Blair Shevlin

BayesFlow 2.1.0 is now live! 🚀 Our new major release includes lots of goodies: differentiable adapters, better inference network featuring Mean Flow, unified masking, redesigned multilevel inference, and much more! 🎉 The sky is the limit. And as always, keep rocking! 😎 github.com/bayesflow-or...

📢 New paper 📢 I am excited to report that our paper 'Transdiagnostic factors differentially shape choices and decision times in social evaluative learning' is now published Open Access in Psychological Medicine! 1/5

I’m hiring a postdoc in my lab at the University of Amsterdam! Interested in mathematical psychology, evidence-accumulation models & Bayesian hierarchical modeling? Join us to develop new models of cognitive fluctuations across multiple timescales. Please share! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

🎉 New paper at Behavior Research Methods!!! We present the samplr package for R, which helps use sampling algorithms and cognitive models for human data - show theoretical background + examples. Thanks to @yunxiao-li.bsky.social and @asanborn.bsky.social. Paper link.springer.com/article/10.3...

🎉 We are officially kicking off our 2026–2027 Speaker Series! We’re excited to welcome Dr. Yuanjia Wang on Friday, October 23, at 1 PM for her talk, “Computational Phenotyping and Integrative Learning for Individualized Treatment in Psychiatry.” 👉 RSVP here: forms.gle/zVoJ2doj6Ny4...

Now out in PNAS. We show that AI detection failure rates vary and are platform-specific. Agents without knowledge of the tests were caught every time, while sophisticated agents with knowledge of the tests could evade detection only at nearly 3x the time and 6x the cost. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📢 My lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is considering graduate student applications this fall! We welcome applicants interested in using computational modeling to study social interaction 🗓️ Deadline: December 1, 2026 🔗 Learn more: sinclaboratory.com/apply #comppsychiatry #socialneuro

Integrating HiTOP and computational psychiatry Perspective by T.Allen, A.Schreiber, S.Blain, C.Carlisi, C.DeYoung, A.Fornito, C.Gillan, V.Goghari, N.Hall, P.Homan, A.Kaczkurkin, R.Kotov, R.Krueger, R.Latzman, A.Okan, J.Tackett, HiTOP Workgroup & M.Hallquist go.nature.com/3VEgfZe

We are delighted to announce SPM26 - a major release covering all the changes made to SPM since the release of SPM25. This amounts to around 370 commits from 30 contributors. Thank you to all of those who got involved! github.com/spm/spm/rele...

📢 New publication! 📢 Excited to share our new paper "Preserved higher-order mentalising during strategic interactions after medial prefrontal cortex damage" in collaboration with @thepsychologist.bsky.social's lab - out now in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New vacancy for an assistant professor position in our department at Maastricht. You will establish an independent and internationally visible research programme in predictive brain processes and contribute to the education programmes of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience. Please share!

Neuroinflammation may contribute to maternal anhedonia by disrupting dopamine-dependent reward circuitry.

You ever look at a team's depth chart and struggle contextualize how deep a team truly is relative to the league? Well I built a tool that helps with that. Introducing Team Depth Ladders. intheno.net/team-depth-l...

One last worrying finding: AI-assisted submissions were approved 99.6% of the time, basically as often as unassisted submissions (99.7%). In 60 cases where we directly observed instructions explicitly banning AI, all 60 were still approved and paid.

🚨 New paper 🚨 Are your participants using AI to take your study? We conducted the first study directly observing AI assistance in online research, spanning 700K+ Prolific submissions. We found very rare, concentrated AI use, but gaps in safeguards. arxiv.org/abs/2610.09279

Gonzaga University is hiring (TT) in neuroscience for Fall 2027. Gonzaga is a great place focused on undergraduate education with strong support for research. Deadline Oct 26! employment.gonzaga.edu/jobs/assista...

Very excited to see this work from Eyiyemis Damisah's group at Yale out in @natneuro.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... They combined our gamified aversive learning task (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) with single unit recordings to show that claustrum neurons encode uncertainty

6 days to register a comment on NIH Request for Information (RFI) on Changing Reporting Outcomes for Peer Review. They are proposing to hide the impact scores and percentiles. 🤔 funding decisions will not be transparent👎🏼. Register a comment while you still can rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3...

Neural latent representation of implicit perceptual decision confidence signatures from brain-wide intracranial EEG https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.30.755781v1

The complete version of @phaueis.eurosky.social and my BBS target article, "Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling," is now available. It includes 32 commentaries and our response. Please share #philsci #philsky #cogsci

⚡ Out now: Psychological and health sciences increasingly study how phenomena dynamically influence and reinforce one another over time: for example, to understand the mechanisms maintaining mental disorders. Can we identify reliable clusters of these dynamics? A thread 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Moral and perceptual decisions may share computational mechanisms, but do they rely on the same neural systems? This study shows that both follow similar evidence-accumulation computations, yet engage distinct neural representations. 🧪 #NeuroSky #morality #cognition plos.io/4AM2V57

Metabolic and neural responses to ultraprocessed foods: a randomized, controlled, crossover study ->Nature | More on "Ultraprocessed foods and brain response" at BigEarthData.ai | #Food

How fast we decide reveals how we learn. New in @plos.org #PLoSCompBio : modeling response times alongside choices disentangles working memory, reinforcement learning and cognitive control, and reveals differences in schizophrenia that choices alone missed. 🧵 t.co/BTOgmpd4YH

Some months ago, I wrote a skeptical reply to a commentary on bots in online studies in PNAS, arguing that no evidence yet exists for such bots. Together with the authors of the original commentary, we now show that bots can pass (almost?) all online cognitive studies with human-like performance 1/n

How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)

NEW: The anterior hypothalamic nucleus acts like a volume knob for stress, scaling the brain’s response to threatening events 🧠 Read the Cai Lab's latest paper, led by @zachtpennington.bsky.social, in @nature.com 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... More: bsky.app/profile/did:...

Apparent food selectivity reflects multiple non-food image properties https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.18.751020v1

I think it comes down to opportunity cost. In our recent paper (Zhang et al., PNAS, cond. accepted), data from a few months ago suggest some people are already doing this (caveat: some may be non-compliant humans, and things move fast).

I just had Opus 5.5 one shot a Human-Like mousetracking driver by looking at my code on cognition. Right now it's choosing left or right randomly. It's still not perfect but this took it literally a simple prompt and 1.5 mins to code a script. It can then be randomized and used across bot accounts.

Like I've been saying - many of the tools we've been using for bot detection are no match for today's LLM agents. We need to work together to build new standards!

I'm excited about this work that an amazing undergrad, @ariazhang.bsky.social, did with me and @tomerullman.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Aria showed how a neural net can discover abstractions for intuitive physics and use its own reliability estimates to decide when to deploy them.

Tired of the centrality debate? Of seeing one application where centrality is influential & others where it's more arbitrary? We have the article for you: osf.io/preprints/ps... Turns out centrality can indeed matter; but when it does depends on underlying network structure & mechanism of spread 🧵

Been raising that alarm internally at Sinai and Yale, but if our field wants to continue to rely on virtual data collection then we need to develop better bot detection tools. Glad to be collaborating with @kiante.bsky.social on these efforts. His work at UCLA is leading the way survey-shield.com

New paper in Nature Communications 🧠 Rapid Changes in Risk Attitudes Originate from Bayesian Inference on Parietal Magnitude Representations. Why the same person can flip between a safe bet and a gamble, and what parietal cortex has to do with it. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Announcing two tenure-track faculty openings in the Psych Dept at Northwestern University: Cognitive/Affective Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology psychology.northwestern.edu/people/facul...

Sharing this event - looks very interesting! Interpretability in Psychological Models Online, 15 October 2026, 15:30–19:20 CEST tmmpsych.vercel.app/events/inter...

📣 NEW PREPRINT ALERT! 📣 📝Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... When choosing between options with multiple attributes, what does the brain actually compare - individual attributes or integrated option values? We combined EEG + eye-tracking to find out... and found evidence for the latter 🧠

Incredibly excited to host this event next week! Dr. Rust's work is both rigorous and inspiring

ONE WEEK AWAY! On Thursday, September 24, 1pm, the #FBISeminarSeries and host Dr. @bshev.bsky.social welcome @upenn.edu's Dr. @nicolecrust.bsky.social. Dr. Rust will present "From Subjective Feelings to Brain Mechanisms: Advancing the Science of Mood through Epistemic Iteration". ✨NOT TO MISS!