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Looking forward to it!

My undergraduate thesis, "Distinct patterns of social contagion under risk and ambiguity", is now published online at @commspsychol.nature.com Deeply grateful for the guidance and constant support of Dr. Qingtian Mi, Prof. Jian Li, and Prof. Lusha Zhu.

Our work on how neural circuits in the cerebellum encode prior probabilities led by Julius Koppen is out now in Nature Neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big thanks to Julius Koppen & the whole team! And dedicated to all of us who found inspiration in Bayesian theories of the brain!

🔔PREPRINT: Sleep ripples drive single-neuron reactivation for human memory consolidation 1/9: How does sleep support human memory consolidation? To test this, we recorded hundreds of neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) across learning, wakefulness, and sleep. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Excited that my paper on metacontrol in humans and neural networks with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social and @lhuntneuro.bsky.social is out in PNAS! We examine the way that predictive representations of control enable behavioral adaptation across settings, and pathologies: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇

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.

This project builds on work establishing the behaviour done at Champalimaud in Lisbon with @michaelfsp.bsky.social, Beatriz Godinho, Christian Machens, and @ruimcosta.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller @lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Using non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation to boost threat extinction. Finally able to causally unravel amygdala computations in healthy humans. I’ve been dreaming about these capabilities for years and it still feels magical. Pinch me, I can hardly believe how strong these effects are.

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...

www.annualreviews.org

Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...

Coming up next week at the SoCR lab talk series is @alimahmoodi.bsky.social, who will be discussing his recent thought-provoking perspective, which advocates for a computational view of neural mechanisms of social cognition (contra an anatomical one).

Nature Reviews Neuroscience

This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...

Action selection using predictive models of the environment plays a fundamental role in human and animal behaviour, yet is poorly understood at circuit and algorithmic levels. Spatial navigation is an...

Lennart Verhagen 🧠

Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions

🧠 What makes threat memories so hard to forget? 🐍😱 Using focused ultrasound we provide causal evidence that the human amygdala drives rapid threat learning 🐍⚡ and determines how resistant those memories become to subsequent extinction 🐍🚫 🆕📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Two experiments show that observing others shifts both risk and ambiguity preferences. Risk contagion is asymmetric, with stronger alignment toward risk-averse others, whereas ambiguity contagion is more symmetric. www.nature.com/articles/s44... @dengpan.bsky.social @qingtianmi.bsky.social

Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.

Ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human amygdala provides causal evidence for its role in forming persistent threat memories.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Communications Psychology

Two experiments with preregistered replications show that observing others shifts both risk and ambiguity preferences. Risk contagion is asymmetric, with stronger alignment toward risk-averse others, ...