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Brandon Forys

@brandonforys.com
98 followers 357 following 36 posts

PhD, UBC Psychology (MCLab, BAR Lab). Incoming postdoc at University of Oxford (Exp. Psych). fMRI methods, choices and thoughts about cognitive effort. Opinions my own.

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Reposted by Brandon Forys
Dan Handwerker @danielhandwerker.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
@enekourunuela.com just put together a simple and fast search of #OHBM2026 content at me-ica.github.io/ohbm-2026-mu... (Select "All posters" for more than just multi-echo). 1/2
me-ica.github.io
OHBM 2026 abstracts
An unofficial community index of OHBM 2026 posters — focused on multi-echo fMRI, but searchable across the whole meeting. Filter by day and method, browse every poster, and read abstracts in place.
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Dani Palombo @danipalombo.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
1 more week to register for NOWCAM. visit. nowcam.org for details.
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Dani Palombo @danipalombo.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
My first ISRW. Great meeting! CC: UBC grads @omransafi.com @brandonforys.com
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Omran K. Safi @omransafi.com · 06/03/2026
Time isn’t just a clock on the wall — it’s how you remember it! Come see me at poster session B (B67) on Sunday morning if you’re interested in how segmenting in space affects how we remember time! Here’s sneak peek of the novel VR paradigm we used. #CNS2026 youtube.com/shorts/2y6Jp...
youtube.com
Virtual Reality Events
YouTube video by OS
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 06/03/2026
Many great talks and discussions on now at the International Sleep Replay Workshop before #CNS2026! I'm also presenting my work on motivational factors predicting choices given rewards, losses, and shifting cognitive effort demands at CNS (D126, Monday 8-10 AM). Please come by if you are there!
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 06/12/2025
CNS 2026! Be sure to register - it will be great to see so many cognitive science and neuroscience folks coming to Vancouver. And be sure to also check out the affiliated International Sleep Replay Workshop: isrw.bio.uci.edu
isrw.bio.uci.edu
International Sleep Replay Workshop – International Sleep Replay Workshop
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Beck Todd @beckety.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
1. Media coverage of a new paper by @ryantomm.bsky.social w @brandonforys.com, @dr-stan.bsky.social et al. Building on Stan’s rodent work, Ryan found that > depression levels were associated w reduced capacity to learn to actively button-press to avoid a nasty sound www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...
medscape.com
Depression Curbs Ability to Actively Avoid Unpleasant Events
Depression in young patients is linked to difficulty in taking action to avoid something unpleasant, while the ability to withdraw and not act remains intact.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 29/08/2025
For >5 years, the International Sleep Replay Workshops have brought together scientists studying sleep & memory. The next ISRW will be on March 6th in Vancouver (before @CogNeuroNews). Follow the link for details + to join the mailing list - see you there! isrw.bio.uci.edu
isrw.bio.uci.edu
International Sleep Replay Workshop – Join us for the virtual ISRW-IV in December 2024!
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Reposted by Brandon Forys
Dan Handwerker @danielhandwerker.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
The recording of yesterday's multi-echo fMRI users meeting is now up! youtu.be/LUyvXA81AEs?... @enekourunuela.com @tsalo.bsky.social
youtu.be
Multi-echo fMRI users meeting - May 27th 2025
YouTube video by Multi-Echo fMRI
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Beck Todd @beckety.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
I just published a new substack post focusing on "holding in personhood." Stefanie Blain-Moraes, Naomi Askenazi, & Ariane Boulet describe their work using dance, music, and technology to hold people in relationship when communication channels are restricted: open.substack.com/pub/becketto...
open.substack.com
Holding in Personhood
Oh, the days, they waste away, like an unplayed game.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 27/03/2025
Thank you!
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 25/03/2025
So wonderful to be a part of this awesome meeting - thanks @danielhandwerker.bsky.social! If you're interested in working with multi-echo and tedana, be sure to join these monthly meetings.
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗹𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 "theoretical framework to analyse individual variability in biological and artificial systems that perform flexible decision-making tasks" Looks like must read! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 25/03/2025
Very interesting, thanks for sharing @beckety.bsky.social!
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Reposted by Brandon Forys
UBC Psychology @psych.ubc.ca · 11/02/2025
Interesting🧵⤵️
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 07/02/2025
Thanks for sharing! These are so comprehensive and I'll definitely have to peruse these as potential measures for future studies.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 07/02/2025
A bit of an older scale (could be used as a secondary measure), but in our group we've been using the Need for Cognition scale to see whether preferences for everyday cognitive control strategies captures choices of high vs. low cognitive effort demands in the lab: psycnet.apa.org/record/1982-...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/01/2025
An image-computable model of speeded decision-making - our latest in @elife.bsky.social combining a CNN with a response time model. TL/DR: Training to reproduce human RTs results in different kinds of representations versus purely task-optimized training.
elifesciences.org
An image-computable model of speeded decision-making
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Thomas Yeo @bttyeo.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula... The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 16/01/2025
Hahah that is how it ended up indeed!
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Dani Palombo @danipalombo.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Cool new paper from Brandon Forys et al. Congrats! [Bonus: the figure in the paper suggests that the "newer" (and nicer) building is where my lab is. 😀]
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
Thanks for reading along! Thanks to Alan Kingstone, @beckety.bsky.social, and Emily Qi for all of their support on this project, as well as NSERC and @ubcpsych.bsky.social!
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
These results could inform future conversations on how to create built environments that are amenable to pleasant experiences, and emphasize the important of context when interpreting stimuli both inside and outside the lab.
media.tenor.com
a waterfall is surrounded by trees in a forest
ALT: a waterfall is surrounded by trees in a forest
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
What's the significance of these findings? They suggest that, even while controlling for how participants navigated to the space, their familiarity with the space, and the sound's identity, the features of our environment can greatly shift how we interpret and respond to everyday sounds.
media.tenor.com
a person is standing in an empty room with the words `` me in my room '' written on the bottom .
ALT: a person is standing in an empty room with the words `` me in my room '' written on the bottom .
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
Nevertheless, bipolar sound ratings and the sentiment of participants' descriptions of how they felt about the sound were highly correlated. Taken together, these findings suggest a role for the features of built environments in impacting how we rate and appraise everyday sounds.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
We found that participants rated the same sounds as less pleasant when they were presented in a smaller room with no natural lighting (Old site). However, they didn't use more negatively valenced language when describing the sounds they heard at the Old vs. the New site.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
To answer this question, we gave participants a series of everyday sounds (dogs barking, phone ringing, etc.) in either a small lab room with no natural light (Old; A) or a larger space with natural lighting (New; B). We asked them to rate and describe the sound's pleasantness or unpleasantness.
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
Furthermore, spaces with distinct features can promote different behaviours. For example, sounds heard in a small, dark room could be more threatening than those heard in a large, well-lit room. But we do not know the extent to which these contextual features impact how we rate everyday stimuli.
media.tenor.com
a picture of a bedroom with a bed and chairs
ALT: a picture of a bedroom with a bed and chairs
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
The features of one's environment can prime us to interpret experiences in that environment in different ways. In this way, even an everyday sound presented in an unpleasant environment could be rated as unpleasant, or aversive.
media.tenor.com
a black and white cat is laying on the floor in a hallway
ALT: a black and white cat is laying on the floor in a hallway
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
Imagine yourself in a dark building with narrow hallways. You hear a dog barking. You're likely to rate this sound as being more unpleasant compared to if you heard this sound in an airy, well-lit space. The meaning of sounds can be easily misinterpreted based on past experiences with them.
media.tenor.com
a small white dog wearing a pink collar with a name tag on it
ALT: a small white dog wearing a pink collar with a name tag on it
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/01/2025
Why can sounds like dogs barking or a phone ringing sound pleasant in some situations, but very unpleasant in others? We explored this question in our new paper out now in @plosone.org: doi.org/10.1371/jour... (a thread):
doi.org
Hear it here: Built environments predict ratings and descriptions of ambiguous sounds
The built environments we move through are a filter for the stimuli we experience. If we are in a darker or a lighter room or space, a neutrally valenced sound could be perceived as more unpleasant or...
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 08/01/2025
Yesterday, I taught the first class of the first undergrad course I'm teaching - cognitive neuroscience - and it was so exciting to see so many students from a variety of academic backgrounds coming together. It looks like it will be a great semester with this talented group!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 08/01/2025
A related question: I would really like to incorporate LLMs into the class. Does anyone have good examples of how they have used them in graduate teaching?
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 11/12/2024
Great talk by @ar0mcintosh.bsky.social at #UBC on the amazing work being done with the Virtual Brain to model and understand how brain activity - and corresponding network - shift with aging. A very powerful tool!
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 28/11/2024
I know many people use VSCode or similar for fMRI analysis scripting, but I’ve really come to like PyCharm - good SFTP interface for working with compute clusters, Copilot inline for code checking, etc. I just wish it could handle remote Jupyter notebook mounting a little more nicely…random thought!
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Reposted by Brandon Forys
OpenNeuro.org @openneuro.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
OpenNeuro.org is now on Bluesky! Follow us for project updates and exciting new datasets.
openneuro.org
OpenNeuro
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Beck Todd @beckety.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
With so many new people flooding onto Blue Sky I thought I'd re-post this just-out cognitive neuroscience paper from my lab - the fruit of many years and much labour.
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Quentin Huys @docqhuys.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
How do DA and 5HT drugs alter reinforcement learning? Join us next Wednesday for talks by @anahitm.bsky.social, Diego Pizzagalli, Michael Browning, Roshan Cools, Emma Robinson, Yael Niv, Cath Harmer, Isabel Berwian, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social and Anne Collins. Links etc: acplab.org/2024/11/15/r...
acplab.org
RELMED Workshop 20th Nov 2024 – Applied Computational Psychiatry Lab
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 15/11/2024
👋 I’m Brandon, a PhD student at UBC Psychology with @beckety.bsky.social and Alan Kingstone. I investigate factors driving our choices in cognitive effort + features of our environment that affect how we interpret everyday stimuli, as well as the neural representations of avoidance and reward.
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Chris Markiewicz @markiewicz.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Announcing: BIDS Validator 2.0 This is a complete rewrite to base the validator on the declarative BIDS schema. Most importantly, this validator boasts long-awaited support for BIDS Derivative datasets. bids-standard.github.io/bids-validat... #BIDS #BrainImagingDataStructure
bids-standard.github.io
BIDS Validator
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 14/11/2024
Thanks for the post @beckety.bsky.social - well said and excited to see this out at long last!
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Beck Todd @beckety.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
New substack post. I interview entrepreneur & special effects producer Philipp Wolf on his strengths-based approach to neurdivergence, his midlife autism diagnosis, and swyvl, his company designing XR to share the experience of neurodivergent nervous systems: open.substack.com/pub/becketto...
open.substack.com
Simulating neurodiversity
An interview with Philipp Wolf
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Beck Todd @beckety.bsky.social · 21/09/2024
I just published a new substack post on dancing with neurodiversity. If you like it please subscribe (for free). open.substack.com/pub/becketto...
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
Thank you to Drs. Rebecca Todd @beckety.bsky.social, Alan Kingstone, and Catharine Winstanley for your support on this project! Thanks also to Alex Terpstra, Rita Jin, and Claire Hales for their input and NSERC for their support! (11)
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
Our findings suggest that cognitive effort decisions could be driven more by one’s cognitive effort ability than by motivational factors like depression or chronic stress, and broadly replicate findings from similar rodent cognitive effort tasks (yay for translation!) (10)
media.tenor.com
Good Brain GIF
ALT: Good Brain GIF
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
Fitting our results with a drift diffusion model, we found that participants who chose more high effort trials were more biased than low effort preference participants towards rapidly selecting high effort trials (higher drift rate and starting point). (9)
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
Interestingly, participants who chose more high effort trials (high effort motivation group) took longer to select low effort trials - potentially indicating that they were spending longer discounting reward when the effort cost was too high. (8)
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
We found that only short term working memory ability predicted whether participants chose substantially more high effort vs. low effort trials. Depression, chronic stress, and reward anticipation levels did not predict effort choices. (7)
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
...In the choice task, they would choose an easier or harder cognitive effort task (having to encode fewer or more shapes) on each trial. Harder trials gave more points towards a monetary reward; easier trials gave fewer points. (6)
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Brandon Forys @brandonforys.com · 12/06/2024
Following a reward anticipation task, participants looked at sets of shapes on screen and judged whether a new shape differed in colour from the original shape in that position. Their short term memory performance in this task determined the next task's difficulty... (5)
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