Jon Roiser

too real

🚀 PhD opportunity in the Vaghi Lab, starting 2027 @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social We are looking to support applicants interested in: 🔬 precision neuroimaging 🧠 compulsivity/OCD 💻 computational approaches Available via the ESRC UBEL DTP PhD or MSc + PhD routes 🔗 surl.li/qunzzt Please share! 📢

📖 New review out today in @natrevneuro.nature.com: Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition 🧠🧪 Full-text link to the paper is here: rdcu.be/9YK3mF7dYhFa

Postdoc job alert! I’m looking for someone with a PhD in neuroscience/psychology, psychiatry, computational modeling or a related field to join my NIH-funded team at UCLA studying the neural & computational mechanisms of #interoception in anorexia nervosa 1/2

This summer I led a series of conversations in my lab about "AI" and our research. Some colleagues have shared "AI policies" for their labs and we discussed whether this would make sense for us. We decided it did not, and came up with a different approach. Please feel free to share & adapt!

nono, i got your note. just. why didn't you text me? i would have picked up more plums. i wasn't saving THOSE SPECIFIC plums. now i gotta go to the store again and. no, it's fine. it's fine. i'm fine. it's just been a long day.

1/7 Excited to share our new @elife.bsky.social Reviewed Preprint! 🧠 How do higher-order cognitive processes like abstraction & metacognition map onto transdiagnostic mental health dimensions? We combined computational modeling of a RL task with symptom profiling 🔗 doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

New paper alert! 📣📣 In this work, we investigated the origins of somatic symptoms – a common and debilitating feature of anxiety and depression. 'Anxiety is associated with the persistence of conditioned somatic sensations over time'

For thousands of years, a solar eclipse has been a prophetic harbinger of a spectacular, epoch-making event. Just saying. #VoteBinface #Clacton

I found this post (which basically boils down to explore-exploit, I think) so interesting, and certainly for me as a Londoner it rings true (albeit thank goodness there is still plenty of diversity in London!)

🚨Our new reviewed preprint is out at eLife! 🎉 Using bi-daily gamified smartphone 📱 tracking, we ask: • Does depressive mood precede under-confidence, or vice versa? • How does depression affect the integration of local confidence into global confidence over time? elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

New paper alert! In this paper we were interested to formally test some of the assumptions made by computational psychiatrists - assumptions about parameter recoverability, reliability and validity. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A key challenge for computational psychiatry is to distinguish state from trait markers and go beyond cross-sectional studies. Here we show that as paranoia waxes and wanes in patients with schizophrenia, so too do volatility priors

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Progress in Computational Psychiatry is is slowed down substantially because researchers (clinicians, cognitive neuroscientists, etc) lack the training in computational modelling and many studies dont follow the best practices in modelling. How can we change this? We've built the CPM toolbox:

I've long suspected this based on our own data - most variation in unselected samples is driven by low symptom scores, and it seems that most covariation is too. Seem important, especially re implications for the "p-factor". We need to confirm correlations from unselected samples in clinical ones

If Binface beats Farage it'll be the most British thing since Boaty McBoatface and we'll need a petition for a new national holiday

Andy Burnham is probably going to raise tax by at least £4.7bn, and maybe much more. Here's my list of 37 ways he might do it: every potential tax rise, how much it would raise, and what the downside would be. There's always a downside. Thread:

PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!

🎉 Now published in Nature Communications! 🧠 We develop a novel computational reinforcement learning & habit model of Twitter data, and show that younger people & women are more behaviourally sensitive to 'Likes'. Read the paper: bit.ly/4f1vsKS

immense work

If you missed the original version of our VTA study, we now have an updated preprint with a new title and some new analyses. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Applications open for Mental Health & Wellbeing ECR Catalyst Grant Call with funding of up to £10k available to support innovative, cutting-edge research that crosses disciplinary boundaries & focuses on bringing discovery to practice. Deadline: 18 May https://bit.ly/3PKtgxh

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

New paper alert! 📢 Anhedonic Traits Do Not Impair Performance in a 3-Arm Bandit Task - from @jonroiser.bsky.social and colleagues: doi.org/10.5334/cpsy...

war_iran_final-blow_v1.pdf war_iran_final-final-blow-v2.pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits.pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits (1).pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits (1) APPROVED.pdf IRANWARPLANSFINALFINALFINAL.pdf IRANWARPLANSFINALFINALFINAL (1).pdf

Another poster today at #cosyne26 (2-112)! @rowanboard shows how early life social isolation alters dimension-based learning, cognitive flexibility, and the ventral hippocampus–PFC circuit. Great collaboration with @jonroiser.bsky.social linking mouse and human versions of the task!

excellent commentary on an excellent paper - congrats to all involved!

The Scottish have won the AI Wars.

Gotta say, did not have "Greece sends warships to defend island from Persian attacks" on my bingo card for this millennium, yet here we are.

very cool, innovative and important contribution - congrats to the authors

Pleased to share this newly co-authored expert opinion on the Polyvagal Theory (PVT): www.clinicalneuropsychiatry.org/download/why...

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I'm delighted to have received a junior faculty grant from The Huo Family Foundation to investigate mechanisms linking social media use to mental health outcomes in young people. huofamilyfoundation.org/news/updates...

Reminder: Haidt is not actually an "expert" in this field and actual experts have called out that he's just wrong about almost everything. www.techdirt.com/2025/09/10/e...

incredible resource for aspiring (and indeed existing!) computational cognitive neuroscientists

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

⚠️ Job Alert ⚠️ I'm recruiting a postdoc to work with me and Professor @jonroiser.bsky.social on an exciting new project examining the link between young people's decision-making on social media and their mental health.

How should a newspaper behave when its own country is at war? The Israeli newspaper @haaretzcom is both revered and reviled for the path it has chosen. My long read profile of a remarkable institution www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel...

Man answering his phone on the train: Yes? Correct, I’m not at work (pause) I’m not going to answer that because I am not at work today. No, you’re going to have to ask someone who is. Goodbye.

Passionate about women's mental health? Interested in brain stimulation? Excited by cutting edge neurotech? Come do a PhD with me! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (thread)

🚀 We're hiring ! 🕵️ Seeking a postdoc to study the development & individual-level organization of brain circuits supporting (in)flexible behavior in psychiatric populations. 🧠 Precision functional mapping, fMRI, normative modelling Details 👉 tinyurl.com/3h8tcv2e 🗓️ Apply by Dec 10! Please RT 🙌

(credit to Paulina Lukow, sadly not on Bluesky)

🗳️ Is political engagement actually good for us? Professor @jonroiser.bsky.social and Dr @lbernardi.bsky.social talk to us about the impact of politics on our mental health.