Timothy Verstynen

Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Timothy Verstynen's research focuses on how our brains allow us to explore our environments and learn from experience.

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Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Timothy Verstynen's research focuses on how our brains allow us to explore our environments and learn from experience, with the goal of translating these findings from neuroscience to artificial intelligence. He is an expert in multiple neuroimaging methods, psychophysics, computational modeling, and experimental design. He has experience running startups (co-founder of NeuroScouting LLC), writing popular science books (Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?), press appearances (featured in the Fastball documentary), as well as building and running neuroimaging centers (as co-director of the CMU-Pitt Brain Imaging Data Generation & Education (BRIDGE) Center).

Areas of Expertise

Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Computational
Learning Science

Media Appearances

High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

Retraction Watch  online

2023-04-06

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said.

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The Real Face of Cancel Culture

Inside Higher Ed  online

2023-03-10

Criticism is not canceling, and the victim narrative is particularly pernicious in light of attacks on academics and teachers at home and abroad, Timothy Verstynen writes.

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How nutritious are brains? Scientific answers on how zombies operate

The Washington Post  online

2022-10-25

Why is that? Perhaps because they’ve lost function in key parts of their rapidly decaying brains, said Carnegie Mellon cognitive neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen, co-author of “Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?”

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Social

Industry Expertise

Research

Accomplishments

WEF Young Scientist

2017

NSF CAREER Award

2014

Education

University of California at Berkeley

Ph.D.

Brain & Behavior

2006

University of New Mexico

B.A.

Psychology

2001

Articles

Overfitting to ‘predict’suicidal ideation

Nature Human Behaviour

2023

Unlike many areas of medicine, the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology suffer from a critical lack of ability to directly measure the internal processes that are the root of most psychiatric disorders 1. Instead, these fields rely on indirect assessments, via verbal report or behavioural analyses, that can often be unreliable indicators of internal thoughts and experiences.

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Competing neural representations of choice shape evidence accumulation in humans

bioRxiv

2022

Changing your mind requires shifting the way streams of information lead to a decision. Using in silico experiments we show how the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic (CBGT) circuits can feasibly implement shifts in the evidence accumulation process. When action contingencies change, dopaminergic plasticity redirects the balance of power, both within and between action representations, to divert the flow of evidence from one option to another.

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Identifying control ensembles for information processing within the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuit

PLOS Computational Biology

2022

In situations featuring uncertainty about action-reward contingencies, mammals can flexibly adopt strategies for decision-making that are tuned in response to environmental changes. Although the cortico-basal ganglia thalamic (CBGT) network has been identified as contributing to the decision-making process, it features a complex synaptic architecture, comprised of multiple feed-forward, reciprocal, and feedback pathways, that complicate efforts to elucidate the roles of specific CBGT populations in the process by which evidence is accumulated and influences behavior.

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