Toby Wise

✨New PhD Position!✨ Come and work with us on understanding cognition with a mix of cognitive modelling and ultrasound neuromodulation! More info on the lab & position: mic-lab.de/positions/ph... Official job ad: tinyurl.com/miclab-phd 🙏Please RT - deadline is Oct 14 ‼️

What if we stopped building a new theory for every experiment and started building theories that explain them all? We built CORE, a model that combines a small set of computational principles to explain human behavior across many tasks. A first step toward a radically different cognitive science.

Happy to say this is now published @natcomms.nature.com 🎉 Across 2 task types, 2 countries, and 3 samples we find the corpus callosum is important for metacognitive efficiency. We also show this effect is unlikely to be explained by perceptual or IQ difficulties. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

🚨New preprint with Fei Dai, @hanqizhou.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.social We extend empowerment (control over external states) by turning it inward. *Representational empowerment* asks which representations a learner should acquire and curate to solve future problems arxiv.org/abs/2609.02322

🚨 💫 💥 Interested in PhD / Postdoc opportunities in computational psychiatry / cognitive neuroscience? My lab at University College Dublin 🇮🇪 is currently accepting expressions of interest for internally funded PhD/Postdoc applications for positions starting in September 2027 (!). 1/

Check out our new Trends In Cognitive Science paper on mechanisms of cognitive flexibility - a broad collaborative piece with Florian Bähner, Ali Hummos, Sarah Oh, Kai Sandbrink, and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New lab preprint! Computational psychiatry assumes anxiety arises from domain-general biases. We argue this is mistargeted: trait anxiety is generated by person-specific world models, which requires a fundamentally different approach to task design. 🧵 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/98ktg_v3

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to innovate at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. 📍Munich 📅Flexible start: 10/2026–03/2027 ⏳Full consideration by 14/08/2026 💼Funded for 2 years, extension possible Discover, grow, collaborate, eat cake.

Can't wait for #cogsci2026 in Rio 🇧🇷! Check out some of the exciting new work this year by the hmc-lab.com and collaborators. Sadly, @davidnagy.bsky.social won't be attending due to illness, so I'll be subbing in to help out with the framing-the-problem.github.io/cogsci2026.h... workshop.

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 🔽

We're excited to share the lab's findings at #Cpconf See 🧵 below & come by! C71 + poster spotlight! @adipizanti.bsky.social finds overthinking (using MB planning more effortfully without any benefit) is related to worry in 2 large datasets, and explains it with a new DYNA + internal checking model:

📣Going to #cpconf? Come see @luiantaverra.bsky.social A2 Tue 9am, Bidirectional relationship between aversive beliefs + avoidance & its association with transdiagnostic symptoms @alexnitsch.bsky.social B43 Wed 3:15pm, The role of aversive replay in avoidance behaviors in psychiatric disorders

🌟 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 🔁

🎉 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

🚨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

📝 New preprint (co-led with Hannah Hamling as her NYU honors thesis!) 📝 🧠 Do adolescents learn differently in volatile versus stable environments? 🧠 Yes, and they seem to adapt their learning computations to a greater extent than adults! 😮 🤔 Preprint for deets (+ 👁️ data) osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interested in human replay and solid methods? Jointly with @skjerns.de we're releasing a benchmark dataset with known ground-truth neural sequences in MEG & fMRI, for developing & validating replay methods. First test: existing methods show similar effect sizes, but room to improve shorturl.at/6TgIr

🌵🏜️🌵 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...

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

New preprint from the work of my placement and final year of undergrad! 🚨 We investigated the applicability of normative modelling to large-scale, gamified cognitive data, and explored how corresponding extreme deviations from the norm relate to transdiagnostic compulsivity. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Some really brilliant work in this preprint from @luiantaverra.bsky.social - featuring potentially the most aversive task I've ever worked with

🚨🚨 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!

🚨 Our lab's first paper is published! The claim: anxiety distorts not just what looks threatening, but the task models people use to plan. 🧵 This tiny study provides preliminary support that world model variation is critical to explaining anxiety. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I’m excited to share our new preprint: A Multi-Level Examination of How Hostility Unfolds During Online Argumentation. osf.io/preprints/ps... This is the first paper to examine how toxicity manifests from belief differences and how they are represented in the human brain.

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

Can we really measure replay in humans using MEG with current methods? In our most recent paper we simulated replay under realistic conditions via a novel hybrid approach with astonishing results. we're delighted that it has now been published @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/108...

📣🔥 Early bird registration now open for 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference cpconf.org at Yale July 14-16. Late-breaking abstracts now open (deadline: May 8) Trainee pre-conference (July 13) registration open (free!) See you in New Haven! #CPConf2026

📣 So happy to share with you the results of my main PhD study, where two human predators worked together to hunt a human prey in Minecraft, and had their brains scanned simultaneously using fNIRS 🎮🧠 We find that the brains of the predators are synchronised in the prefrontal cortex during hunting! 💡

🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊 In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.

Congrats to Navid on his new paper in Molecular Psychiatry! Computational modeling found that learning rates and uncertainty sensitivity could distinguish between affective disorders and substance use disorders. Forgetting rate was instead affected transdiagnostically. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Last week to apply for a 3 year postdoc with me and @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, embedded in theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de Focus is on developing innovative experiments and computational models to understand social & cultural learning. Deadline is March 30th 👉 hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni...

How do we know that things we do will have the outcomes we expect? We chat to @tobywise.bsky.social about his research into the relationship between compulsivity and uncertainty. Go give it a listen! #BrainAwarenessWeek open.spotify.com/episode/2hyj...

💥New paper out! Why do some people generalise threat more than others? We show that anxious people generalise more strongly, even after accounting for perceptual mistakes. A huge (!) thanks to @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social and @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking: Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods? (alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Last week to apply for a 3yr postdoc with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself. Deadline is March 15th hmc-lab.com/TAMPostdoc.h...

Some nice coverage here of our study published in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social CNNI on structure learning and uncertainty in compulsivity 📃 Paper available here - www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...

Come work with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself! 3 yr Postdoc on category learning w/ structured, program-like representations. Funded by the www.theadaptivemind.de Excellence Cluster! Deadline is Mar 15th, details 👇 Please share widely 🙏

🚨 JOB alert: 📢 We are looking for a PhD student to work on our international @wellcometrust.bsky.social project on information gathering in OCD and Schizophrenia! If you have a background in computational psychiatry / neuroimnaging and speak German, apply here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Finally out!! This paper comes from my undergrad work and marks my very first fMRI project. Here we use mouse tracking and fMRI to show how repeated moral decisions are shaped by the trade-off between reward and consistency, and how the brain adapts to this conflict over time.

🚨Four postdoc positions at the #ReasonableAI excellence cluster @tuda.bsky.social! jobs.rhein-main-universitaeten.de/rmu/job/52370 Please share widely 🙏

Our latest work on the neurobiology of subjective emotional experience in anxiety is out now in SCAN 🧠 Brief summary below 👇 doi.org/10.1093/scan...

🌟 Job alert! We are looking for a postdoc to join a multidisciplinary research team working on the Individually Measured Phenotypes to Advance Computational Translation at Yale (IMPACT-Y) study. postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)