New paper: across 3 EEG experiments, we examined how do we edit WM at test. Imagine you were asked to memorize 4 colored squares during encoding: at test, when you were given a single test probe, are you able to remove the items at irrelevant positions (upper), or do you have to keep'em (lower)? 1/n

We've known that socioeconomics (SES) matters for the 🧠. New & 🤯 is that SES drowns out all other brain associations, incl. IQ. If you train an algorithm to predict IQ from brain data, it's still way better at predicting SES. Science Mag: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @smarek0502.bsky.social 👀🧵👇

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Check out my poster at #VSS2026 in banyan breezeway tomorrow afternoon! We find that stimulus memorability parameters (hit and FA rate) robustly affect performance in a task with no recognition memory requirements (visual search with trial-unique images). With @utochkin.bsky.social and Ed Awh

@vssmtg.bsky.social l | Distracted during talks? Maybe your brain has better things to do. 🌊☀️🍹🏖️ Sunday, May 17, 9:30am, Talk Room 1 — I’ll present our new goal-competition theory with @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social.

If you are at #VSS2026 check out our poster 36.320 in the Sunday afternoon session. I'll tell what we learned about the neural signatures of stimulus memorability from EEG decoding in a large visual memory dataset In collaboration w/Leo Chang, Ed Vogel (@edvogel.bsky.social), and Ed Awh

A multi-lab replication effort (@eegmanylabs.bsky.social) of the contralateral delay activity (CDA) has just been published online! In brief, the set-size effect appears to be robustly observed, but CDA correlation with VWM capacity is not reliably strong. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

Spatial attention and working memory are popularly thought to be tightly coupled. Yet, distinct neural activity tracks attentional breadth and WM load. In a new paper @jocn.bsky.social, we show that pupil size independently tracks breadth and load. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

We found attentional suppression might be related to re-coding salient singleton locations in a inverted format to target locations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

How does the visual system track moving objects while remembering the color of those objects? My latest research article (co-first with Piotr @styrkowiec.bsky.social) exploring this question using EEG is out in JoCN! @jocn.bsky.social #workingmemory #cognition #cogneuro #cogsci #neuro

New pre-print day! Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex 🧠 (with Ed Awh & @serences.bsky.social) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very excited to announce my first paper is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using EEG, we identify an item-based measure of storage in working memory that generalizes across auditory and visual items. authors.elsevier.com/a/1ljFF3QW8S... #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #workingmemory

Splitting 5-4 (with Chief Justice Roberts joining the three Democratic appointees in dissent), #SCOTUS grants *partial* stay to Trump administration in NIH funding case; holds that challenges to grant terminations (but *not* the underlying guidance) need to be filed in the Court of Federal Claims:

Domain general frontoparietal regions show modality-dependent coding of auditory and visual rules direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

Not looking forward to this getting quoted - may be one of the dumbest words committed to judicial opinion. Don't assume that "experts" are correct, but assume that judges are better at science than scientists?

UChicago has ~$108 million in NIH grants. According to most recent F&A rate info I found (2019-20), UChicago has an F&A rate of 62% for on-campus grants, so around $67million in F&A support. If the rate is cut to 15%, that’ll be a loss of $50 million in support. That’s thousands of jobs lost

One doctor’s recommendation to deny a 43-year-woman coverage “contained errors on practically every aspect” of her condition, the Labor Department said in 2012. United and other insurers continued to hire the doctor over the next decade. propub.li/3BQjJ1e

variable names *are* code comments

Terrific! Paywalls are disappearing! No more 12 month embargo between when NIH funded work appears in a journal and when it becomes accessible to all (as of December 2025). www.nih.gov/about-nih/wh...

A modern staging of Agamemnon where the chorus is referred to as “chat.”