How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

📣📣📣 Hi Everyone! I'm accepting PhD students for the Fall 2026 cycle! Our lab topics include the developmental origins and elaboration of moral cognition/prosocial behavior, persistence, and optimism. More info below!!

it's a hyper capitalist racket, and the fact that ***academia*** (full of all those gigantic galaxy brains) collectively still hasn't managed to burn it to the fucking ground says a lot about how deep these exploitative structures run

so ORGANIZE this is a labour issue - collectively, you are NOT powerless stop upholding systems that exploit you, chew you up and spit you out ... and that steal and lock away the knowledge you create from the rest of us out here

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

@fluxsociety.bsky.social is there a lost and found at #Flux2025? I lost my coat and jumper during today's poster session. Thanks!

@sofiascatolin.bsky.social 💡 Parent-Child Functional Neural Similarity and Its Association With Child Mental Well-Being 📅 Saturday | Posters III 🕙 10:15–11:45AM | Goldsmith Hall 🎤 Flash talk: Saturday | 9:10–9:15AM | Hyde Suite 1&2 ✨ As the Beatles sang: in the end, it’s all about the love we share

Interesting on how publishers respond when concerns are raised 👇 My own experience: Springer, 3 journals, No action Elsevier, 3, No action CUP, 1, No action Brill, 1, No action Emerald, 1, No action Frontiers, 1, No action Qeios, No action Cell Press, 1, Editorial note Royal Society, 1, Retraction

This RedNote post shocked me today. An anonymous user says they are going to upload 60 papers to arXiv soon and are looking for “citation partners” to boost citation counts together by citing each other. Something is seriously wrong in the system of evaluating researchers by citation counts.

How is science fighting back against attacks in the US? The project @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social encourages researchers to publish in local newspapers in their hometowns. The goal: remind people of the value of science 👇 www.wissenschaftskommunikation.de/one-goal-is-... #scicomm #wisskomm

Great and detailed blog post on compositionality, written by Eric Elmoznino: ericelmoznino.github.io/blog/2025/08... #compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience

I mean, Trump has got everyone kissing his arse *by being an enemy*. How do we imagine that kissing his arse will stop him being an enemy, when being an enemy is working so damn well for him? Are we stupid? Are we even stupider than Donald Trump? Maybe we are.

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Wow: tenure letter writers’ publication records (h-index) are better predictors of tenure decisions than candidates’ own publication record.

Introducing five concepts from dynamical systems to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms, have a read! @perez-carrasco.bsky.social‬ @roederlab.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social This effort started in a morphogenesis meeting @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social‬ in 2023. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

At 18:30 UK time, I will be presenting my work on learning and exploration across development at the @cogscisociety.bsky.social Glushko Dissertation Prize Session! #CogSci participants can join at this link: underline.io/events/489/s...

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

I decided not to go to cogsci in person due to the current political situation in the US. If you're still interested in our work on developmental change in cognitive effort, you can find a video summary here: underline.io/events/489/p...

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

NEW POLL from @DataProgress and @imeupolicy of NYC Democratic primary voters: • 78% say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza • 79% support restricting weapons to Israel www.imeupolicyproject.org/polls/zohran...

Everything Gaolang Gong touches is magic. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Kapitalismus (Symbolbild)

Am I the only one who likes Science journals way more than Nature ones? And who finds some Nature practices quite predatory?

My own university has a "strategic goal" to increase research "outputs" by 10% annually (7 year doubling time). Your university is almost surely working towards the same. University rankings are now the main driver of this damaging institutional behavior. Publication is an out-of-control arms race.

Good morning folks. If you’re around #OCNS2025, maybe come by today for a chat about optimal communication in brain networks? ✨

Got the most beautiful experimental paradigm in your head but don't know how to implement it? Head over to the DevStart tutorial on how to build one with @psychopy.org ;) tinyurl.com/devstartfirs...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I will never understand why we have to pay £1,000 annually for NHS, and also pay for NHS with our taxes. I'm not aware of any other country that has set up this kind of scam.

Democrats invested $20 millions to study young men and how to reach them. Meanwhile:

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social

Eight-month-old infants demonstrate the ability to flexibly adapt their learning strategies in response to changing environments, suggesting early cognitive flexibility. doi.org/g9rc8x

Out now in Science Advances! We find that infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament. This has be so much fun to work on and ended up being my favourite personal paper! So excited it's out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Looking forward to visiting Iméra in Marseille this Friday, where I'll be giving a talk about how infants explore the world (and themselves) as part of this workshop: www.imera.fr/en/agenda/cu...

🚨 BREAKING UPDATE Labour has FINALLY accepted defeat in our legal challenge of anti-protest powers We won this case in court twice - under both Conservative and Labour leadership Gov must now commit to reviewing ALL arrests made under these unlawful powers www.lbc.co.uk/news/exclusi...

✨Excited to share that our new paper is now out in iScience!✨ 🧠 We show that people can coordinate surprisingly well in novel interactions by violating others' expectations - without requiring deep, recursive reasoning about others’ beliefs. 📄 Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

New from The Strain Team: 🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊 Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗). Gross! 😀 1/n #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

Is the UK military providing Israel with the ships position? A UK sovereign ship?

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Congrats @sofiascatolin.bsky.social! This is such cool work showing how mothers might attune to the attentional abilities of the infants! With insights that could only be achieved with hierarchical Bayesian modelling

🚨PhD position alert!🚨 Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric... Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

If you go to settings -> moderation, you can mute words, and you won't see posts with those words anymore. It feels like breathing fresh air again.

I often wonder what would happen if the science budget cuts we see in the US would happen in Europe. I also wonder what we can do to avoid the same faith. It feels like beginning of COVID all over again, where each country thought they were immune, to then realise everyone was equally screwed...

Democracy has always been a contest to get different issues and framings on political agenda. Now seems to be a contest between reality and political entertainment complex. Science struggling to compete with merchants of distraction to get attention on state of the planet, economy and society.

#neuroskyence What are your favorite papers on the idea of redundancy in the brain? E.g. how a different neural circuit can step in when the "original" is damaged? Or just how the same function can be executed in different ways within the same brain?

Live from Cambridge - setting up a new encampment for Palestine in front of Trinity College 🇵🇸 #freepalestine

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Everyone knows scientists who cherry-pick results or outright fabricate findings. Entire fields collapsed because figures were manipulated in Microsoft Paint! The system pressures to succeed, and who cheats has an edge—but when a fascist government attacks science, the whistle-blowers get blamed?

This is a really cool project! Please repost to anyone interested at the intersection between developmental cognitive neuroscience and education!

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨 We're looking for a postdoc to work on EEG and fNIRS projects with 3-18-month-old infants, looking at whether/how/when infants represent affordances: careers.ceu.edu/job-invite/8... Part of the @simonsfoundation.org SCENE project: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...