Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

A *super* exciting new paper from @lizsiefert.bsky.social!! Human hippocampal ripple rates track very closely with several indicators of low arousal, during both sleep and wake. This is probably the most compelling data I have ever been associated with.

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Great to see Mark Stokes getting acknowledged , and also the author senior authors who stepped in, but I’d like to highlight 1st author Michał Wojcik who completed this excellent work from his PhD under such difficult circumstances. He‘s got more good stuff in the pipeline - one to watch

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

New paper out in JEP:HPP! psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/... Can we learn from things we're not paying attention to? We used a contextual cueing paradigm to pit selective attention against spatial prediction during visual search in 2 high-powered (N=104) experiments — and found they actively compete.

🎉Save the date! Black In Neuro Week 2026 is July 27–Aug 2. We're celebrating our 6th annual BIN Week with returning favorites like #NeuroRacism, #NeuroAcrossTheDiaspora, and #BINRollCall plus a brand new theme: #BlackInTime. ✨ 🧠 #BINW26 #AReimaginedFuture

We make flexible choices in new situations by knitting together information from separate relevant memories. But what governs which memories are retrieved and when? In a new preprint, we captured how people build decision variables from different memories by tracking their gaze on a blank screen.

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Interested in human replay and solid methods? Jointly with @skjerns.de we're releasing a benchmark dataset with known ground-truth neural sequences in MEG & fMRI, for developing & validating replay methods. First test: existing methods show similar effect sizes, but room to improve shorturl.at/6TgIr

Only 4 days until our free webinar on writing better, fairer reviews! You'll leave with a practical framework for giving feedback that's specific, balanced, and fair. Register using the link below.

Another handful of sand in the gears: Researchers cannot serve on a panel *at all* if anyone from their institution has submitted to that panel. Recusing themselves for the proposal itself is no longer sufficient. This is needless, but will certainly slow things up even further.

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Many consequences to this. Suppose you are an NIH program officer, hoping for a promotion to a branch chief or division chief position. Now, if you get the promotion, you may well lose your civil service protections. This could be very destructive to NIH and to individual careers.

ALRIGHT EVERYONE HERE IS THE OFFICIAL SUFS GUIDE TO LEAVING PUBLIC COMMENTS ON THE OMB-2026-0034 PROPOSED RULE: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-advocacy/the-sufs-guide-to-writing-public-comments (share with all your friends!)

Our newest finding: tiny microsaccades are biased toward the location that is about to be attentionally suppressed. This suggests that attention briefly precedes suppression: before the system can suppress a location, it first appears to select it.

It has been such a pleasure to work on this paper! Beyond its intellectual breadth, what gives me great delight about this work is how the collaboration arose, thanks to @samversc.bsky.social. We read each other's papers, chatted about them on social media, and that eventually evolved into a paper!☺️

Now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social ! We show that the persistence of memory biases across retrieval episodes may critically depend on attention to inducer stimuli during initial interference. w/ @keisukefukuda.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 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...

The advantage of using @standupforscience.net, as opposed to going straight to the site (which may be flagged as closed for some) is that we keep a record of every transaction including time submitted/accepted and the full content. 2/3

RE: OMB-2026-0034 Comments Vought was unprepared for the revolt on his hands and they are struggling and/or obstructing to get comments up in real time. They have weeks to actually post things after a review, so the numbers and specific individual comments may take time showing up. 1/3

Want to make peer review more inclusive & equitable? @mattgoldrick.bsky.social and @mariamaly.bsky.social are hosting a free webinar on how to write better, fairer reviews! 📅 June 15th | 12–1:30pm EST 🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/59ez5azt #PeerReview #AcademicTwitter

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

AS PROMISED: Stop Vought. Save Science. The @standupforscience.net action center is live: fight2win.standupforscience.net REGISTER for our Emergency Science Meeting (6/2, 4pm et), Call and email Congress, and leave your public comment all in one place! #standupforscience #TakeActionNow

So honored to receive the Glushko prize, and just grateful that @cogscisociety.bsky.social is willing to recognize whatever I’m doing as the study of the “mind” :)

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

Which factors are more vs. less important in predicting memory? We systematically investigated the contributions of image memorability, valence, arousal, attention, and test delay. Image memorability was the strongest predictor of memory. Proud of this work led by @hartwakeland.bsky.social!

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 with @paulm-k.bsky.social and Mark Stokes on how we switch internal attention between working memory contents. Beta-band oscillations tracked the magnitude and success of these switches. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... #neuroskyence

Now out in Current Opinion in Neurobiology! We propose that biases in perception & memory emerge naturally from an adaptive, hierarchical human learning system. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social + sky-less et al. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

When you're stressed, what happens to the mental links that let you connect related experiences and draw new conclusions? In our new @science.org #ScienceAdvances paper, we show that stress disrupts that linking process in the hippocampus🧵

“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.

Excited to share I will be joining UC Davis as an assistant professor starting July 2027! Thank you dearly to all mentors and friends who have supported me over the years ❤️ and Cal Poly friends, I'll miss you!

In a new paper, we found that older adults show attenuated explicit motor learning but enhanced implicit adaptation. Through a series of meta-analyses and experiments, we dive into the mechanisms underlying these age-related effects. Huge shoutout to Elizabeth Cisneros for leading the effort!

We just got approved to hire a teaching professor in Quantitative Methods! This is the *very* rare tenure track teaching position at Berkeley. I'll be chairing the search committee. Official job ad coming later this summer!

Long-term memory reorganization of navigational episodes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Breaking: Congress is pushing back on the Trump administration's termination of National Science Board members, with the House calling for their reinstatement and the Senate asking pointed questions about OMB's political interference. My reporting for @science.org:

How does the brain rapidly distinguish similar memories? We use 7T fMRI to show dynamic shifts between pattern separation and reinstatement signals in hippocampal CA3 and DG with changing task demands: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Incredibly proud of the newest PhD from the lab, Dr. Craig Poskanzer! He gave a phenomenal defense yesterday showcasing his work on how internal & external attention are balanced in the brain and behavior. Passed with no revisions except two typos. And his wife made a beautiful hippocampus cake!

For further context, and in contrast to what the IHE article from yesterday stated, the hack is very much still ongoing (it appears that Instructure tried to fix the Canvas breach, but the hackers got around the patches again today). www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

The final typeset version of this paper is online now! Check out the new analysis approach that Narjes developed to track changes in event structure at multiple timescales, allowing us to see how event dynamics in a film clip change with repeated viewing

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Past experiences shape current selection. But when and how strong are past and present targets represented in the brain? In our newest paper, we show that past and present search targets are concurrently represented in the brain. Out now in @plosbiology.org doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience