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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Franziska Brändle @frabraendle.bsky.social · 6d

Taken together, our results advance our understanding of the dynamics of fun in realistic environments. They also emphasize the importance of using realistic, game-like environments together with highly-controlled experiments to advance our theories of human motivation & learning.

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · 14d

Congrats Ondrej & failte to Eire ☘️

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Ondrej Zika @ondrejzika.bsky.social · 14d

🚨 I am over the moon 🌓 to announce that I am joining University College Dublin @ucddublin.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor this fall to start the Uncertain Mind (UMI) lab 💫

I am looking for PhD/Postdoc candidates to join (more below 👇 ). Please RT as the deadline is pretty soon 🙏

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Alex Pike @alexandrapike.bsky.social · 25d

New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"I feel full with shame": A qualitative perspective on gastric interoceptive sensibility

“Am I hungry? Did I overeat at lunch?” Gastric interoception - the sensing, interpretation, and regulation of signals from the gastrointestinal system…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · 27d

B2B Cognition & Mental Health Lab talks, with unintention twinning titles 🎭

Me: The promise and pitfalls of 📱/ real-life data
Alex: The promise and pitfalls of computational modelling 🧮

📍Centre for Decision Science Summer School
@alexandrapike.bsky.social

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Leya @aleyamarzuki.bsky.social · 27d

🚨New pre-print out! 🍂

Using daily gamified smartphone 📱 tracking, we found that reductions in both self- and decision-making confidence precede when people are likely to report experiencing symptoms of OCD.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Metacognitive antecedents to states of mental ill-health: Drops in confidence precede symptoms of OCD

Mental health symptoms, like those in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), show pronounced fluctuations over time. However, little is known about the underlying factors driving these fluctuations. Whi...

www.researchsquare.com

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Lucy Stafford @lucysta02475610.bsky.social · Jul 31

I'm looking for ~25 more people with a gastrointestinal disorder to complete an online survey on interoception. You can find this survey here: sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/l...

🙏

Lucy Stafford - Take part in my research

⬇️Scroll down for links to the BODY experiment and the online surveys.⬇️

sites.google.com

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

Finally, a big shoutout to @adrianhaith.bsky.social, @yuedu.bsky.social, Robert Hardwick & co for inspiring this work & the game! 🌟

Happy reading! 🤓☕

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

The good news? If there’s more than one mechanism driving compulsive behaviour, there’s likely more than one way to intervene! We talk about this in our @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social review @eikekofi.bsky.social @parnianrafei.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits

Habits are the behavioral output of two brain systems. A stimulus–response (S–R) system that encourages us to efficiently repeat well-practiced actions in familiar settings, and a goal-directed system...

www.cell.com

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

People higher in compulsivity made the most habit errors - suggesting stronger habit formation 🏋️‍♀️

… but so did younger adults, men & those with more education! Because habits aren’t 'bad'. They’re efficient ✅. Until they're not 🚧.

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

Similar to the lab-based version, we found more habits following extended training. And this effect was time-dependent ⏱️, with habits being revealed when you have to act fast

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Time-dependent competition between goal-directed and habitual response preparation - Nature Human Behaviour

Hardwick et al. show that habits in human behaviour consist of automatic preparation of an action in response to a trigger. Even though we can learn to control habits to perform different action respo...

www.nature.com

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

Introducing ... 🥁🥁🥁... COGQUEST

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

Training habits = lots of trials + multiple in-lab visits. Burdensome & inaccessible 🥱🚫 That’s why we gamified a habit task via @clairegillan.bsky.social's Neureka app

1000 people trained habits over a week, while also reporting on their mental health. All without stepping foot inside the lab!

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 28

🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨

Why do some people get stuck doing things that no longer make sense, or are even harmful? Our new study shows compulsivity isn’t just about weakened goal-directed control; people high in compulsivity also form stronger habits

📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#PaperFairy #Habits #CogSci

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

David Luque @davluque.bsky.social · Jul 24

New preprint! Habits should get stronger with more practice, right? Well, this crucial result has been difficult to reproduce in human labs. In an instant classic, de Wit (2018) showed 5 failures in obtaining more evidence of habits in conditions with more training -as compared to little trained

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Jul 23

Habits Need Time: Evidence of Habit-like Behavior After Short Training Likely Reflects Failures in Habit Testing: https://osf.io/zh39t

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 17

I promise I missed the #CPConf2025 Travel Award photo because I was boarding my ✈️ and NOT due to punting 🛶 .. Grateful for the opportunity to present my work 📱, met up with friends & eat delicious german apple cake

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jul 15

Come to my fan-tastic poster at #CPConf2025 🪭 Poster 35 to find out all things habits, gamification or to get a quick cool down 🥵

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Alex Pike @alexandrapike.bsky.social · Jul 10

What does this tell us? At least some of the implicit assumptions when advocating for the use of computational models in psychiatry are not met for these popular tasks and computational models -> limiting utility.

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Parnian Rafei @parnianrafei.bsky.social · Jul 8

🚨 New paper alert!
Do time constraints reveal habitual behaviour? 🤔 We directly compared two major paradigms in the habit research field (Outcome Devaluation vs Response Remapping) under identical training and forced-response conditions 🧠 ⏲️ ⌨️

preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Michael Wong @miquai.bsky.social · Jun 24

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?"

Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Vanessa Teckentrup @glassybrain.bsky.social · Jun 19

The way we feel affects the way we think. Can we find evidence for this in real-world mood and cognitive performance? For a few weeks, we followed people through their daily lives on their smartphones to answer this question! 📱🌍🧠 #neuroskyence

osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Vanessa Teckentrup @glassybrain.bsky.social · Jun 18

Very happy to see this published open-access in Behavior Research Methods now 🤗
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.3758/s134...

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · Jun 10

Touched down in the motherland 🇮🇪 for #RLDM2025 Excited to be apart of this explosive line-up 💥

My 🎯? To cram in as many 👾-related puns as possible

Luianta Verra @luiantaverra.bsky.social · Jun 10

Are you coming to @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social #RLDM2025?
Join our workshop on Gamification in Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience with an amazing speaker lineup! 🎮👾🧠💫

w/ @ondrejzika.bsky.social @ingrdmrtn.bsky.social

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Reposted by Kelly Donegan

Dan Mirea @danmirea.bsky.social · Jun 5

If you’re at @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social next week, consider joining our workshop on real-world RL!

You can sign up to our mailing list for updates here, even if you don’t attend:

sites.google.com/view/rlinthe...

Georgia Turner @georgiaturner.bsky.social · Jun 5

Excited to co-host a workshop at @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social with @danmirea.bsky.social & @anadasilvapinho.bsky.social next week!

We will be exploring applications of reinforcement learning to real-world data 🌳 Sign up to our mailing list to receive updates: sites.google.com/view/rlinthe...

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Kelly Donegan @kellydonegan.bsky.social · May 15

& that’s a wrap! 💫 4 amazing years done at this wonderful lab 🧠📱

Ending on a high having passed my PhD-viva 👩🏻‍🎓 Endless thank yous to (AWOL) @clairegillan.bsky.social & the lab for all their support (& attention to detail 🎈💞🎀🌸) and to @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social & Sonia Bishop for examining

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