Tangible rewards are known to sharpen visual processing of associated objects. Tomić et al. show that an internal sense of confidence—acting as an intrinsic reward—similarly biases attention,…

Scientific Reports - Cognitive offloading weakens the neural representation of to-be-remembered information

Phasic reward prediction signals in ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA) neurons and basal forebrain (BF) noncholinergic bursting neurons are remarkably similar despite the distinct circuit…

Action potentials are brief electrical impulses that form the mechanistic basis for how neurons communicate. While it is well known that the shape of action potentials can differ across neurons, one f...

Dorsal and ventral noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus form topographic subpopulations whose projection patterns and activity encode choice switching, reward-prediction errors and disregard o...

The genomic regions regulating gene expression are often themselves transcribed into a variety of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). However, the regulatory roles of this noncoding transcription remain largely unknown. By using live imaging, we reveal that the ...

I use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.

Chericoni et al. show that neurons in the human hippocampus track the positions of multiple agents in a simple pursuit-based video game. They identified place codes for each agent and for gaze. The co...

Through statistical learning, people extract patterns from the environment to predict future events. In a longitudinal study, the authors show that statistical learning declines with age and that high...

Recursive application of the law of total variance decomposes the marginal variance of an outcome into components attributed to explanatory variables and a residual component. The resulting decomposit...

People are effort-averse in most situations but can exert effort for little reward when progressing towards goals. Here, the authors show that under deadline pressure people become effort-seeking whil...

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

This frontostriatal neural network model links the source of working memory capacity limitations to challenges in learning resource management, and mitigates this challenge by learning a 'chunking' st...

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