Yeah! Let's get this year started off right.
A new theoretical model for everyone's favorite sensitive and specific neural marker.
So why is it a marker of goals if it is called the Reward Positivity? 1/4
Back in the Paleozoic (IJ Psychophys, 2017: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2017.11.013), we linked positive and negative feedback variance to independent scalp maps (and generators), but I never 100% knew what to make of it. This really tilts my priors toward independent processes.
Check out @theazalabak.bsky.social's cool new paper on model-based planning during foraging. She's applying for grad school this season, so keep your eyes out!
Plato's Cave allegory, illustrated. the shadows on the cave wall are captioned "increasingly insane and extreme positions", the prisoners labeled "internet users", the figures holding the shadow's shapes labeled "algorithms", the fire labeled "random internet users expressing their idiosyncratic beliefs". the space above the cave is labeled "literally just outside" and the philosopher freed from the chains of the physical world labeled "guy who logs off"
from "Classical Studies memes for Hellenistic teens" on FB
James Swanson, one of the earliest researcher who promoted amphetamines in the 90’, in this piece by @nytimes.com on a.d.h.d. and stimulants. “there is no long-term effect. The only long-term effect that I know of has been the suppression of growth.“
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/m...
However, these results are contingent on whether the task features can be decoded. Activity-silent, or 'bursts' of proactive processes sprinkled in the ITI and not time-locked to the stimulus, may not appear with our method. Therefore, the proactive unicorn is still galloping even in our task.
I'll plug this in: we run the Multi task with EEG and, adapting Kikumoto's decoding+RSA method, we can see a change in distractors' coding compatible with the distractor-specific adaptation reported in our recent NHB. This 'looks' like reactive, given it shows up 500ms post-stimulus.
we've seen goal gradient like effects emerge in cognitive effort tasks but how does attention to goal progress ?
a new study from our lab, by Sean Devine and others, uses eyetracking to answer this question
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Striatal stimulation enhances cognitive control and evidence processing in rodents and humans
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#neuroscience
Three new CDML publications to start off 2025!
First up: research on multidimensional control from @davideghez.bsky.social in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social! Across three behavioral experiments and with computational modeling, Davide shows that people adapt control in a distractor-specific fashion.
This is awesome! Congratulations!!
We've got an excellent line-up in both philosophy and neuroscience for our first conference! Submit your abstracts by Feb 1 and join us in St. Louis in early May!
It's out!
Our work on multi-dimensional control adaptation landed on @naturehumbehav.bsky.social
Free access to the full text here: rdcu.be/d5pt1
Big shout-out to @wouterkool.bsky.social for sharing the venture and for setting the bar that high in mentorship!
For a quick recap, linked thread
Great conversations with @ndosenbach.bsky.social while preparing this Nature News & Views on the new Kang et al. Ready to have the same with everyone here. Thoughts? What other practice should be investigated to help BWAS reproducibility?
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Psychologists and neuroscientists are calling for international pressure towards immediate ceasefire in Israel, Palestine & Lebanon, respect for international humanitarian law, end of the occupation, and release of all hostages.
Read & join us by signing here: tinyurl.com/PsychLetter
Do you teach neuroscience? Here’s a list I’ve compiled of mostly free online neuroscience textbooks, simulations and datasets you can use for your course! If I’m missing something, let me know so I can add it! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
#psynom24 is coming up. On Fri 22nd I will be talking about cognitive control with multiple distractors, including ↓
Hold your amphibians!
Some resources i've curated for the cognitive and computational neuroscience communities on bluesky! First, a twin set of starter packs. go.bsky.app/2n84SRM
The *registration* for this year's satellite meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology at Psychonomics in New York City will *close Sunday, November 10!* If you plan to attend, register by Sunday for free on the meeting website: mathpsych.org/conference/17/
Overall, this suggests that attentional gains for multiple sources of information can be adapted in parallel.
This opens the questions of how ‘multidimensional’ conflict is represented in the brain.
Check out the discussion of our preprint for some speculation.
With a neural network model, we show that you need multiple, distractor-specific conflict monitors.
In short, humans can simultaneously adapt attention towards multiple sources, based on their individual ‘compatibility’ history.
(Lasagne never helped writing a great epitaph. Life stories did)
We observe within-dimension adaptation, but absence of cross-dimension adaptation.
Put simpler, participants adapted attention to a given dimension based selectively on the congruency history of that dimension with the cued task.
a.k.a. ‘spaghetti plot’. It would be lame if it wasn’t how we actually refer to this effect.
Control adaptation in the MULTI produces parametric congruency sequence effects.
You are robust to congruency effects the more you have been previously exposed to incongruence (flatter, lighter lines).
(Check out @hritz.bsky.social’s new paper for a related, convergent, finding!)
The congruency of non-cued dimensions spans from 0 (all incongruent) to 3 (all congruent). This leads to parametric effects on responses to the cued dimension.
Also, interference comes from everywhere: Any non-cued dimension interfere with any cued task (as in the best families).
In our new MULTI paradigm, two stimuli differ across 4 dimensions. Your need to find the instructed feature for a given cued dimension (aka ‘write the epitaph’).
The three other dimensions can either facilitate or interfere (i.e., your sister and your aunt).
Families can be large.
Could you compose your cousin's epitaph while your sister shares his life stories, and also suppress your aunt’s push for more lasagne?
New preprint!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our environments are complex and ever changing. We report behavioral data and neural network simulations showing that, in multidimensional environments, humans adapt attentional control in a dimension-specific way.
w/ @wouterkool.bsky.social
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