A stellar new developmental cog neuro lab with the coolest lab name and PI. Congrats to Tess and all her future trainees!!!

Delighted to share that I’ve been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for #InfantNeuroAI The project will investigate how human infants learn to understand the visual world, by combining awake infant neuroimaging (fMRI and OPM-MEG) with computational models from AI.

This is one of the coolest things the FIT’NG society does: gather a bunch of scientists in a room to discuss big questions and unsolved problems in our field. If you are attending FIT’NG (or thinking of extending your stay after ICIS…), I highly recommend signing up!

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Woohoo!!

With so many eyes on Pittsburgh during the NFL Draft this weekend, it feels like a fitting moment to share some personal news — I'm excited to be joining the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2027!

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

New paper alert🚨 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Two takeaways. First, 2- to 4-year-olds can use a process called second-order correlation (SOC) learning -- e.g., A & B go together and B & C go together, then A and C go together -- in a category context to make causal inferences.

Beautiful and impressive work from Cliona and team on visual development — with awake 2 month olds in the MRI scanner (!!)

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

We can use past experience to make predictions about the future. How do predictions affect our memory for the present? My own work (tinyurl.com/42kyukch) suggests that predictions compete with memory. But other recent work (tinyurl.com/2ekd4wr6) found the opposite--cooperation! What's going on here?

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath. p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

This project is trying to raise science awareness by doing short videos about cancelled research — including mine.

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Join us on Thursday, December 4th at 10am EST (7am PST, 3pm GMT) for our next free Functional Analysis Fall event: Brain age modeling with fetal and neonatal neuroimaging data, featuring @huilisun.bsky.social and Dr. Kiho Im! Register at: tinyurl.com/FAF3brainage

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🥳 So pleased to share our new publication: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... The whole @kinderstudien.bsky.social lab got together to do a little scientific retreat last year and this is the result - a truly developmental perspective on the phenomenon of interpersonal neural synchrony 🧠🧠 👨‍🍼👩‍🍼

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

Inspiring Q and A with Dick Aslin! Look for more such content over the next few months from @psychscience.bsky.social www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Join us on Tuesday, November 18th at 11:00am EST for our next free Functional Analysis Fall event: Encoding Models for Understanding High-Level Representations in Early Development, featuring Dr. Freddy Kamps and Dr. Sarah Jessen! Register at: tinyurl.com/fitngFAF2rep...

🚨 New preprint on the first infant 7T MRI project in North America! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We showcase that by leveraging 7T for infants, we can improve data quality and thereby facilitate precision functional mapping in early development.

Join us on Monday, November 3rd at 12:00pm EST for our free Functional Analysis Fall event: Functional alignment as a tool to improve and expand your analyses with FIT data, featuring @camerontellis.bsky.social Register at: tinyurl.com/fitngFAF

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

Woohoo!! Excited for this free (!) virtual talk series on novel ways to analyse your fetal/infant/toddler neuroimaging data! First talk on Monday 🍂🍁

Im very excited about this work out from our recent infant ssVEP study! Led by postdoc Maeve Boylan! After infants learn about objects while reading a book with a parent, their brains prioritize the processing of familiarity. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

"We hope to inspire curiosity ... prompting researchers to uncover why children experience the world so distinctively and what this reveals about cognitive development." @jocn.bsky.social's November issue presents a special focus on the development of event segmentation: #NeuroSky #cognition

thrilled to share our preprint on false memories in naturalistic recollection! Distinct paths to false memory revealed in hundreds of narrative recalls paper: doi.org/10.31234/osf... w/ phoebehc.bsky.social (co-first) Vy A. Vo @davidpoeppel.bsky.social @toddgureckis.bsky.social thread below 👇

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨! I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

The FIT'NG Trainee Committee is excited to be recruiting new members! It’s a great way to: ✨ Build your network ✨ Gain leadership experience ✨ Shape programming for trainees across the society Interested? Fill out our form by September 23rd: tinyurl.com/TraineeCommi...

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org

Is precision functional brain imaging in babies possible? YES! We show this in not one but two new preprints out of WashU and @umn-midb.bsky.social! 1️⃣: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 2️⃣: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🐣👶🧠

It's been a great FIT'NG so far 🧠👶🏻 I'm always excited to present the work from the amazing FOUNDCOG team, and chat all things developmental cog comp neuro. Feel free to reach out to me or find me on the last day tomorrow!

Delve into the developing brain at "Back to Basics: Components & Mechanisms of Memory Development." From infant fMRI to rodent studies on amnesia, this symposium explores how the memory network, especially the hippocampus, changes across the lifespan. Join us! #FluxCongress2025

It’s been such an inspiring week at #flux2025 in the beautiful city of Dublin! Now the excitement continues with #FITNG2025 🧠💚

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall. Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Game on.

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! Come learn about a project combining many of my favorite interests - naturalistic neuroimaging, development, & manifold learning (of course). Catch me at poster C181 on Fri - “Intrinsic dimensionality of brain activity manifolds across tasks and development”

Every active shooter situation is a failure of our system. Hurts deeply when it’s a place you love.

Lazarus et al. (2025): A simple act with a lasting impact: Holding babies skin-to-skin in the NICU helped support their development and reduced differences linked to family income. Early touch can be a powerful way to promote equity from the very start #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...