It is frequently said that the next-generation of researchers need to be *trained* in open scholarship, but I don't think this is enough when they (we) will inherit broken academic systems. Remarkable reforms are needed to face present day challenges and I think more ECRs should be given the reins.

Here’s to Joey finding our preprint on biorxiv already before I saw the email it had successfully uploaded 🥂Tweeprint (/blueprint) will follow soon. With @amit-rawal.bsky.social and @mjwolff.bsky.social

If you are a visual #workingmemory researcher that has a dataset from a delayed recall task with continuous report (the ones using a circular response wheel) and want to share it, please drop a reply. Would love a link to both paper and dataset! See: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData

So @reubenrideaux.bsky.social and I decided to run an image-processing workshop at this year's EPC/APCV. We will be teaching people how to compute the contrast energy of kiwi fruit, I guess. Sign up now: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/ @expsyanz.bsky.social

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

i shouldn’t give this piece any more attention than it has already garnered but i feel like it is worth pointing out some flaws in the argument/unquestioned assumptions thread 1/

🧠 #Psych & #CogNeuro people — #attention! Hiring a Research Associate (WissMA) in #Cologne to study #SelectiveAttention in action-related contexts (e.g., #VisualForaging)! PhD opportunity! Some teaching in German ... karriere.crf-education.com/job/wissensc... Please forward, repost!

This work👇 is now published in PB&R 🥳🎉 #workingmemory link.springer.com/article/10.3...

The Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) and Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) are holding a joint meeting in 2026, to be held at the University of Auckland from July 1-4. Abstract submissions now open! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

Anyone want to do a PhD with me at the Sunny Coast? I'm recruiting, and I wanna do some fun psychophysics (but the possibilities for the PhD are very broad). Domestic students only, sadly. In case y'all happen to know someone: @nataliepeluso.com @reubenrideaux.bsky.social @visnerd.bsky.social

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

Our latest paper, “Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests”, is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Non-paywalled version: arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786 Tweet thread below from first author @genetang.bsky.social...

Any researchers claiming that we have extensive evidence that social media causes harm, and thus, a social media ban is evidence-based policy, is deeply unserious and can peddle their future wares (any school programs/interventions, any books or media deals, any edutech) in a sinkhole on Mars.

Hey everyone, I have a Special Issue – that I think academic structures don't provide enough time or resources to do careful, methodical, and incremental work to address all the research questions that I have. (This is equal parts truthful about my feelings on academic reform, equal parts pun).

I have been admiring Solid Air – an independent show about all things music. It brings together musicians to openly discuss their art, share stories, and also bring others' art that has influenced them. It is quite worldly and thoughtful, and has an underlying tone of respect and appreciation.

I am even warier than the authors about the broad-brush applications of the QRP label. However, I stand firmly against classifying data dredging/fishing expeditions as responsible research practice and as exploratory research. Science reform has distorted our understanding of scientific exploration.

I revisited "The seductions of clarity" by @add-hawk.bsky.social, which points out mental clarity can prematurely stop us from deliberating. I reflect on how we might inflict this upon ourselves by accepting simplifications, and whether society is trending away from nuance and complexity.

Ways AI could accelerate my research: * Raise the amount of science funding as a percentage of GDP in all nations. * Creating time to dedicate to life – admin-wise, health-wise, and living-wise (e.g. speeding up boring household chores) * Stabilising geopolitics so I am not in angst all the time.

Have you ever wanted to study individual differences in attention only to be frustrated by prohibitive low reliability? If so, what a coincidence! Let me introduce you to the first study from the newly formed Sheffield PandA lab: Using RSVPs to measure the speed of attention: rdcu.be/e0t0A 1/

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Excited to share Jongmin Lee’s discovery of abstract codes guiding prospective working memory! Thread below. doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106... Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

Here’s a thought that might make you tilt your head in curiosity: With every movement of your eyes, head, or body, the visual input to your eyes shifts! Nevertheless, it doesn't feel like the world does suddenly tilts sideways whenever you tilt your head. How can this be? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵 1/n

Our publishing system does not prioritise or value the careful curation of research data to be FAIR nearly enough. I have been data editing for AP&P for a year now, and it is sad to see no reward for the clearly careful organisation of data and materials vs that which is thrown on OSF with no care!

Had a chuckle at this line from C. Thi Nguyen @add-hawk.bsky.social: "After all, step counts are not the same as health, and citation rates are not the same as wisdom". How much freer would we be if we resisted quantification across all aspects of our life?

I've decided research is not for me...it's for everyone!

This is going to take my thinking in circles to the next level. Are we still using the #workingmemory tag? Relevant for anyone there – bring back the delayed reproduction task and the computational model wars! #teamnotpureslots #teamnotpureresourceseither

I am happy to share that our preprint “𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮: 𝗔 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵” is now out. Huge thanks to @bayslab.org, Julie de Falco, Zahara, @cjungerius.bsky.social, @ivntmc.bsky.social, Adam, and Xiaolu for the lovely collaboration. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I am running a self-organised @carpentries.carpentries.org introduction to R workshop later this month, but suddenly getting errors with the Github Actions to build the site. Looks like the same issue in recent datacarpentry repos as well. Anyone else facing the same issue/know the fix?

I do my most considered thinking when I am writing. In an effort to think more, I've started a blog to write on whatever has my attention. It's a reminder to myself to keep thinking and discovering; maybe it will serve the same purpose for others to preserve their desire and time to think.

With 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.

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

One of the best ways for early-career researchers to create community within their department and effect change towards doing open and thoughtful research is to start a ReproducibiliTea journal club. We've distilled our network's experience into a set of simple rules to follow and get started!

I think this is a key point for our field to reckon with – that the underlying cognitive representation can vary across the many tasks and conditions that we use to probe working memory. I think that doesn't mean we give up our search – we do have to rethink the questions we are asking though!

We recently published a theoretical review about how compositional and generative mechanisms in working memory provide a flexible engine for creative perception and imagery. Pre-print: osf.io/preprints/ps... Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Make it your New Year resolution to add a #workingmemory dataset to OpenWMData so that we can curate our field's precious data, start testing theories and benchmarking models across datasets, conduct secondary analyses and meta-research using the data itself, and help me feel like I'm, like, alive.

Never getting any research funding so that my work can never be taken for "granted".

Hey everyone! I have enough publications to stop working for the rest of the year!

Has anyone attended any pre-data-collection poster sessions (i.e., poster sessions where people present their plans for experiments before data collection in order to get feedback when it's most useful) at conferences other than VSS?

Our upcoming (NSF-funded) OPAM workshop will feature Dr Johnny van Doorn (of University of Amsterdam) presenting on the theory and practice of Bayesian statistics (using JASP software). Please register and join us for the workshop (on January 26th), here: www.opamconference.com/online-works...

The faster we move to value science for its practice (the critical thinking and search for knowledge, the various skills we apply) and not simply outputs via number of publications or journal prestige, the easier it will be to survive the onslaught of AI slop, probably de-funding of science too.

AI anthropomorphization hits new highs in science, thanks to a @utoronto.ca PhD candidate and some obvious @aixiv.bsky.social deceptions. @emilymbender.bsky.social @olivia.science @irisvanrooij.bsky.social www.the-geyser.com/aixiv-nothin...

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

Is WM a gateway to LTM? In this registered report we find that higher WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding - suggesting WM capacity is not a bottleneck for forming LTM traces. @as-souza.bsky.social @edamizrak.bsky.social @cognition-zurich.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... [1/3]

New paper in Psych Review on a model of false recognition in Deese-Roediger-McDermott DRM task. Not just recognition responses, but also associated RTs! And not just the semantic task, but also the structural task - where words overlap in orthography/phonology! A thread!

Well this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

Thank you to everyone who came to the symposium! I'm also grateful to the people who have chatted to me about my talk on building a formal cognitive model that fits for the latent representation to then link to neural representation similarity. My talk slides: williamngiam.github.io/talks/2025_A...

#DECRA #DE26 announcement cont.: Outcomes summary: Approved / requested (%) Apps: 200 / 1532 (13.1%) Funds: $102.79M / $785.30M (13.1%) Approved grants requested $103.17M; 99.6% provided. /bot