An open revolt is taking place on Capitol Hill over the bill the Senate approved this morning to reopen the Homeland Security. House Republicans are irate at their Senate counterparts for passing a bill that does not include money for ICE and Border Patrol www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

So are the headlines saying the Democrats won this round, or nah? Cause they did. Funding for TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard, no funding for ICE. That’s the deal Dems have been offering over & over. Republicans caved.

Science peeps! Excited to share first of two preprints just uploaded. This one concerns a person who hears sounds when she moves her eyes! We could actually record these sounds and verify they were connected to eye movements 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Also out today - A quick intro piece on the role of the cerebellum in cognition. What does it do? How will we find out? This is what @actlab.bsky.social and I think the critical questions are right now. It was fun to write - especially the section on evolution.... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

new preprint! 🐍 In a dynamic Snake game inspired task, we show participants flexibly replan their behaviors after distraction, but this ability is constrained by memory load and distraction strength. EEG results coming soon👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu) "Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks" We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context. How might this work...? 🧵1/8

New lab paper! We built a new computational model that explains several disparate observations about the conditions that promote (or hinder) associative learning. Main finding is that different kinds of experience (blocked, interleaved) have opposing effect at high vs low memory capacity. 🧵 below!

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory. Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

ICYMI at #CNS2026, we have a new mentorship program! Learn more and sign up NOW to be a mentee or mentor: www.cogneurosociety.org/new-cns-ment... #neuroscience

More new results, this time from the amazing Lily Kramer! 🎉 “Sequential experience reshapes population representations in visual cortex” doi.org/10.64898/202... Visual experience unfolds in time. We asked how temporal structure reshapes population activity in visual cortex. 🧪🧵1/

Excited to see this work out! We show that attention can rapidly learn to ignore salient distractions within 1-2 exposures. Interestingly, this learned suppression is highly contingent on an initial instance of capture! More to come! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... @yuezhang-mu.bsky.social

Email your senators to urge them not to confirm Jim O’Neill as Director of the National Science Foundation. He's not a scientist, has no relevant expertise, promoted vaccine misinformation, helped gut the CDC, and his Silicon Valley ties raise questions about protecting the public interest. (1/2🧵)

New paper! 🚨 ~1.8K Mooney images from THINGS + ~1K participants to study visual ambiguity resolution. Results suggest the visual system shifts from a top-down guess to bottom-up matching after disambiguation, and a U-shaped link between info gain and identification. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Hi Colleagues who use eyetracking! 👋 👀 @shen4brains.bsky.social , @jordwynn.bsky.social, Zhong Xu Liu and I are guest editing a Special Issue for Neuropsychologia on Contributions of eyetracking to cognitive neuroscience.

New lab paper! 🧠 Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements. plos.io/4dwJhR8 Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏

BREAKING: @delauro.house.gov announces at a House Oversight hearing with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya that OMB approved the agency's apportionment last night. That means the agency should have access to its appropriated funds — 42 days after its spending bill passed.

A new data-sharing policy proposed by the NIH would result in “substantial harm to scientific progress,” a neuroimaging consortium says. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/data-sharing...

Wondering why NIH and NSF aren't making new grants? We explain what's happening at OMB. www.science.org/content/arti...

Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉 Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy. Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.

We have to direct attention to both the outside world and our internal thoughts and memories. This process of attentional selection occurs rhythmically, with a shared theta rhythm associated with sampling internal and external information. Neat work by Cavanah & Fiebelkorn!

Very happy to share our review on Reinforcement Learning vs Statistical Learning, with @ambrafer.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A nice summary: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/two-eng...

NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18. osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool. arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747

The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed. For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com 🧪

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

New this year at @cogneuronews.bsky.social 2026: All abstracts will be published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society jocnf.pubpub.org/cns2026. Functionality includes ability to append a visual abstract, like this: doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

1/ 🚨 New preprint Key Moments Scaffold the Semantic Structure of Narratives Using spoken recall and annotations from three naturalistic datasets with topic modeling, we ask: which parts of a narrative contribute most to its semantic structure and subsequently memory? Preprint: osf.io/dcfvw

So... A friend was supposed to give a PURELY SCIENTIFIC talk at NIH within the next couple of weeks and it was cancelled because of a "new process" where all speakers/talks have to be CLEARED BY A POLITICAL APPOINTEE.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

Excited to share our paper (with @jzacks.bsky.social), now out in JEP:LMC! Event boundaries sometimes disrupt temporal order memory in list-based paradigms—but what happens in narratives with more complex structures that better resemble real life? ✨ Link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

Sorry for the delay – the PsyArXiv link works now 😅

1/6 Happy to share our new paper with @grassocamille.bsky.social and @virginievanw.bsky.social: "Nested contextual change and the temporal compression of episodic memory". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📍2003 marked the year in which the retro-cue paradigm was born. Fast forward, 23 years later, we adapt this logic to long-term memory and ask how does attention shape retrieval from long-term memory? 🤔 w/ @william-nm.bsky.social Kia Nobre, Nahid Zokaei and Nora Roüast osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

America needs a Surgeon General who follows the science, not trending conspiracies and pseudoscience. Tell your Senator to vote against Casey Means as our nation’s doctor!

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories? We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate! Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

New with @tobiasegner.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social! The relationship between external and internal attention is not fixed but varies between competition, concurrence, and cooperation. We shed light on the conditions that allow for each of these relationships to occur🔍 psyarxiv.com/ry94x_v1

Attentional resources vary rhythmically, but what about susceptibility to #[email protected] &co show that theta & alpha phases modulate sensitivity & distractor impact, revealing rhythm-specific mechanisms shaping #attention & distractability @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4tU0vh4

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary. In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

New preprint out 🎉 What happens to the hippocampal “place code” when an animal is actively engaged in a task? The answer surprised us (and might surprise you too!). Let's dive in ⬇️ Link: "Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706430v1

Excited to share my first PhD paper with @ashenhav.bsky.social @shenhavlab.bsky.social “Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...