Elliott Wimmer

Antidepressant treatment shouldn't be a guessing game. RELMED is working towards using advanced research to predict which medication is most likely to help each person along their individual path to recovery.

Postdoctoral research position in #ComputationalPsychiatry and #EEG as part of relmed.ac.uk trial testing reinforcement learning as biomarker for antidepressant treatment response. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @mikebrowning.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

New #job alert! Clinical research fellow / postdoc in #computationalpsychiatry at the @mpc-comppsych.bsky.social / @uclqsion.bsky.social and UCL psychiatry. We will aim to understand the computations engaged by serotonin in the treatment of depression. Please re-sky. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Please share widely!

We are looking for someone excited about reward and decision-making research!

(And especially for candidates in the UK or with settled status in the UK, due unfortunately to uni rules.)

@mpc-comppsych.bsky.social
#Neuroscience #ComputationalPsychiatry #MEG #Reward #Memory

📢 We're hiring a Research Assistant in cognitive neuroscience & computational psychiatry! 📢

Join us at UCL to conduct an MEG study of reward & memory, exploring how brain signals link to variability in apathy and anhedonia.

🔗 apply from next week: lmdlab.github.io

🚨closes September 12th!

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

📢 We are hiring! 📢
For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself.
Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Interesting connection! Thanks so much for sharing your new paper.

Thanks so much, Paul. That is a good point!

Thanks! And thank you, I’ve found your results there to be very intriguing, too.

📄 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

OSF preregistration: osf.io/x3z5f

Overall, the results challenge the idea that motivational symptoms universally impair decision-making.

In the paper, we discuss potential reasons for this surprising finding.

We are very happy to hear your thoughts, and please share!

…but in actual decision-making, they showed enhanced goal-directed performance:

Higher apathy-anhedonia scores were related to greater sensitivity to goal values – plus faster navigation to goals and higher earnings.

(n.b. this relationship was not found in other common tasks we also collected.)

We tested links to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptoms.

The relationships with an 'Apathy–Anhedonia' factor were very interesting: people with higher scores reported lower expectations of goal success...

The paradigm tries to capture features of real-world decision-making:
1) we often make choices in well-learned envirornments,
2) risk is learned from experience, and
3) plans with more steps are riskier, but can also be more rewarding

We designed a novel risky goal task: over two days, participants learned maze-like environments where each step carried a small risk of failure. As goals became more distant, risk compounded.

Participants then made choices between a certain reward vs. risky goals with variable distance & reward.

🧵 New paper! We studied depression symptoms and goal-directed decisions under uncertainty

@shiyiliang.bsky.social, with @evanrussek.bsky.social & @robbrutledge.bsky.social

Surprisingly, we found that apathy–anhedonia was linked to enhanced goal-directed behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

We are recruiting a new PI at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, Associate or Full Professor. This is an amazing place to do cognitive neuroscience, in the heart of London. If you or someone you know might be interested, please pass it on. #neuroskyence

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Postdoc opening - highly recommended!

Epic dopamine / VTA neuron diversity paper

Across 3 studies (1 preregistered), combined n>600, using 2 different RL tasks, we found that performance was positively correlated with anhedonia symptoms.

General depression effects were mixed, but no correlations were negative.

These results are unexpected so we look forward to feedback!

We are excited to post a new preprint with Shiyi Liang @shiyiliang.bsky.social:

'Reinforcement learning is positively associated with anhedonia symptoms' osf.io/preprints/ps...
(a bit late here – a version was online back in December)

@mpc-comppsych.bsky.social

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

We're recruiting for new postdoc and RA positions on our @erc.europa.eu project "ConsciousComputation"

To apply and for more details, please see:

RA: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Postdoc: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Very happy to chat to anyone interested! 🧠🧪

Our paper where we use computational modelling to study how some people continue to be underconfident in their abilities despite having intact performance out in Nature Communications
@naturecomms.bsky.social
with @smfleming.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social Ray Dolan

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reconstructing a new hippocampal engram for systems reconsolidation and remote memory updating This study demonstrates that hippocampal activity during remote recall is crucial for the reconsolidation of remote memory, also called systems reconsolidation, with new hippocampal engram cells recruited to enable memory updating. The findings reveal that adult neurogenesis supports this recruitment process and the role of mPFC projections to the hippocampus and amygdala in systems reconsolidation.

Neuron

Reconstructing a new hippocampal engram for systems reconsolidation and remote memory updating

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Ausschreibung

Exciting PhD opportunities in various labs in Hamburg, including ours. Feel free to contact me regarding details. www.uni-hamburg.de/stellenangeb...

Picture of Trinity College Dublin's campanile in the front square of the college. Writing overlayed to indicate that the RLDM conference will take place from the 11th to the 14th of June, 2025. Logos for Trinity College and the RLDM conference at the bottom of the image.

Come join us at Trinity College Dublin for the 6th Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2025)

Abstract deadline January 15: rldm.org/submit

To find folks from twitter you used to follow, the 'Sky Follower Bridge'. (Though a small percent of bluesky accounts were colonized by different people with the same name.)

I am beyond excited to share our new preprint ‘A neural basis for distinguishing between imagination and reality’ with Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social and @smfleming.bsky.social! osf.io/preprints/ps... a thread 🧵

Did you know #RLDM2025 is coming to Dublin next June? rldm.org Abstract submission open now ☘️ 🇮🇪