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

🚨 #DECRA #DE26 announcement: ❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2026❗️ See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/285 /bot

ARC says they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 25th Nov). In recent times these announcements have been around 11am Canberra time. With 2 schemes on the same day, I assume they’ll announce one of them later in the day (probably DECRA first).

Tim Cottier @tvcottier.bsky.social introduces a novel face triad task to explore whether super-recognisers decipher the identity, valence or gaze of faces. When asked which face is distinct out of the three, super-recognisers preference identity information more than controls! #ASPP2025

After seeing @micahgoldwater.bsky.social speak on memes as forms of argument-making, I've decided to livetweet what I can of the Australasian Society of Philosophy and Psychology conference #ASPP2025. Conservatives can see the effectiveness of liberal memes, whereas the reverse is not observed.

Plus, researchers with potential financial conflicts of interest were more than twice as likely to publish positive effects. 2/

Thanks to everyone who came to Sydney for #AIMOS2025! I can't wait to see you in Wellington, NZ next year!

More people need to know about MetaROR @metaror.bsky.social! If you are doing meta-research, then you get that the for-profit publishing system is a headache – you can help sideline journals by having your preprints handled by the MetaROR team for the peer review process. #AIMOS2025

Job posting alert! Open Science Specialist at the University of Calgary (in Canada!) #job #OpenScience careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1704502...

I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖! #sfn2025 #sfn25

Check out my SfN poster if you are interested in how retrospective and prospective representations in working memory work together to create plans and replans when being distracted! I will present it at the early career poster session at 6:45 pm on Saturday or from 1-5 on Tuesday.

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...

The Ponizsa illusion - Kanizsa triangle produces Ponzo illusion, but oddly it inverts apparent depth: the longer line looks closer! Also has an inversion effect like we studied in Altan et al 2025 Proc Roy Soc (doi.org/10.1098/rspb...) but it's also in reverse! 🤔 #visionscience #psychscisky

Hello fellow nerds! The upcoming Australasian Mathematical Psych Conference (AMPC) is going to be on Feb 23-25, and they've just put out the call for abstracts. Details below. This is one of my favourite conferences and this year it's in Singapore(!!) which should be awesome.

I'm in Sydney until December 15th. If any tweeps (blueskyers?) are around lets get lunch or coffee! Also ... if you allow random strangers to join your D&D* group for a few weeks ... pleeeeeeease let me know :))) ___ * or whatever pen & paper y'all are up to

🚨🧠🚨 POSTDOC POSITION 🚨🧠🚨 in my lab: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Connectivity in Working Memory. Deadline 12 Nov! Apply via website; please repost.

A recent redesign of OSF by @cos.io led to widespread access failures. What began as a few broken download links became for me a total disappearance of eight years of DOI-registered work. What happened, how was it resolved, and what it reveals about trust and infrastructure in open science

The package formerly known as papercheck has changed its name to metacheck! We're checking more than just papers, with functions to assess OSF projects, github repos, and AsPredicted pre-registrations, with more being developed all the time. scienceverse.github.io/metacheck/

What is the representation underlying cognition? Formal models rely on multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments to derive the representation. In this preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social, we take an alternative approach; we build Bayesian generative models for three cognitive tasks. /1

Check our new Psych Science paper w/Daniil Azarov & Daniil Grigorev. Although an ability to recognize a familiar object among new ones clearly depends on how many and which objects there are, we show a remarkable stability of underlying "representational spaces" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

What is the representation underlying cognition? Formal models rely on multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments to derive the representation. In this preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social, we take an alternative approach; we build Bayesian generative models for three cognitive tasks. /1

We are very excited to announce that we are opening applications to join the ReproducibiliTea Steering Committee at the beginning of 2026! 🔹 Full Announcement: docs.google.com/document/d/1... ✍️ Application Form: forms.gle/R8FSHGJCFVk2...

Any early-career researchers in #workingmemory wanting to contribute to an #openscience initiative? I'm looking for help building up a data hub resource for the field. Volunteers can expect to devote a few hours, and might pick up insights into handling research data and how to use Github.

The world went and got itself small in a damn hurry

I'm not a historian, but it seems social movements that advance humanity come from minority groups recognising injustice and coming together in collective grassroots action. So, it's rather telling that the fight over how (or whether) to embed AI in society is falling along very similar lines.

editor-in-chief, action editor, reviewer

📣 “Peer Review and its Diversification” Webinars 15-16 October 2025 👉 Register for the Zoom link: forms.gle/1R4Y3d33W8bQ... 📄 Full programme: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

What annotations / metadata do you wish was included with every #cogsci dataset (especially #workingmemory folks 👀)? My current list includes the experiment task, stimulus, level of data (trial-, subject-, or group-level), format, and whether analysis code is provided. Any more?

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

Are you an early career scholar interested in learning more about peer review? Join us for our virtual @reviewerzero.bsky.social workshop! We will help you understand how peer review works and give advice on responding to reviewer comments. 9-10:30am PT / 12-1:30pm ET on October 30th. Register👇🏼

I have a vague memory of reading a paper that was a passionate rebuke of academic capitalism, and proposing a solution that academic committees should use sortition – random allocation to different roles. It's entirely possible that I dreamt this but does anyone know of such an article?

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥 We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪 Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

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.