Honored and excited to share that I am the winner of Nomis & Science Young Explorer Award!! Also thrilled to share that my article describing my research is out now in @science.org today! The normalization of (almost) everything www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/

Today is the opening day for AAUP v. Trump, in which a historic coalition of unions is suing the Trump administration for using funding threats to suppress free speech. I just listened to the judge's opening remarks and they were SCATHING to the defendants. www.courtlistener.com/docket/71360...

There is absolutely no need to comply with Trump's ridiculous demands at this time. No formal agreement, no force of law. A faculty-led lawsuit challenging the premise of the demand letter is being heard in court _tomorrow_. The only sensible explanation is that UC Regents *want* to comply.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory means so much — including a 'fuck you' to the Islamophobic weaponization of antisemitism... @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2025/11/04/z...

Nearly ready to go! Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025!

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 🧪

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

The science is clear - SNAP reduces food insecurity, improves health outcomes, and lower healthcare costs. Although fed judges ruled the admin can NOT withhold SNAP disbursements, it appears they plan to do just that. We’re mobilizing a national food drive - join here👇 zurl.co/BrvG5

New in @pnas.org. Preschool teachers were less likely to accept participation attempts by children from working-class backgrounds, regardless of their perceived language level. With a great team: @andreicimpian.bsky.social @sebastiengoudeau.bsky.social & Louise Goupil. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

With SNAP expiring, at least one Calif community is responding not by helping people get food, but by threatening hungry people with arrest This is what we mean when we say policing is a policy choice that creates crime Here’s the math that proves it 🧵

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

Sookud and colleagues found that individuals with higher compulsivity and intrusive thoughts develop a less certain internal understanding of the external world, and this mediates the link between symptoms and goal-directed behaviors.

Please understand that the only reason this has been released is because of the UCLA faculty association who filed a request and challenged the refusal in court. If you are a UC faculty member, join your FA!

"UC warned that releasing the proposal would cause “irreparable harm” to its negotiations with Trump." yes this is the fuckin problem

BREAKING: The California Supreme Court has DENIED the University of California's request that it block the release of a 28-page, $1.2-billion fine Trump administration UCLA settlement offer. UC is required to give a faculty group the document today. www.latimes.com/california/s...

psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

University of California faculty push back against Big Brother cybersecurity mandate | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

the Muppets have been real quiet since the Louvre heist

"a tendency to confuse linguistic form with epistemic reliability—a dynamic we term epistemia, the illusion of knowledge that emerges when surface plausibility replaces verification" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A compressed code for memory discrimination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.12.681901v1

University of California & Cal State campuses have together shared the names of thousands of employees with the Trump admin as it probes antisemitism allegations. Faculty are demanding schools, which say they are legally required to share data, push back: www.latimes.com/california/s...

🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨 Speakers @mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social @davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This video is part of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom's series, "Faculty on the Frontlines," which spotlights ten AAUP members who share their stories of repression and resistance in the face of partisan interference and violations of academic freedom. Learn more at the link below👇

Every time someone wants to decide something on merit alone

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Members of the Penn community: please sign this actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3

"Among other steps, universities would also be required to change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would 'punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.'"

Note that the Trump Administration is already going back to schools with whom it earlier reached "deals" (such as UPenn and Brown) for further concessions. Conceding to a bully has only emboldened them to make new demands.

Developmental changes in memory structure and precision alter the use of retrieved episodes during decisions for reward: https://osf.io/78zmx

Developmental differences in exploration reveal underlying differences in structure inference: http://osf.io/t8hpr_v1/

"Faculty, like all University employees, are also entitled to First Amendment protection for speech on matters of public concern, but only insofar as the employee’s expressive interests outweigh the University’s interests in fulfilling its public service mission."

👏 stop 👏 requiring 👏 recommendation letters 👏 in 👏 the 👏 first 👏 round 👏 of 👏 academic 👏 job 👏 applications

Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Martin Engelcke, Yuxuan Li, Arslan Chaudhry, James L. McClelland: Latent learning: episodic memory complements parametric learning by enabling flexible reuse of experiences https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16189 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16189 https://arxiv.org/html/2509.16189

Spineless.

At this point the choice to "negotiate" has to be seen as willing complicity. www.dailycal.org/news/uc/comm...

Outstanding cross-species work co-lead by Madison Tetzlaff and @biancaleonard.bsky.social

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses. www.afr.com/work-and-car...

This study of intelligence in the UK Biobank is typical of a lot of current social science genomics. Impressive technically, and not over-interpreted. But still, a main result gets lost in the sauce. Within-families, the direct-effect polygenic score explains no more that 1-3% of the variance. /1

Facing a proposed $1.2-billion fine and severe medical research grant cuts at UCLA, the University of California has not gone head-to-head with Trump in court. So on Tuesday, groups representing more than 100,000 of its employees did. www.latimes.com/california/s...

On behalf of the AAUP, I am so honored to share that today we joined our sister UC unions in a wall-to-wall lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the use of Title VI as a cudgel to bend the University of California in its ideological vision. www.latimes.com/california/s...

TUESDAY 9/16: meet all your colleagues at the @uofcalifornia.bsky.social Regents meeting. They will be talking about Trump's latest demands. We will stand up and demand Hands Off Our UC! CUCFA, AAUP, AFT, UAW, CNA, and AFSCME. You want acronyms, we've got all of them! 2pm Sept 16 at UCSF, Join us!

The CUCFA (Council of University of California Faculty Associations) seeks an Operations Director. This position is Remote. Details can be found at: unionjobs.com/listing.php?... #1u #UnionStrong @uc-faculty.bsky.social @aaup.org

Early bird registration for "The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025" conference ends on 30th September! This meeting provides a multidisciplinary perspective on the neural, behavioural and computational mechanisms of foraging across species. uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis... Please share!

The AAUP notes with great alarm the rash of recent administrative actions to discipline faculty, staff, & student speech in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. 1/4