Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings. We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity. 1/

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age. Link in post below 👇

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

This is an incredible development for all types of conditions. Including neuromodulation for depression (like TMS) which is currently largely limited to the brain's surface whereas some of the most relevant bits of the mood network lie deep in the brain (subcallosal cingulate, insula ...).

Our latest paper outlining our ecosystem of tools for mining the neuroimaging literature, is finally officially published in eLife! doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

So happy to share our paper on the role of the hippocampus as a mismatch detector: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We show that the hippocampus detects mismatches between ongoing experiences and episodic memories but not generalised schematic knowledge. See 🧵for how we got here: #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

That's why I'm here... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

shout out to the journal of the society (That I am a member of) that I review a bunch for charging 5200 for open access via springer nature. was a fun ride, but I am done.

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!

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

Adaptive learning is coordinated across behaviour, time and neurobiology (from synapses and dendrites, to astrocytes and the systems level). If you’ve ever wondered how noradrenaline helps shape these multiscale learning processes, you might like this: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Hey #memory folks, check out this new preprint by @joschadutli.bsky.social , @koberauer.bsky.social, and @leabartsch.bsky.social showing that elaboration benefits are likely driven by aiding in establishing efficient retrieval cues.

During sleep, reuniens theta synchronizes with MEC provoking memory reactivation. rdcu.be/eCMfl

Here's a set of new results from my lab asking how the brain combines different ideas (concepts)! Now in press at J of Cog Neuro, we looked at how semantic composition (combining different concepts together) shapes brain activity. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence

Share your examples of the terrible losses from cuts to science funding #what_we'll_never_know Message me if you would like to make a video.

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Is the hippocampus best understood in term of discrete subfields or functional gradients? Functional gradients are recapitulated within each hippocampal subfield, supporting a role for both discrete & continuously changing computations. Neat work by Bouffard, @barense.bsky.social, & Moscovitch!

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁? Don't miss the Neuroscience and Philosophy Salon. Earl Miller and team will discuss recent paper and we'll have plenty of discussion. Open to all. Sept 12, noon EST-US umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... #neuroskyence @earlkmiller.bsky.social

This is a superb short video on the consequences of the ongoing destruction of American science. Please watch and circulate. @sebastianseung.bsky.social is fantastic here. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

The love of reading is an endangered species. Just 16% of Americans do regular leisure reading—down from 28% in 2003. Only 41% of UK parents read daily to their toddlers—down from 64% in 2012. Books aren't merely a source of flow. They're a gateway to empathy and lifelong learning.

The Experience Sampling literature has always made me really skeptical about inferring cognition from resting state scans. With idiosyncrasies abound, LCDs dominate. This wonderful paper does so much to flesh out our understanding of what behavioral and neural processes might be happening at rest.

"Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think." cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (@fabbs.org) is searching for a short-term technology policy fellow. Great opportunity for a new PhD interested in policy, maybe before a research postdoc or faculty position: fabbs.org/news/2025/08...

New content: Rodriguez, A., Musfeld, P., & Bartsch, L. M. (2025). The Flexibility of Working Memory in Drawing on Episodic Long-Term Memory Representations in Serial Recall. Journal of Cognition, 8(1): 40, pp. 1–26. DOI: doi.org/10.5334/joc.... #psychscisky

It’s a shining example of the utterly low bar for evidence we accept when someone is willing to say science is broken.

2026 @jocn.bsky.social Travel Fellowship @jocn.bsky.social and Cog. Neurosci. Soc. to offer a stipend of $3000, plus waived conf. reg. and waived poster submission fee to attend www.cogneurosociety.org/annual-meeti... , to one trainee based at an institution located in each of five regions:

Biologist John Benning writes home to North Carolina: “The fruits of science are so widespread, they sometimes escape notice.” Decades of taxpayer-funded research made miracle gene therapies possible, saving countless children’s lives. 🧪🏠 @jbenning.bsky.social johnbenning.net/2025/08/01/a...

Also, 30,000 fake papers out of 1 million+ does not indict or threaten science as a whole. This entire "science is in crisis from within" narrative is a right-wing myth.

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

Nice work by @yoichimiyawaki.bsky.social showing the fMRI hemodynamic response contains enough info to decode stimulus type within 2sec. Happy to have helped with this project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The White House has instructed NASA to terminate two major, climate change-focused satellite missions. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health.

📣 New preprint from the SCIMaP team! Across three studies, we show that communicating the economic impact of NIH funding cuts—especially with interactive quizzes and maps—decreases approval and motivates action to oppose the cuts, across the political spectrum. 🧵 1/8 osf.io/preprints/ps...

On July 17, NIH announced it will indefinitely extend flexibilities for BESH (Basic Experimental Studies with Humans) reporting, easing burdens for studies misclassified as clinical trials. Read more ⬇️

🚨 New preprint alert! Excited to share our latest work on alpha/beta activity, eye movements, and memory. Across 4 experiments combining scalp EEG/iEEG with eye tracking, we show that alpha/beta activity directly reflects eye movements, and only indirectly relates to memory. 👇 Highlights (1/7):

New review paper with Maverick Smith on improving memory for stuff people actually want to remember: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

PO just confirmed that our 5th percentile R01 is not getting funded. Past NCI Payline at 4 percent. Cant believe it.

First yuge paper using ConversationAlign is out in Cortex. >1500 unscripted conversations between people of different ages, >8 million words. Aging is associated with abstract word dropout and age differences in growing lexical-semantic misalignment www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” doi.org/10.1038/s415... Small contribution in this piece by @frosas.bsky.social and colleagues on how we need both types of research culture in neuroscience. #neuroskyence

How the brain shifts between external and internal attention www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #neuroscience

I decided to make a long blog post combining general sociological things I am aware of with personal observations of cultural and lifestyle differences between the UK and USA. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/07/comp...

Current publication requirements: innovative methodology, clear differentiation from prior work, addresses identified problem area, compelling case for internal and external validity Nature, 1975: DUDE YOU HAVE TO CHECK OUT MY CAT!

Dear machine learning folks working in the NeuroAI space, please read the relevant neuroscience and cognitive science literature before starting your project. Half of the time you're simply reinventing the wheel and not really advancing anything. This has been my public service announcement.

Happy to share our study showing a new role for ventromedial PFC in prospection. tinyurl.com/e7kudkby #neuroskyence #psychscisky

Super excited to share this one!! Meta-learning sparsity and learning rate gives rise to brain-like gradients of complementary learning systems. So complementary learning systems emerge organically through behavior optimization, and it's not just two of them!!

Is a human reviewing editorial decisions at PNAS? They're not reviewing responses to authors: "your manuscript was assigned to an editor with expertise in the subject area of your work, who examined the manuscript and identified {$actual_rev_count} expert reviewer in the field to assess your work"

Oh, ha ha ha

We just published a new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review examining what drives how people segment continuous experience into distinct memory events. The takeaway: contextual stability, not prediction error, is the main driver.🧵https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02723-4