David V. Smith
@dvsmith.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Temple University. Using fMRI and tES to understand how we make social and economic decisions.
Reposted by David V. Smith
My department, Duke Neurobiology, is searching for a new chair. Ad below. Come work with me, @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @ennatsew.bsky.social @jorggrandl.bsky.social @jnklab.bsky.social @sbilbo.bsky.social @neurocircuits.bsky.social and many other amazing folks! @dukemedschool.bsky.social
Department Chair, Duke Neurobiology - Duke University, Durham job with Duke University - School of Medicine | 12852576
The Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) seeks a distinguished neuroscientist to serve as the next Chair of the Department of Neurobiology.
www.nature.com
January 13, 2026 at 1:21 AM
My department, Duke Neurobiology, is searching for a new chair. Ad below. Come work with me, @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @ennatsew.bsky.social @jorggrandl.bsky.social @jnklab.bsky.social @sbilbo.bsky.social @neurocircuits.bsky.social and many other amazing folks! @dukemedschool.bsky.social
Reposted by David V. Smith
SANS 2026 deadline has been extended by a week to **next Monday Jan 19th 23:59 PT**!
We encourage all current and prospective members of the SANS community to take advantage of the extended deadline and submit their work for consideration as either an individual poster or oral presentation!
We encourage all current and prospective members of the SANS community to take advantage of the extended deadline and submit their work for consideration as either an individual poster or oral presentation!
January 13, 2026 at 12:23 AM
SANS 2026 deadline has been extended by a week to **next Monday Jan 19th 23:59 PT**!
We encourage all current and prospective members of the SANS community to take advantage of the extended deadline and submit their work for consideration as either an individual poster or oral presentation!
We encourage all current and prospective members of the SANS community to take advantage of the extended deadline and submit their work for consideration as either an individual poster or oral presentation!
Reposted by David V. Smith
Want to get into one of the fastest growing tech fields today? The CMU Neuroscience Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering have teamed up to offer a suite of masters programs in Neural Technologies, tailored to your long term career goals.
Spread the word!
Spread the word!
We are pleased to announce the new Master’s in Neural Technologies (MiNT) program. Please visit our website to learn more and apply:
www.cmu.edu/ni/academics...
www.cmu.edu/ni/academics...
January 12, 2026 at 3:47 PM
Want to get into one of the fastest growing tech fields today? The CMU Neuroscience Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering have teamed up to offer a suite of masters programs in Neural Technologies, tailored to your long term career goals.
Spread the word!
Spread the word!
Reposted by David V. Smith
This is a HUGE win…and one that happened because we ~collectively~ said “NO!”
But AAAS coming in and saying on record to the NYT “Science is doing ok. Things are not bad at all…” is baffling.
If things are hard for you as a scientist, please share in the comments.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/s...
But AAAS coming in and saying on record to the NYT “Science is doing ok. Things are not bad at all…” is baffling.
If things are hard for you as a scientist, please share in the comments.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/s...
Congress Is Reversing Trump’s Steep Budget Cuts to Science
www.nytimes.com
January 10, 2026 at 12:09 PM
This is a HUGE win…and one that happened because we ~collectively~ said “NO!”
But AAAS coming in and saying on record to the NYT “Science is doing ok. Things are not bad at all…” is baffling.
If things are hard for you as a scientist, please share in the comments.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/s...
But AAAS coming in and saying on record to the NYT “Science is doing ok. Things are not bad at all…” is baffling.
If things are hard for you as a scientist, please share in the comments.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/s...
Reposted by David V. Smith
Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings
webbslab.com/job-postings
January 9, 2026 at 9:28 PM
Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings
webbslab.com/job-postings
Reposted by David V. Smith
per my point about the mercator projection being the root of this whole thing
Why is Trump fixated on Greenland? @sbg1.bsky.social recalls what he told us in 2021: "I said, 'Why don’t we have that?' You take a look at a map...I love maps. And I always said 'Look at the size of this, it’s massive and that should be part of the United States.'" www.newyorker.com/news/letter-...
Why Donald Trump Wants Greenland (and Everything Else)
There’s no Trump Doctrine, just a map of the world that the President wants to write his name on in big gold letters.
www.newyorker.com
January 9, 2026 at 12:48 AM
per my point about the mercator projection being the root of this whole thing
Reposted by David V. Smith
Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.
We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
January 7, 2026 at 2:00 AM
Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.
We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.
Reposted by David V. Smith
When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me.
I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1
January 3, 2026 at 1:14 AM
When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me.
I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
Reposted by David V. Smith
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization
Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...
rdcu.be
December 23, 2025 at 1:02 PM
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
“These results demonstrate a generalizable small-magnitude effect of lower cognitive performance aligning with school vacation even after adjusting for socioeconomic status or ADHD diagnosis.”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Cognition varies across the calendar year in multiple large-scale datasets | PNAS
Children’s cognitive abilities vary across short and long timescales, from circadian
fluctuations to year-by-year developmental changes. “Summer sl...
www.pnas.org
December 20, 2025 at 10:48 PM
“These results demonstrate a generalizable small-magnitude effect of lower cognitive performance aligning with school vacation even after adjusting for socioeconomic status or ADHD diagnosis.”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Reposted by David V. Smith
AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social
AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor
These guidelines can help researchers ensure the integrity of their work while accelerating progress on important scientific questions.
www.thetransmitter.org
December 16, 2025 at 1:48 PM
AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social
Reposted by David V. Smith
🧠💸 Launching the RewardSignals feed
RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making.
To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals.
You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”.
#RewardSignals
RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making.
To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals.
You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”.
#RewardSignals
November 15, 2025 at 8:02 PM
🧠💸 Launching the RewardSignals feed
RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making.
To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals.
You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”.
#RewardSignals
RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making.
To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals.
You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”.
#RewardSignals
Reposted by David V. Smith
Very excited to hear about this! We find Bayesian multi-level modeling at the ROI level super helpful (e.g. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... ), will be nice to not have to artificially carve the data into parcels a priori!
November 20, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Very excited to hear about this! We find Bayesian multi-level modeling at the ROI level super helpful (e.g. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... ), will be nice to not have to artificially carve the data into parcels a priori!
Reposted by David V. Smith
It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.
24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.
The pen is mightier than the keyboard.
24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.
The pen is mightier than the keyboard.
November 20, 2025 at 3:09 PM
It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.
24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.
The pen is mightier than the keyboard.
24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.
The pen is mightier than the keyboard.
🚨 New and ongoing work from my lab will be at #SfN25! If you’re attending, come by our posters to talk social decision making, reward, and mood — details in the thread 👇
November 15, 2025 at 11:11 PM
🚨 New and ongoing work from my lab will be at #SfN25! If you’re attending, come by our posters to talk social decision making, reward, and mood — details in the thread 👇
Reposted by David V. Smith
Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!
🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.
A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.
A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.
A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.
A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!
Reposted by David V. Smith
🚀 New paper (open access) out in Cognitive Therapy & Research: we (@herzog.bsky.social, @evalottabrakemeier.bsky.social, @hudsongolino.bsky.social and me) ask whether group‑level symptom‑change networks in CBT actually capture what happens inside each patient. #Psychology #CBT
Must We Always Go Idiographic? - Cognitive Therapy and Research
Purpose While psychological change processes are increasingly assumed to be “non-ergodic”, prompting a shift toward idiographic approaches, the assumption of ergodicity is often accepted a priori rath...
link.springer.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:11 AM
🚀 New paper (open access) out in Cognitive Therapy & Research: we (@herzog.bsky.social, @evalottabrakemeier.bsky.social, @hudsongolino.bsky.social and me) ask whether group‑level symptom‑change networks in CBT actually capture what happens inside each patient. #Psychology #CBT
Reposted by David V. Smith
Is social media to blame for teens’ mental health decline?
Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit.
This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame.
Here’s why: 3 reasons.
Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit.
This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame.
Here’s why: 3 reasons.
November 9, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Is social media to blame for teens’ mental health decline?
Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit.
This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame.
Here’s why: 3 reasons.
Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit.
This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame.
Here’s why: 3 reasons.
Reposted by David V. Smith
Really delighted to share our new article in Current Biology showing that the cingulate-to-dorsolateral prefrontal pathway is not involved in trial-to-trial short-term adaptation but rather in sustained motivational control.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
Redirecting
doi.org
November 2, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Really delighted to share our new article in Current Biology showing that the cingulate-to-dorsolateral prefrontal pathway is not involved in trial-to-trial short-term adaptation but rather in sustained motivational control.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
Reposted by David V. Smith
I am recruiting a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara for an NIH-funded project on the organization of lateral PFC function--across emotion and cognition--using representational fMRI & TMS. I’d love to find someone w/ a background in cognitive control & computational modeling to complement our team! 🏝️ 🧠 🧲
October 29, 2025 at 6:20 PM
I am recruiting a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara for an NIH-funded project on the organization of lateral PFC function--across emotion and cognition--using representational fMRI & TMS. I’d love to find someone w/ a background in cognitive control & computational modeling to complement our team! 🏝️ 🧠 🧲
Reposted by David V. Smith
Looking for a PhD? Interested in cognitive computational neuroscience, motivation and decision-making? See our project listed in the BBSRC MIBTP competition for funding for a 4-year PhD in the @msnlab.bsky.social in the @thechbh.bsky.social. Deadline 27/11. More info: tinyurl.com/5d5vz8m7
The computational and neural dynamics of human motivation and cognitive control at University of Birmingham on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - The computational and neural dynamics of human motivation and cognitive control at University of Birmingham, listed on FindAPhD.com
www.findaphd.com
October 23, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Looking for a PhD? Interested in cognitive computational neuroscience, motivation and decision-making? See our project listed in the BBSRC MIBTP competition for funding for a 4-year PhD in the @msnlab.bsky.social in the @thechbh.bsky.social. Deadline 27/11. More info: tinyurl.com/5d5vz8m7
Reposted by David V. Smith
This article is quite good and balanced, but I find these numbers pretty insane.
October 22, 2025 at 9:52 AM
This article is quite good and balanced, but I find these numbers pretty insane.
Reposted by David V. Smith
Next Week: Don’t miss @angeladuckworth.bsky.social & @katymilkman.bsky.social in conversation with Nobel Laureate @rthaler.bsky.social and Professor @aleximas.bsky.social about their new book, The Winner’s Curse.
📅 Thurs Oct 23 | 4-5PM
📍 Huntsman Hall G06
📩RSVP: https://bit.ly/4nbI9EG
📅 Thurs Oct 23 | 4-5PM
📍 Huntsman Hall G06
📩RSVP: https://bit.ly/4nbI9EG
October 16, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Next Week: Don’t miss @angeladuckworth.bsky.social & @katymilkman.bsky.social in conversation with Nobel Laureate @rthaler.bsky.social and Professor @aleximas.bsky.social about their new book, The Winner’s Curse.
📅 Thurs Oct 23 | 4-5PM
📍 Huntsman Hall G06
📩RSVP: https://bit.ly/4nbI9EG
📅 Thurs Oct 23 | 4-5PM
📍 Huntsman Hall G06
📩RSVP: https://bit.ly/4nbI9EG
Reposted by David V. Smith
Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream
connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
October 16, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream
connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
“We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility—critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust - Nature Neuroscience
This Comment calls on scientists to acknowledge how insufficient communication and limited engagement beyond academia have deepened the divide between science and the public. Restoring trust requires ...
www.nature.com
October 16, 2025 at 12:44 AM
“We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility—critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...