neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway for reformatting aversive memories during recall Tan et al. identify a neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway in rats that updates aversive memories when they are recalled. Noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus triggers synapse-to-nuclear tra...

Excited to share our new paper:
We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory.
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

I couldn't find a tool to plot different #neuroimaging data in one consistent style, so I made one! Meet yabplot (yet another brain plot) - a #Python package for (sub)cortex & tracts.🧠
- Simple API
- Built-in atlases
- Custom atlas support
🔗 github.com/teanijarv/ya... (drop a ⭐️!)

Towards Molecular Selectivity in Pharmacoimaging: Comment on van den Bosch and Cools Abstract. Molecular-enriched fMRI promises to bridge the gap between neurotransmitter systems and macro-scale network dynamics, yet empirical support has remained elusive. Commenting on van den Bosch ...

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨

We wrote a commentary in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social on a really nice recent paper from van den Bosch & Cools where they provide the first real attempt at validating REACT (molecular-enriched fMRI).

Here's what they found and what we think it means 👇

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience invites submissions to a collection on “The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition”. Making decisions i

I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...

"Multiple demand" network cognitive control interrogation across humans and macaques. Lateral PFC more functionally heterogeneous in humans than NHPs. Very cool translational work from @markboxf.bsky.social and colleagues!
doi.org/10.64898/202...

We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨
🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes

#JNeurosci: Rewards can strengthen memories, but how is this represented in the brain? Focusing on the hippocampus, Cohen et al. discovered that neural activity patterns for reward-related memories may differ depending on age. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1325-25.2026

Register now for the next #ResearchInConversation webinar on March 12, noon EDT
🔗 Register: https://neuronline.sfn.org/scientific-research/the-serotonin-1b-receptor
📄 Read the #JNeurosci paper: https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0413-25.2026

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value - Nature Cue-evoked striatal dopamine release in mice encodes bidirectional trajectory errors, spatially and temporally separated from value coding, reflecting the relationship between the speed and direc...

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

🚨 New Paper: Controlling the Human Connectome with Spatially Diffuse Input Signals

Now in press at Communications Biology!

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Spatial Null Models and Transforms for Brain Map Comparison Implements spatial null models and coordinate-space transformations for statistical comparison of brain maps, following the framework described in Markello et al. (2022)…

neuromapr 0.2.1 has been accepted and published on CRAN!

Very excited to get this out to users in the simplest way possible, and hope the #rstats #neuroimaging community finds it useful!

lcbc-uio.github.io/neuromapr/

If you are headed for psych grad school and want experience with EEG, fMRI, affective science and internalizing psychopathology research, apply to be my lab manager!

Final version now in press at Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience! Congratulations to Rachel for her hard work on this ☺️🧠⚡
trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/...

#JNeurosci: Weiss et al. show that similar pupil dilations can arise from distinct underlying neuromodulatory states, highlighting adrenergic signaling as a key pathway through which arousal shapes cortical dynamics.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0898-25.2025

Monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test?

In collaboration with @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social & his lab we figured out how to do it nonhuman primates using noninvasive neuroengineering of synthetic serum markers.

nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

A recent paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com raised concerns about the lesion network mapping method. Our team of 16 coauthors analyzed >1000 lesions and 34 symptoms and found that "The methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain sound" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Predator–prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution - Nature Reviews Biodiversity The drivers of cognitive variation remain elusive. In this Perspective, Wooster et al. propose the predatory intelligence hypothesis, positing that the complex interactions between predator and prey p...

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Most fMRI studies rely on relatively small datasets, often just dozens or a few hundred people.

This preprint introduces NeuroSTORM, a foundation model pretrained on 28.65 million fMRI frames, over 9,000 hours of scans from 50,000+ individuals.

Exploring the Neurophysiological Responses of Mobile MOBA Gamers: An EEG Dataset for Understanding Gaming Addiction in Natural Contexts EEG Dataset from Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Gameplay in Natural Settings: A Scientific Data Overview Introduction Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games represent one of the most engaging and widely played gaming genres worldwide, especially prevalent on mobile platforms. Despite their popularity, the neurophysiological processes underlying MOBA gameplay and their links to gaming addiction remain insufficiently understood. Addressing this gap, a recent open-access study published in…

Exploring the Neurophysiological Responses of Mobile MOBA Gamers: An EEG Dataset for Understanding Gaming Addiction in Natural Contexts

EEG Dataset from Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Gameplay in Natural Settings: A Scientific Data Overview Introduction Multiplayer Online Battle Arena…