Gonzalo Urcelay

Phil Baker’s llamas will provide you with eggs forbetterscience.com/2026/10/27/p...

Check out @parnianrafei.bsky.social's work comparing the classic outcome devaluation and response remapping strategies to assess habits in humans. This study clarifies what each test assesses and is highly needed in this continuously-growing habit literature

Announcing #engramsensembles '27, to be held at @tcddublin next May. Registration and abstract submission will open in autumn 2026.

Overreliance on habits is linked to maladaptive behaviors & clinical conditions. But are some people more habit-prone than others? Here, we tested the temporal stability of individual differences in both habit learning & expression. Our data suggest trait-like tendencies! osf.io/preprints/ps...

NEW PAPER! "Variations in the Accuracy of Old-New Judgements Following Compound Learned-Predictiveness Training" by Sandra Lagator, Clara Muñiz-Diez, @tombeesley.bsky.social and Me Out now as an express publication in @qjep.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Looks like a very interesting opportunity for someone looking for a postdoc in attention

Lovely visit to Birkbeck to talk about avoidance, hosted by @silviaseghezzi.bsky.social. Good engagement from staff and students, really enjoyed visiting. Also got to talk with @matildevaghi.bsky.social, lots to think about in my way home.

Our back-translation of value-modulated attentional capture to rats and mice is now published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, and it's open access! Yay. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

To mark the 80th anniversary of the Experimental Psychology Society, we invite proposals for a special anniversary symposium reflecting on the current state of experimental psychology and its future trajectory. Please see below for information on how to submit a proposal! eps.ac.uk/eps-80th-ann...

Looks like an amazing opportunity to do a postdoc

New preprint and simulator of associative learning attentional models. Have fun! 👁️ arxiv.org/abs/2602.07519 cal-r.org/index.php?id... #simulation #associative_learning #attention

As someone with an interest in 1) ways of enhancing extinction learning to attenuate recovery and 2) assessing the evidence for memory erasure, I read this preprint from the Namboodiri lab with attention. Here are a few thoughts on the preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

Heading back home from another @exppsychsoc.bsky.social brilliant meeting in London. Here's the information about the next one!

Excellent talk by @katepeters3.bsky.social, who visited us at @notts-psych.bsky.social today to speak about "Effects of environmental enrichment in reducing food seeking and the role of corticolimbic circuits"

This looks very appealing for someone looking to do a PhD in sunny Malaga (Spain) with an excellent mentor and team.

Thought-provoking analysis by @markhaselgrove.bsky.social on a recent preprint looking at benchmarks for associative learning models 👇

In which 94 benchmark phenomena are identified. 16 are domain- and species-general and should be explained by any theory claiming generality. 30 are species- and/or domain-specific but highly robust across procedures

The MRC are looking for a computational neuroscientist to join their Neuroscience & Mental Health Board, to replace me as I step down next year. Drop me a line if you want to know more Deadline September 14th www.ukri.org/who-we-are/w....

Only two days left to apply for this 3-year postdoc position to look at fear, avoidance, heart rate monitoring and the neural mechanisms orchestrating these. Get in touch with Carl Stevenson or myself if you are interested, the deadline is Friday! Please repost.

Only a few days left to apply for this 3-year postdoc position in Nottingham (deadline Sept 5th!). If you're considering applying please get in touch. If you're already a PI, then repost this!

Reminder that we're looking for a Post Doc and the deadline is looming (Sept 5th). If you are interested, please get in touch. If you see this, please repost it to that it is seen by potential applicants!

In this recent #ResearchHighlight, the authors discuss new findings pointing a potential non-pharmacological approach for mitigating maladaptive craving behaviors

The cost of remembering: engram competition as a flexible mechanism of forgetting. Our new perspective piece in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, lead by Ryan Lab alumni, Livia Autore. Also with Michael Drew from @utaustin.bsky.social Trends in Neurosciences www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

My latest column for @thetransmitter.bsky.social - why neural populations are a convenient fiction doi.org/10.53053/FZK...

Nick Mackintosh and the not-so-recent history of associative learning, as seen through the eyes of his friend and definitive rival, Geoff Hall. It reminded me of how much fun it was working with Geoff. www-users.york.ac.uk/~gh1/pdf/201...

Looking for a free day out over Summer? We give you free car parking, and a fun half day of science. Rember the park and the ice-cream van are only a stones throw away. We still have a few spaces left for this years Summer Scientist Week, so make sure to get booked on at www.summerscientist.org

As staff, it’s our great honour to witness this moment of celebration. We’ve loved teaching & supporting you throughout your journey, watching you cross the stage, meeting your families & friends is a privilege. Wishing you all the best. Go make your mark, Class of 2025! 💫

New preprint from the lab on habit learning in compulsivity from the fantastic @kellydonegan.bsky.social! ✅ N=1000, ✅ pre-registered, ✅ within-person crossover design...we study individual differences in habit learning using the Neureka App

The first day of the joint EPS and CSBBCS meeting in Dundee ends, fittingly, with a joint poster session!

@kellydonegan.bsky.social showing our latest smartphone habit research this morning at @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social 📲

Many variables determine whether instrumental behaviour is goal-directed or habitual. We have documented in rats that delays between response and outcome attenuate sensitivity to outcome devaluation (a canonical test of goal directedness). In this study we replicated that observation in humans.

Maybe the future of education is that only students who care about learning will go to college and everybody else can spend all day at networking events. I just don't see any point spending time in the liminal space where students pretend that they're learning while having LLMs do their work.

Fantastic Mackintosh lecture at the Gregynog Associative Learning meeting given by Eva Jablonka

Abstract portal is open for submissions for the joint meeting of EPS and CSBBCS in Dundee (July 2025).

Delighted to be at the Lancaster meeting of the @exppsychsoc.bsky.social. Great talks from members of @notts-psych.bsky.social, Lauren Marsh and Sandra Lagator.

Take a look, there are great talks of EPS prize winners!

When something is written with the clarity that we crave and deserve and openly articulates what we silently shout, there is no need to rephrase it, just to spread it. "I don’t think the problem so much that the universities as a whole are underfunded, ... 1/n

The meeting programme for EPS Lancaster in April is now live! eps.ac.uk/next-meeting/

One more contribution from the lab to finalise the year. This one on spatial learning!

Announcing the 2025 "Engram and Ensembles in Learning and Memory" meeting, at @tcddublin.bsky.social Half of speakers will be selected from abstracts submitted by trainees. Registration is open below, with discounted rates available until January 31st. event.fourwaves.com/engramsensem...

I happily closed my twitter account. Now I got to wait 30 days for that to take effect. It will be nice to start 2025 without it, and I'm looking forward to it.