Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

1/11 Very excited to say that our preprint, Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain, is up on biorxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

New paper examining longitudinal #brain data over 7y & relation to #reading; implications for early intervention/policy @fitngin.bsky.social Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship with literacy development | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

It was a pleasure to hear from @csavasegal.bsky.social about her impressive body of work. She demonstrates that movies are powerful tools to study individual differences in people's cognitive representations. Can't wait for her upcoming study on real-time manipulation of subjective interpretations!

Can you show movies to infants to study their visual system? Yes! Check out the paper showing how movies can be useful in awake infant fMRI. elifesciences.org/articles/92119. Summarized as a digest (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-PR), pod (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-pod), & thread (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-bsky)

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

Life update 🚨🧵 This job market season I got close, but no spaghetti 🍝, to landing an assistant professor job. I put in 52 customized applications, expending a level of effort on par w grad school qualifying exams & dissertation defense 😅. I gave it my all at campus interviews, & enjoyed meeting many

A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence

Thrilled for @tristansyates.bsky.social that this is out. Don't miss this exciting result that, in alignment with animal findings, rules out many possible explanations for why we don't remember our infancy! Like all good science, it opens more questions: is retrieval or consolidation the culprit?

Last week we were wow'd by @jacob-prince.bsky.social who presented his incisive and compelling work on the emergence of category selectivity in computational models. Check out the paper here (www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...) and keep an eye out for this rising star!

Tristan is a superstar, with a "rewrite the textbooks" study out next week, plus a slew of transformative published papers. This is a tragedy, but I hope she persists. Still, this attack shakes the foundations of the US's leadership in science. Call your dean, your congressman, and your senator.

We were delighted to host Kathy Garcia recently for her talk on how brains and computational models represent social dynamics. She leverages incredible data, cool methods, and exciting questions to tackle big topics in social cognition. Check out her work: garciakathy.github.io

Our memories are not encoded with timestamps. How do we reconstruct the passage of time from our memories? In a new paper (accepted at Psych Science) @samiyousif.bsky.social and I demonstrate a powerful illusion of time that results from repeated experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

A few weeks back, we had the pleasure of hosting Lindsey Mooney, who spoke to us about her thrilling past and present work on infant/toddler memory. We were most excited to hear about her follow-up to her already brilliant 2024 paper. lindseymooney.github.io/files/Memory...

Incredible work by @lillianbehm.bsky.social to corral this paper. Lots of interesting insights, but it also puts into focus some mysteries: Why are females better than males at scanning? Successful scanning does not seem to be a personality trait, so what state predicts success?

Interested in understanding what brain activity during movies means from the perspective of the viewer? Then you absolutely need check out this amazing study by @ravenwallace.bsky.social from THinC Lab out now in @elife.bsky.social A thread 🧵 elifesciences.org/articles/97731

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

Emily presented this to our lab last year and we had a lot of fun chatting about it. Really great to see this out.

Eleanor Maguire, who died 4 January at age 54, pioneered the famous London taxi-driver study and naturalistic approaches for studying spatial and episodic memory in people. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/memory/remem...

We were delighted to host @ainedineen.bsky.social in-person for a talk to end last year. She spoke about the spatial frequency tuning of the features that the infant ventral visual stream processes. Using fMRI and computer vision models, she provides a compelling account of the tuning of this area

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of pulvino-cortical connections in newborn human infants is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...

We were dazzled by @clionaod.bsky.social's talk. Sitting at the apex of AI, neuroimaging, and developmental research, this research is not to be missed. Invite her to give this talk; you won't regret it!

Great opportunity to get involved in groundbreaking research with a phenomenal team

Filled with enthusiasm, joy and appreciation after Dick Aslin’s festschrift. Two days weren’t enough to celebrate his singularly brilliant career. It’s been an honor to work with and know my hero.

🧵 New meta-analysis on sources of infant looking in Nature Hum Behaviour. Led by Linette Kunin, w Sabrina Piccolo & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (paywall) tinyurl.com/33yfwcaa (access to pdf).

We were delighted to host @emilymeyer.bsky.social for a talk on the puzzle of human cortical expansion. This fascinating talk weaved together evolutionary reasoning, developmental biology, and sophisticated neuroimaging to come to a compelling conclusion. Looking forward to seeing the paper soon!

We were treated to an enthralling talk by @halieolson.bsky.social a week ago. She told us about her exciting work studying language in the toddler brain, collecting high-quality data in one of the hardest to study populations! Can't wait to see it published.

The Scaffolding of Cognition team is hiring! We're looking for a passionate graduate student and a dedicated lab manager. Learn more about these opportunities by reading below or visit our website: soc.stanford.edu/people/#join.... Please pass on the information to your friends and mentees too! 1/5

Come join us!

Nick told us about his broad and exhilarating research program. From incisive work on the development of familiar and unfamiliar face processing, to computer models with topographic representations of visual categories. Don't miss it!

Such a pleasure to host Juliana Trach in our lab meeting. She presented her uniquely innovative work on the neural basis of reinforcement learning in infancy, as well as her superbly designed research on hierarchical representations in motor learning. Watch that space!

Hearing about @shannonmklotz.bsky.social research was so exciting! I have long wondered how we would need to change salience models to make them predict infant gaze, and I think her research has cracked it! Don't miss it!

It was such a treat to host Lauren Smith from UCSD. Her research program is incredible: using fNIRS, naturalistic behavior, and clinical populations to gain insight into joint attention during infancy. I'm excited to see all of her work come out.

The traditional view of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is that it is a "declarative memory system": necessary for long-term episodic memory but not other domains of cognition. Is that really true? A thread of how there is no such thing as a dedicated "episodic memory system"

Stanford started a pre-doc program and several faculty in psych (incl. myself) are recruiting: iriss.stanford.edu/predoc Great opportunity to get more research experience before starting a PhD! App deadline is Feb 29. Info about my lab's research: cicl.stanford.edu Please share 🙏

Interested in learning and cognitive control in infants? Apply to our funded RA position! This Stanford program will be especially helpful to those excluded from the traditional pipeline to grad school Project: iriss.stanford.edu/predoctoral-... Listing: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...

It was our pleasure to host @zoengo.bsky.social at our lab meeting last week. She gave a captivating talk on her new mapping review of memory development. Can't wait to see it all come out.

I’m at #SfN23 with some *brand new* infant movie-watching fMRI data! We ask: Does the developing visual system “prefer” more realistic stimuli, or simplified/exaggerated information? How does this impact decoding of (lion) faces? Come by SS9 tomorrow (Tuesday) from 1-5pm! 🦁👑

This seems like a good first post: what happens to psychology in the LLM future? I ponder… open.substack.com/pub/noahgood...

Had the distinct pleasure of hearing from Dr. Tess Forest (@tessforest on the other place). She had such a rich, full, and compelling story about the development of statistical learning, and its consequences. Check out all of her great work

A few weeks back, we had the pleasure of hearing from @drjuliamoser.bsky.social about her groundbreaking work. We were inspired by her use of multiecho sequences with infants, as well as her phenomenal work on MEG. Check it out!

Events, how infants process caricature, resting state, oh my! Strongly recommend that you invite @tristansyates.bsky.social to give a talk in your lab. Thank you!

Don't miss this from the inimitable @tristansyates.bsky.social

Stoked that this is finally out. In this paper we demonstrate that movie data from awake infants undergoing fMRI can be used to uncover the organization of the visual cortex 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...