🚨 New publication in collab with Shayna Rosenbaum's lab: "Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments" Our test SeaHeroQuest shows a correlation between nav performance and mental imagery (VVIQ) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

New paper out in NeuroImage, w/ @ra-neuro.bsky.social & Tim Andrews @yorkpsychology.bsky.social Statistically efficient neural encoding of natural object variability shapes the temporal dynamics of visual processing Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Code: osf.io/6w5ef

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

"The study provides a unique insight into how the human brain separates the simple act of seeing a face from the emotional spark of recognition" Case report co-authored by researchers @yorkpsychology.bsky.social incl @dmwatson.bsky.social, published open access in Cortex doi.org/10.1016/j.co... 🔓 📄

Join us in wishing a massive happy 100th birthday to the man who has inspired millions of people around the world to care about nature and look after our planet - the incredible Sir David Attenborough! 🎉

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of the visual system in newborn infants is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

I'm in @theobserveruk.bsky.social today looking at why so many unis are in financial trouble and what the government needs to do to save HE. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!*** Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience. PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply). Deadline: 21st May. www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...

📣 Job alert: We are recruiting a Prof in Neuroscience with MRI expertise to join us at @unirdg-cinn.bsky.social and @unirdg-psych.bsky.social. See tinyurl.com/2kdjph8v for details. Contact me for info/chat. Please spread the word #neuroskyence #neurojobs

Optical Bench Equipment. A stash of old optical bench equipment has turned up in a cupboard at the Exeter psychology department. If it could possibly be of use to you, please contact Stephen Lea ([email protected]) or Agnieszka Kaczmar ([email protected]).

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology: Determinants of individual navigation ability with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

New paper in Neuropsychologia 🎉 Patterns of functional connectivity differentiate individuals and individual regions in face and scene selective networks With @kiranoad.bsky.social @bartholomewquinn.bsky.social & Tim Andrews, @yorkpsychology.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1mhTF_fKKq...

A thesis student is looking at parasocial attachment to generative AI in undergraduate and postgraduate students. The questionnaire will take about 10 minutes. Please pass the study link on to anyone who might be interested. exp.psy.gla.ac.uk/project?para...

Excited that this work with @serences.bsky.social and @timbrady.bsky.social is now out! Our Gabor-wavelet model better predicted voxel responses in scene regions than 3D models. Does this mean that scene areas aren’t “for” processing 3D scene structure? NO, we argue. 1/ dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Cold you say? The River Foss next to the Hall is frozen!

#JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Han and Epstein explored how people integrate different kinds of views to form mental maps of places, revealing two sets of brain regions involved in integrating views of landmarks into existing mental maps of a virtual city. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0187-25.2025

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! Strong evidence in silico and humans, out in PNAS Nexus: tinyurl.com/3kbu8xw4 With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

What makes visual stimuli memorable? Wilma Bainbridge, @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, Lore Goetschalckx, and I investigate the role of processing fluency for memorability in a new review paper in Nature Reviews Psychology. Check it out! rdcu.be/eSyjz

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy

Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

#JNeurosci: Lu et al. show that two brain regions—retrosplenial complex and superior parietal lobe—represent facing direction when people perform a naturalistic navigation task in a virtual-reality city. @russellepstein.bsky.social @gkaguirre.com @zhenganglu.bsky.social vist.ly/4chuk

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Kirsten L. Peterson, Michael W. Cole, et al: Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Excited to share a new article from @icevislab.bsky.social! In a sample of over 60 people, we found distinct neural differences underlying object and face recognition in dyslexia. These findings highlight crucial domain-general visual processes that may contribute to word reading challenges.

In our Trends in Cogn Sci paper we point to the connectivity crisis in task-based human EEG/MEG research: many connectivity metrics, too little replication. Time for community-wide benchmarking to build robust, generalisable measures across labs & tasks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

📣 New job alert! I'm looking for a 2-year research assistant for a project on word learning from childhood to adulthood. Come and join us in lovely York! Please RT 🙏 @yorkpsychology.bsky.social jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

Everyone is talking about this MIT research on how using ChatGPT academically affects the brain. It's striking how much ongoing impact there is from overreliance on Gen AI. It goes beyond spoon-feeding; LLMs appear to be dismantling the apparatus we need to use a spoon ourselves in future.

Drumroll... The SPM team will announce that SPM is now fully accessible from Python! 🐍 Learn more about SPM-Python at the SPM roundtable event (Friday, 1pm) and poster number 1841 at #OHBM2025. Try the beta for yourself at github.com/spm/spm-python [2/7]

In these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):

Now out in Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com : “End-to-end topographic networks as models of cortical map formation and human visual behaviour”. Please check our NHB link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨🚨🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨🚨🚨 Neural dynamics across cortical layers are key to brain computations - but non-invasively, we’ve been limited to rough "deep vs. superficial" distinctions. What if we told you that it is possible to achieve full (TRUE!) laminar (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) precision with MEG!

I’m looking for a postdoc and RA for an ERC-funded project “SLEEPAWAY: Forgetting unwanted memories in sleep”. You’ll use MEG/EEG and fMRI to understand how the sleeping brain remembers and forgets. PLEASE REPOST 😊 Postdoc: tinyurl.com/vr5thp7s RA: tinyurl.com/ycyzkatc

✊ Dundee Uni backs down from plans to cut 700 jobs after pressure from unions and the community. Now they must take compulsory redundancies off the table. Solidarity works.

Beyond binding: from modular to natural vision Opinion by H. Steven Scholte & Edward de Haan Open Access: tinyurl.com/4b5myz68

I am so happy—this is the first 1st author paper I have written, since the cancer diagnosis of my late wife seven years ago. 📑 PAPER ALERT: "Beyond binding: from modular to natural vision" in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025) sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The portals are now open! EPS Meeting: University of Dundee. 8th – 11th July 2025. A joint meeting with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS). Portals for this meeting opened at 10am (UK Time) on April 7th for a minimum of 24 hours. eps.ac.uk/next-meeting/

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Xiaoli Chen, Ziwei Wei, and Thomas Wolbers: Representational similarity analysis reveals cue-independent spatial representations for landmarks and self-motion cues in human retrosplenial cortex doi.org/10.1162/imag...

This article by Sussex university’s vice chancellor about how the Office for Students seemingly oversaw its investigation into worries about free speech at Sussex is… quite something. www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Catriona L. Scrivener and Edward H. Silson: Opponent visuospatial coding structures responses during memory recall and visual perception in medial parietal cortex doi.org/10.1162/imag...

🚨New publication alert!🚨 Our latest paper explores socioeconomic biases in AI—but this time, it's not about people directly. It's about homes. Consider these images: it's clear to us that they're all bathrooms. 1/

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Nicholas M. Blauch, Marlene Behrmann, et al: Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling doi.org/10.1162/imag...

People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Jayson Jeganathan, Michael Breakspear, et al: Spurious correlations in surface-based functional brain imaging doi.org/10.1162/imag...

Read this: it really captures the reality of mass redundancies in the university sector, which will only snowball from here. voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

In this review article, I summarize some of our recent work on the neural basis of visual search in scenes, showing how attention and expectation interactively drive preparatory activity in visual cortex and jointly modulate the visual processing of potential target objects. doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Save the date!! #BACN2025 11-12 September 2025, Edinburgh www.bacn.co.uk/conferences Submit talk and poster abstracts by 30 April 2025.