Inlay

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027! This fall, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M, where I will launch the Coupled Minds Lab. We will study how conversation shapes the way people connect, coordinate, and change their minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io

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/...

Recent preprint with Oriel FeldmanHall and Matt Nassar, showing clear neural evidence that adolescent (13-15 yrs) social media and smartphones use are associated with blunted reward signaling in the ventral striatum, the brain's reward processing hub, and worse mental health. osf.io/preprints/ps...

📣 New preprint 📣 "Neural Dynamics of Belief and Value Computations Guiding Strategic Social Decisions" We use EEG and computational modeling (combining learning + DDM) to explain participants' choices, RT, and neural signals in a strategic game. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Successful strategic behavior must be grounded in beliefs about the opponent and her intentions. While many potential models have been proposed to explain choices in such situations, the neural mechanisms that govern learning and choice in complex strategic contexts remain poorly understood. Here, we use a computational model that combines dynamic learning and choice mechanisms to explain both choices and response times of human participants engaged in a competitive strategic task. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we identify temporally structured stages of neural processing that support an evolving value-based decision process, corresponding to first- and second-order belief updates and evidence accumulation related to the comparison of action values. Gamma-band phase coupling between central and parietal EEG signals varied with individual winning rate, suggesting that strategic behavior involves coordinated information transfer across spatially remote areas. Together, our data characterize the temporally evolving neural dynamics of belief and valuation processes that underlie strategic choice and provide neural validation for assumptions embedded in computational models of this behavior. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 725355

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 06 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02427-2In this individual participant data meta-analysis, and across 321,345 smartphone-ratings of affective well-being and nearly 1 million hours of physical activity measurement, Rehder et al. clarify the nature and extent of activity–well-being relations and document their relevance in humans’ everyday life.