Shawn Rhoads
Assistant Professor @ ISMMS
NIH Director's Early Independence Awardee
Lindau Nobel Laureate Young Scientist
PI @ sinclaboratory.com
Using computational models, fMRI, & intracranial EEG to study social inference, learning, empathy, loneliness, & well-being
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsHybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsVery 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)
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🌟 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...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsBasic Experimental Studies in Humans (BESH) Will No Longer Be Considered Clinical Trials by the NIH grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsApplications for NeuroHackademy 2026 are now open! This is a two-week NIH-funded summer experience that combines neuroimaging and data science in a summer school / experiential hackathon: neurohackademy.org/apply/ @uwpsychology.bsky.social @uwescience.bsky.social
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsVery happy to see this out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com - kudos to @magdadelrio.bsky.social who has led this work and nicely brought together data from two very different studies! article is here: doi.org/10.1038/s415... and PDF is here: rdcu.be/eZ27x
- New preprint from my postdoc with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social at the MPC! TL;DR: there is a strong recency bias in information gathering and it is attenuated in people on the #OCD spectrum - a possible mechanism for #indecisiveness 🤔 Paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below...
- Delighted to be featured in @thetransmitter.bsky.social's Liftoff series: bit.ly/3ZkMQl8 Learn more about our lab's work at the intersection of social interaction, neural computation, & mental health. Reach out if you are interested in collaborating or becoming involved! sinclaboratory.com
- In this month’s “Liftoff,” @shawnrhoadsphd.com talks about how he’ll implement hackathons to foster community in his lab, and @zurisullivan.bsky.social shares how weekly discussions about unfamiliar topics can encourage curiosity in a lab. bit.ly/3ZkMQl8 By @franciscorr25.bsky.social #neuroskyence
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsThis month’s newsletter features a Q&A with @ubadahsabbagh.com on his transition from neuroscience to a biotech firm. Plus, read about @shawnrhoadsphd.com and @zurisullivan.bsky.social’s new labs, job opportunities and more. Sign up for the 'Launch' newsletter. www.thetransmitter.org/newsletters-...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsIn this month’s “Liftoff,” @shawnrhoadsphd.com talks about how he’ll implement hackathons to foster community in his lab, and @zurisullivan.bsky.social shares how weekly discussions about unfamiliar topics can encourage curiosity in a lab. bit.ly/3ZkMQl8 By @franciscorr25.bsky.social #neuroskyence
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsWe’re launching a bi-weekly m-Path blog on #ESM / #EMA measurement, new papers & showcases. 🗓️ Every 2 weeks (Wed). First up: item quality. A paper by @gudruneisele.bsky.social introduces ESM-Q: a consensus checklist for good momentary items. 👉 Read the blog: blog.m-path.io/blog/our-blo...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsI'm looking to hire a postgraduate research associate in Computational Psychiatry for my new lab at Yale. Please see link below for details & help RT 🙏 postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...
- Thrilled to be at #ACNP2026 this week! 🏝️😎 If you are interested in computational modeling of social cognition for mental health, I'd love to connect and nerd out! Also excited to share the latest from my new Social Interaction & Neural Computation Lab: sinclaboratory.com
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsWith 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.
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsWhat if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️ In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.
- New study by @xrmasiso.bsky.social et al shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsThis 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!
- Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🧵 If you're looking for a fully funded PhD or Postdoc in Computational Psychiatry, please reach out! We are expanding the lab and tackling some big questions. Here is a thread on what we are currently up to: 👇
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsSo honored to join the other exceptional social psych scholars in this forthcoming issue of PIBBS! 🧠📊 Our paper examines how insights from social neuroscience can inform better public policy @fabbs.org @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsNew job alert 💫 We’re hiring a 3-year postdoc for the NEPTUNE project to study the causal mechanisms of paranoia and social learning. Work with us on experimental psychopharmacology (THC), social cognition, and psychosis 🧑🔬 Apply here: lnkd.in/gQqnNvjR](my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...) Please RT :)
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsOfficially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsDelighted to share our new Perspective article @natrevneuro.nature.com, led by the great @edoardochidichimo.bsky.social : "Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination". With @loopyluppi.bsky.social, Pedro Mediano, @introspection.bsky.social, Victoria Leong and Richard Bethlehem.
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsIn this systematic review, Kabotyanski and colleagues summarize how intracranial neural biomarkers relate to psychiatric symptoms and can guide the development of closed-loop neuromodulatory therapies, emphasizing the need to consider disorder-specific time constants for effective implementation.
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 - www.cpconf.org @robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop More info to come soon!
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsWe are thrilled to announce that the preliminary program for the 2026 GRC on the Frontal Cortex is now live! www.grc.org/frontal-cort... Registration is now open for both the GRC and our GRS, chaired by @albitc.bsky.social and @jorge-miranda.bsky.social!
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsAnd the next step? Full voxel-level modeling. Recent numerical advances cracked the scalability barrier. Voxel-level hierarchical modeling is now feasible, revealing just how punishing traditional multiple-comparison adjustments really are. arxiv.org/abs/2511.12825
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsThat’s a wrap on #NYCPW2025! Huge thank you to our instructors and incredible participants for an inspiring, engaging, and energizing three days. Your curiosity and collaboration made this workshop a success. 🙌🧠✨
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsOur latest hyperscanning study tracks how neural coupling unfolds during genuine conversation and how it differs from simply reading scripted dialogue: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsOur next paper on comparing dynamical systems (with special interest to artificial and biological neural networks) is out!! Joint work with @annhuang42.bsky.social , as well as @satpreetsingh.bsky.social , @leokoz8.bsky.social , Ila Fiete, and @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social : arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25943
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsSuper pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!
- 🧪Preprint! How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions. A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches. A 🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025... With @emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsExcited to share our manuscript about BrainEffeX, a tool for exploring fMRI effect sizes. Includes why we made it, how to use it + contribute, and how we made it. @sneuroble.bsky.social @psychonetrics.bsky.social @alexkfischbach.bsky.social @nichols.bsky.social @dscheinost.bsky.social & MINDS Lab
- Shearer et al. introduce an interactive web application for exploring fMRI effect maps: doi.org/10.52294/001... @halleeshearer.bsky.social @sneuroble.bsky.social @ohbmossig.bsky.social #OpenDatasets #SpecialIssue
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads👉 Saren Seeley continues our Day 3 with a discussion on Study Design & Replicability #NYCPW2025
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads@lauraaberner.bsky.social started Day 3 of #NYCPW2025 by helping the group map out their own clinically relevant questions in computational psychiatry. 🧭 🧠
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads💭Closing out Day 2 of #NYCPW2025 with Ülgen Kılıç's talk on Network Theory in Psychiatry and some hands-on project work! 🙌
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsNext up, @bshev.bsky.social inspired some group discussion on Drift Diffusion modeling during #NYCPW2025 Day 2!🗣️📊
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🌎 New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com 🌍 doi.org/10.1038/s442... There is an urgent need to choose behaviours that mitigate climate change, but these are often more effortful. Can we increase pro-environmental motivation? Joint w/ Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta & amazing international team 👇🧵
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads☀️ Good morning #NYCPW2025 Day 2! @shawnrhoadsphd.com starting strong with a tutorial on fitting computational models to behavioral data!
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads✨ Program Manager Job Alert ✨ Join our Mount Sinai team in NYC to steer a multi-institutional neuroscience initiative aimed at understanding Bipolar Disorder. If you’re passionate about science, data & impact we’d love to hear from you! Learn More & Apply 👇 careers.mountsinai.org/jobs/3032351...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsWrapping up Day 1 of #NYCPW2025 with @neurokim.bsky.social using LLMs for cognitive model discovery. Excited to end the day with some project brainstorming! 💡🧠
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads📣Up next at the 2025 New York Computational Psychiatry Workshop: @vincgfiore.bsky.social on Bayesian Inference! #NYCPW2025 📊
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🙌 @angelaradulescu.bsky.social kicking off Day 1 of #NYCPW2025 with a tutorial on Reinforcement Learning!
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238 👇
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsIntroducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsUnderstanding and explaining differences across minds in social interaction: insights from social neuroscience and clinical psychiatry link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsVery excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪 1/12
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsMany prosocial & antisocial behaviors simultaneously impact both ourselves & others. In order to guide future choices, how do people learn that their behavior has resulted in benefits/harm to themselves and/or someone else? @shawnrhoadsphd.com Nature Communications 👉 nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsThrilled to share a new paper in @jamapsychiatry.com on path asymmetry in complex dynamic systems of psychopathology! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... With amazing collaborators @tfblanken.bsky.social, Han van der Maas, & Denny Borsboom 🥳
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsOur new paper is out! It offers a tool to assess collinearity impact on contrast estimates *and* uses simulations + MID data to show how common collinearity avoidance strategies can bias results. Huge thanks to @russpoldrack.org , M Demidenko, and the ABCD folks. 🔗 direct.mit.edu/imag/article...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsNew preprint by @annalinavmayer.bsky.social and team members together with @tobikube.bsky.social 💫 „Self-esteem modulates beneficial causal attributions in the formation of novel self-beliefs“ #affectedbeliefs #sociallearning #beliefformation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads🚨 New preprint 🚨 Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory? In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions. 🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads
Thrilled to be part of this fantastic new project led by @ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social and supported by @bipolardiscoveries.org. Grateful to collaborate with an outstanding team — Dr. Helen Mayberg, Dr. James Murrough and others — and looking forward to the work ahead!- PRESS RELEASE! @mountsinainyc.bsky.social receives $4.5 million @bipolardiscoveries.org grant! Led by @ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social, team will investigate neural mechanisms underlying #BipolarDisorder & pioneer novel neuromodulation-based treatment strategies 👉 www.mountsinai.org/about/newsro...
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsNew release of PowerLMM.js! Browser-based power analysis for longitudinal models with dropout. Now includes: - Power analysis summary report - Reproducible & shareable configs (URL/JSON) - Calculations validated against R - Hypothesis region visualization powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com
- Reposted by Shawn RhoadsPRESS RELEASE! @mountsinainyc.bsky.social receives $4.5 million @bipolardiscoveries.org grant! Led by @ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social, team will investigate neural mechanisms underlying #BipolarDisorder & pioneer novel neuromodulation-based treatment strategies 👉 www.mountsinai.org/about/newsro...
- Reposted by Shawn Rhoads📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly 🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ
