New preprint alert! Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations #psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪

“I’ve had my bath, lunch was good, and I’m getting ready to watch my programs.” Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/o...

Nobel Laureate Janes Watson repeatedly made claims suggesting that differences in intelligence between ethnic groups are biologically determined, and these claims were not supported by credible scientific evidence. He died today. #JamesWatson #DoubleHelix news.sky.com/story/scient...

Noise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data. But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality. Let's dive into why. 🧵

Pleased to share our latest paper led by @tomlewin.bsky.social, now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We present the first chromosome-level genome of a phoronid and show that shared chromosomal fusions unite phoronids and bryozoans as sister groups. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Beyond Broca: The Two Routes to Speaking. My new @psychtoday.bsky.social essay excerpted and adapted from Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language, forthcoming this month @mitpress.bsky.social. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wire... .

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting. A neural state space for episodic memories www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

How can the "default network" support many forms of introspective thought? Our new review argues these functions rely on distinct MTL connections: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thanks to @denizvatansever.bsky.social & Jess Andrews-Hanna for the invitation to this Special Issue! 🧵

share.google/FkOnXVNpGvvZ... I've been playing around with this and it's actually kinda neat - it separates an author's h-index into 1st, 2nd, other, and last authorship positions. Perhaps this could encourage a more even spread (& ignore the final weighted metric proposed). What do you think?

From retinotopic to ordinal coding: Dissecting the cortical stages of visual word recognition www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What does it mean to be both animal and thinker? Join @moatazassem.bsky.social and John Duncan on 25 November at Murray Edwards College for the launch of John’s new book ‘The Animal and the Thinker.’ Get your tickets here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-animal...

Wow, this excerpt from Giuffre's book (www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...), and Bloomberg got Epstein's emails, including one from Steve Kosslyn (the Harvard psychologist possibly referenced here) asking how he could help when Epstein was about to enter jail. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

It’s been a chaotic evening. A major accident in Vauxhall caused train delays and pushed my lecture back by an hour. Huge thanks to our students for being so patient and understanding! Now heading home after a very long day 😴 share.google/aRwA9JUkd4jc...

Apply now for #visceralmind26 #functionalneuroanatomy #summerschool! The course will run 7th-11th September 2026. Visit our website for an example timetable, more info on content, and testimonies: www.bangor.ac.uk/visceralmind. @psychbangor.bsky.social | @bangoruniversity.bsky.social

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣 The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning? Thread 🧵 ⬇️

Just finished by my very first lecture at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social. I was very impressed by the students at Birkbeck, particularly their initiative and motivation. 💝 Many thanks to my colleague Raffa for helping us run the lecture smoothly. 👊

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg: #psychskysci #neuroscience doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Some people are unable to consciously picture images in their mind's eye – they have aphantasia. What have scientists learned about aphantasia over the past 10 years? This paper reviews subtypes of aphantasia, its potential functions, and ongoing debates. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

OK. One more item added to my reading list 📚

Ahem. Mental imagery (& imagery-critical) researchers should read this: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I hate cancel culture, seriously. I don't think Jimmy Kimmel should be cancelled by ABC, and I don't think Megyn Kelly should be cancelled by MSNBC either. Instead of cancelling, a mature society should encourage mutual understanding and open discussion.

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... "Extensive work has shown that the visual cortex is reactivated during mental imagery"; #neuroscience

I'm sure I'm not the only one being overly tired yet unable to turn my brain off. What a gift the @snlmtg.bsky.social community is 💙 I genuinely can't wait to welcome you all in Geneva for #SNL2026!

A study by Bartels et al (J Neurosci) showed that decoding what colour one person was seeing also decode what another person was seeing. I haven’t read the study but it is a clever way of trying to find out if your blue is my blue. Not my expertise but worth expert discussion.

Although I’m a liberal, my heart still sinks hearing what happened in Utah today. Political violence has no place in our democratic society. Our differences must be resolved through dialogue and democratic processes, not through threats or acts of harm. Rest in eternal peace, Charlie Kirk.

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint states "The attention model conceptualizes aphantasia as primarily a deficit in top-down attentional control": www.researchgate.net/publication/... @jianghaoliu.bsky.social is on a good role, but "attention control deficits" need to be carefully specified and here's why... 1/6

Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our new study (Titled: Memory Loves Company) asks whether working memory hold more when objects belong together. And yes, when everyday objects are paired meaningfully (Bow-Arrow), people remember them better than when they’re unrelated (Glass-Arrow). (mini thread)

The Next Level @thebulwark.com is so excellent. What a great dynamic between the three hosts, and such insightful and fun conversation on a depressing topic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lC...

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

Had a lovely afternoon with my Surrey colleagues, chatting and exchanging farewell gifts. Bye, Surrey - I’ll miss many wonderful people I’ve met here. Thanks to Alan W, Carolina FS, Marie M, Ally G, Di F, Juha S, Melissa M, Angela M, Fabio F, & Yetta W 😃

Congratulations to Flo Martinez-Addiego and ‪@striemamit.bsky.social‬ for the publication of a cool new paper in PNAS showing that high-level actions like tool use generalize between hand and foot, even in individuals born without hands. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share our new preprint... ...𝑖𝑡'𝑠 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒! ⏳ We find temporal confounds in fMRI that emulate neural patterns of perceptual learning. These can be hard to spot with conventional RSA, but may influence our understanding of how prior knowledge shapes perception. tinyurl.com/4bwy6nre

Happy 54th birthday to #KeHuyQuan 🎂 #filmsky #moviesky

BIRD! My most recent commission - a really fun challenge making non-standard VTuber models! This is my test live tracking my motion in VSeeFace to make sure it's all working correctly🪶

Would you like some good news for a change? newatlas.com/infectious-d... "The pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) provides HIV-negative individuals around 99% protection from contracting the devastating virus through sex." #science #medicine

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures rdcu.be/exi8N - yes, please!

If I weren’t moving to Birkbeck, I’d definitely consider York! The Psychology Department is fantastic - modern facilities and leading experts in perception, language, & memory. My mentor Beth Jefferies & former office mate Becky Jackson are there too. I’d highly recommend it to any strong candidate!

Preprints have helped researchers take control of dissemination of their work, but there is a ways to go. Institutions, please prevent certain corporate publishers from wresting back control, and set the foundation for further open dissemination by adopting these recommendations! #openaccess

I wrote this Cortex commentary in response to a recent fMRI study on the angular gyrus's role in segmenting continuous info (e.g., speech, music, film), reviewing key findings & discussing how human connectome research can illuminate neural event segmentation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In a new popular science book, The Animal and the Thinker, John Duncan explains how the balance of instinct and reason answers big human questions. Right and wrong. Ambition and fulfilment. Women and men. Law and democracy. A psychologist’s perspective on “the meaning of life”

Cooperating brain systems and intelligent behaviour: Special issue in honour of John Duncan. Because John is very special. www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... #neuroscience

Cool article about our recent paper by @nature.com 🤩 @peterkok.bsky.social, @smfleming.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Modern AI is often clear, easy to understand and 'cognitively fluent' for the user. In a blogpost today, I talk about why this can give the illusion that you're mastering a topic, when you're actually not (and what to do about it).