Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Registration open 🎉 MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep www.zi-mannheim.de/forschung/ab...

198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

Sleep & Memory summer school, in the picturesque Heidelberg this summer. Highly recommended!

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy? What does the term 'representation' mean to you? We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields. eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

Discovered @patrickmineault.bsky.social's excellent Good Research Code Handbook today, which was always awesome, but is even more necessary as more scientists consider integrating coding agents into their workflows. goodresearch.dev

Preventing data leakage in neural decoding - "for autocorrelated neural time series, standard k-fold cross-validation can dramatically overstate performance." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A useful thing about MoltBook is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a "take-off" scenario might look if one happened for real MoltBook itself is more of an artifact of AI shared roleplaying (not new), but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange, very fast.

Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4

I’m excited to share our preprint ‘Phase similarity between similar objects indicates representational merging across retrieval training but not sleep.’ We use EEG to compare representational changes to memories across retrieval-mediated and sleep-based consolidation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wow, inspiring work. IMO the 'jingle-jangle' fallacy is a majorly underappreciated source of confusion in many fields. In my field (sleep/memory), we have issues of a similar scale re: -What is a "sleep spindle"? -Correlations between "sleep stages" and "memory performance" 1/2 #sleeppeeps

very useful and a step towards the publication of the future. If you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous that we're still stuck with what is basically a digitized version of a printed paper rather than using the vast possibilities of the web

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📢 Postdoctoral Position (2 years) – Social Neuroscience / Psychophysiology @monikaeckstein.bsky.social & myself invite applications from an outstanding early-career PostDoc to join a new project on social touch, stress, and health at the CIMH in Mannheim and Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany

main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂 looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible. science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Save the date for ICOM-7 (aka the Memory Olympics)

Episodic memory consolidation by reactivation of human concept neurons during sleep reflects contents, not sequence of events https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.10.698827v1

Our machine learning competition on forecasting depression is online! We'd love for as many people as possible to participate. Please share in your respective networks — thank you :). www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/announcement...

Submit your symposium to PuG by 28th February 2026: pug2026.org/submission/ And posters by 31st or March!

We should no longer trust data collected on MTurk link.springer.com/article/10.3... My guess is that other online data is going to drop in quality due to LLMs. This is going to be an existential crisis for the behavioral sciences.

Really cool stuff! "Working memory readout varies with frontal theta rhythms" by the @earlkmiller.bsky.social lab, published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

I have an early Christmas present for you! 🎅 Happy to announce that we have three excellent keynote speakers at Psychology and Brain 2026 in Heidleberg! Professors Shamay-Tsoory, Schönauer and Allen will cover topics from empathy over memory to interoception! pug2026.org

📢 Coming soon: A fully funded PhD position in this project, thanks to @dfg.de . If you're into social neuroscience, threat learning, or computational physiology — stay tuned!

The Renaissance of pupil dilation papers might be my favorite development in the recent years. They truly are the window to the soul

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

I feared this in 2016, but now it’s happened: The CDC is gone. Strike them from your list of reliable purveyors of information.

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Last week I was being trained as a #MNE-Python TrainEErs at #PracticalMEEG2025 - it was a lot of fun to look behind the scenes and learn how to run a good workshop :) thanks to @cuttingeeg.bsky.social for hosting and Marijn van Vliet and @nschawor.bsky.social for organizing this amazing workshop!

this week at #PracticalMEEG2025 in Aix! having run an MEG pipeline by trial and error, I was doubting myself between all parameters. lectures on the analysis steps + hands-on application together were very helpful! & seeing women on stage sharing what they're excited about just hits different ⭐️

Remember: finding oscillatory PCA components might not necessarily mean that there is oscillatory activity in your data

New paper finds that selective reporting remains the most replicable finding in science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... I especially like their new exploratory metric 'p-values per participant'. Some papers had 11 p-values per participant! 🤯

How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation? #Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!

Running Windows apps seamlessly on Linux? Finally a worthy WSL equivalent for Linux (LSW so to say)! No emulator, but a real Windows running in the background. Even Office works! wow. github.com/TibixDev/win...

Proposal for how to fix family wise error rates. For every uncorrected p value you must add an extra letter to the claim. “Eating chocolate maaaaaaaaay be associated with lower rates of stroke”

17,058 proposals received, 1,650 to be funded. Break-even, where more money is paid out than burned by the process, is ~2 months time investment per application (assuming only few admin/review/non-submitted efforts). Uncomfortably close to predatory territory: doi.org/10.1111/imcb...

www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-revie... Memory beyond synaptic plasticity - are there alternatives? Some thoughts and ideas from my favorite blog. Was an thought-provocing read, albeit I'm not convinced by all things said.

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...

cool evidence for systems consolidation in humans

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share our new paper on theta-phase locking of single neurons during human spatial memory: www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @lukaskunz.bsky.social, Joshua Jacobs, and our colleagues from the University of Freiburg

Liebe Menschen in Mannheim und einem Umkreis von 100km, ich würde mich sehr freuen, wenn ihr an dieser wunderbaren psychologischen Studie teilnehmt. Reposten ist natürlich auch sehr willkommen! Hier die Studieninfo von der Studienleitung: 🧵1/7

Undoubtedly the most massive group effort I was ever lucky to be involved in. Led by the ever-unwavering @annekeitel.bsky.social, this preprint synthesizes the status quo of what we (don't) know about neural oscillations. Grateful to be part of the @scone-neuro.bsky.social network. #neuroskyence

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results. 👇 1/13

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268