Shawn Rhoads

📢 New preprint out now! In three samples (N=594), including a U.S.-representative cohort and a test-retest cohort, we formalize social motivation, learning, and homeostatic control within a single computational framework and identify a phenotype linked to chronic loneliness doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Abstract and travel award submissions for #SANS2027 are now open! The deadline for submission is January 5th, 2027 at 23:59 PT. Details here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/abstract-sub...

📢 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...

📣 Save the date! RLDM 2027, the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making, is coming to Paris, July 6-9, 2027 🎉 Stay tuned for submission deadlines and more updates on our website rldm.org 👀

Grant peer review costs a lot: ~$40k per application in reviewer time, with proposals reviewed again and again. In @thetransmitter.bsky.social , I propose a partial lottery: reviewers decide pass/fail, chance picks among the passes, and "unmissable" ideas and ECRs get protected routes.

We are growing the team! Currently recruiting a PhD student (Fall 2027 start, portal opens mid-Sep) and hiring a lab manager. Inquiries from postdocs, prospective PhD students, and research assistants are all welcome. Apply now! www.heffner-lab.com/join

Another preprint! This one from my postdoc with @ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social and @xiaosigu.bsky.social. Here we asked how the reward outcomes driving trial-by-error learning leave a lasting imprint on memory strength in the human brain. We used iEEG/computational models of cognition to find:

First preprint from the lab from postdoc Carlo Cerquetella! Demonstrating that neuronal spiking in the human medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex cohere into a redundant, low-dimensional neural correlate of visual attention (captured mostly by saccades) during naturalistic movie viewing.

My main PhD paper is finally out in Nature Human Behaviour! The question: what cognitive strategies do people use when they teach, and can we nudge them toward a better one? Work with my PhD mentors @yaelniv.bsky.social, @markkho.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social. 1/5

One week left to apply to the @sinaiccp.bsky.social New York Computational Psychiatry workshop! 💡 Learn more here: center-for-computational-psychiatry.github.io/course_nycpw/ 📝 Apply here by 8/31: airtable.com/appU8UxfDSQh...

⏰ One week left to apply for in-person attendance at the New York Computational Psychiatry Workshop! Interested in using computational methods to advance our understanding of mental health? 👉 Apply now to explore and connect with others in the field: airtable.com/appU8UxfDSQh...

Now published in eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/103... We find strong evidence that activity in Pre-SMA and vmPFC scales with gaze-weighted accumulated evidence, suggesting attention directly modulates value signals in canonical decision-making circuits! 🧵 on the methods + findings:

NEW STUDY! @mountsinainyc.bsky.social's Yuan Cheng, @herbertwu.bsky.social, et al. provide the first mouse model of leader-follower teamwork & link it to specific patterns of prefrontal cortex activity at the level of single cells. Learn More | Full Text @nature.com ➡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interested in applying computational methods to advance our understanding of mental health? Applications are now open for the New York Computational Psychiatry Workshop! Apply here to explore computational approaches in psychiatry and connect with others: airtable.com/appU8UxfDSQh...

Now in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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...

1/ I am thrilled to begin sharing the latest release of pyEM, a Python package I built for fitting cognitive computational models to behavioral data using hierarchical expectation maximization (EM) with maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP). github.com/shawnrhoads/...

Excited for the first day of the annual Computational Psychiatry Conference, this year held at Yale www.cpconf.org! We have a rockstar list of keynote speakers including @danisbassett.bsky.social @adredish.bsky.social and many more! #CPC2026

Back in New Haven for #cpconf2026! If you'll be there, come say hi! In the first session (#A54), I'll present work on how social craving dynamics shape loneliness - one example using pyEM for custom computational models 📃 Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... 📈 App: shawnrhoadsphd.com/social-cravi...

Very grateful to be able to travel to an academic conference in the US by train! A smooth 5-hr "high-speed" ride from DC to New Haven non-stop, lots of work done, and very excited to catch up with friends and colleagues at #cpconf #cpconf2026 🚨 My lab will be presenting 4 posters, details below 🔽

What predicts mental health disorders' onset and treatment success? Join our free #CCN2026 satellite meeting on the latest computational cognitive neuroscience parsing the multi-scale, dynamical systems of disorders that emerge across development, symptom expression, presentation & treatment.

new preprint from our lab where Rikki Rabinovich used @trackingactions.bsky.social's CEBRA on human intracranial data to decode the progress of time in the human brain during decision making...

🌟 Research Assistant opportunity 🌟 I'm looking for an RA to support research at The Centre for Human Brain Health (CHBH) on social information seeking and decision making, including fMRI and MEG 🧠 tinyurl.com/uob-chbh-ra Deadline: 19th July, 23:59 UK time ⏳ Start: 7th September 🗓️ Please share 🔁

🚨This preprint is now out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... We combine a dyadic foraging paradigm w/ computational modeling + ABM to study how people navigate differing preferences, share responsibility for shared outcomes & what that means for the group! more in 🧵⬇️ @fearbrain.bsky.social

Meet your #GRC-FrontalCortex chairs! Only 2 weeks left to apply! For more info: www.grc.org/frontal-cort...

How do human minds make sense of big, messy problems? 😵‍💫🌀 How do we distill complexity into something simple enough to solve? 🤔💡 We’ll be tackling these questions (and more!) at two workshops on task representations, abstractions, and construals #CogSci2026 #CCN2026 🧵 framing-the-problem.github.io

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵

Pointing out that “everyone else is already doing it!” is a classic way to motivate prosocial behavior. But how can we encourage actions which aren't popular yet? In a new paper in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social, Mike Norton and I had a lot of fun testing a method using "collective streaks." (1/5)

Two poster presentations from my group at #sbdm2026 in Paris. Magdalena Soukupová on the social learning mechanisms of human goal selection and @pierreledenmat.bsky.social on (lack of) mentalizing in social learning.

A recent paper by Epp et al. in NN claimed that ~40% of reported BOLD findings could be misinterpreted. In our reanalysis, we identified several statistical issues that, in our view, undermine these conclusions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 👇 1/11

📣 New preprint 📣 "Neural Dynamics of Belief and Value Computations Guiding Strategic Social Decisions" We use EEG and computational modeling (combining learning + DDM) to explain participants' choices, RT, and neural signals in a strategic game. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Huge congratulations to the CCP’s newest PhDs! 🎓🎉 We are so proud of all your hard work, dedication, and accomplishments. Thrilled to see the incredible things you’ll do next! 🧠✨

🚨🚨 The Social Learning and Decisions Lab is hiring! 🚨🚨 We're looking for a postbacc project coordinator/research assistant to join our team this summer. More details about the position and how to apply here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ySeA... Please share widely and reach out with any questions!

In NYC early? Join us on Wednesday, April 29th for a pre-SOBP happy hour ✨ Connect with fellow attendees and faculty, meet new people, and get ready for an exciting week! RSVP for location and details: www.eventbrite.com/e/1984134906...

How do exclusion and adversity drive social learning in adolescence? Here, @drjk.bsky.social, Lyn Ellett and I show that social exclusion reduces adolescent belief flexibility about others at a later point in time, and reduces the ability to generalise from social cues - 🧵 1/5

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers