Neuropsychopharmacology - Striatal and hippocampal contributions to value-based learning in adolescence

Neuropsychopharmacology - Synergistic pathways to psychosis: understanding developmental risk and resilience factors

Neuropsychopharmacology - Early-life neural correlates of behavioral inhibition and anxiety risk

The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...

Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models usin...

People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

The human brain undergoes a protracted course of development that provides prolonged opportunities to be sculpted by experience. Yet, persistent definitional and measurement challenges have complicated efforts to understand how experience interacts with neuroplasticity during human development. Here, we synthesize previously siloed perspectives to propose an integrative framework defining key dimensions along which adversity interacts with neuroplasticity. We discuss how the state of neuroplasticity during the timing of exposure may modulate how adversity shapes brain development. We also outline how adversity may accelerate or delay the timing of neuroplasticity and amplify or dampen its magnitude. Identifying how, where, and when experience calibrates the brain’s capacity for change may inform how neuroplasticity dynamics can be harnessed to promote healthy development.

This study shows that decision biases previously attributed to value normalization (e.g. relative value learning or range normalization) are better explained by action repetition. Repeating an action ...

Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

Hippocampal maps and ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) value and goal representations support foraging in continuous spaces. How might hippocampal-vPFC interactions control the balance between behavior...

This research advances a mechanistic reward learning account of social learning strategies. Through experiments and simulations, it shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shapin...

Welcome to CogSci Unpacked, an exciting blog series dedicated to summarizing academic papers from the Cognitive Science, a CSS Journal. Our goal is to bridge the gap between academia and the broader p...

This article illustrates the assumption of path symmetry in current theories of psychopathology and calls for the development of dynamical systems of mental illness that incorporate asymmetry.

Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise cognitive resources, shield decisions from interference, and scaffold motivation in the absence of accessible reward signals. We propose that these computational considerations have important implications for algorithmic architectures supporting decision making, including separate algorithms for goal selection and implementation, and for monitoring ongoing goals versus alternative sources of reward. Finally, we discuss how a variety of mechanisms supporting goal commitment and abandonment could relate to dimensions affected in mental health.

Abstract. In task functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), collinearity between task regressors in time series models may impact power. When collinearity is identified after data collection, rese...