Jennifer Bussell PhD

An Animated Look at Noguchi's Experimental Playgrounds That Were Never Built "I think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious and evocative; thus educational," Isamu Noguchi said.

An Animated Look at Noguchi’s Experimental Playgrounds That Were Never Built www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/isam...

Want to know more about birding in the city, and get to try it out?

Come join me to discuss @ryangoldberg.bsky.social's great new book Bird City on March 21 in Washington Heights!

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Introducing: Cosmology 101 with Katie Mack YouTube video by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

I've been going through these videos for some work reasons, and they're so well done. Just great work all around by @astrokatie.com and @perimeterinstitute.ca.

I remind myself: I don’t know everything! Never will. Nor will anybody else. And that’s fine! I root my sense of worth/ego more in my drive & curiosity & compassion - I’m the right person to work on the complex problems I do because I’ll always strive to understand *more* & help more people.

Yes!! And the normalization of imposter syndrome™️ in spaces like academia is just a ploy to exploit healthy awareness of the limits of your growing expertise to get you to constantly run yourself into the ground, chasing a sense of security/belonging they’ll always withhold. Carrot on a stick.

📣 Excited to announce the 2nd edition of our workshop
“Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Theory, Autonomy, Embodiment & Environment”
at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2026!!
🧠🤖🌍🪰🐟🐭💪🧘🏃

🗓️ March 17, 2026
📍 Cascais, Portugal
🔗 Speaker lineup and schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io

Excited to share our latest work in @nature.com showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability Abstract. We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N =

New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation Animals in rapidly changing environments, such as cities, should optimize information gathering to learn about and efficiently forage in these heterog…

Raccoon information seeking! Very cool work on raccoons optimizing information gain in puzzle solving from @sarahba.bsky.social and lab:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lack of reviewers threatens robustness of neuroscience literature Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias peer review.

Broad peer review is crucial for a healthy scientific literature, but neuroscientists turn down review requests too often. Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias the literature, writes @jvoigts.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/l...

So cool, can't wait to read, congrats!

The inferred value of unchosen options spreads to related items in memory Counterfactual thinking — considering what could have come of choosing the other path — can facilitate inference. Previous studies have demonstrated t…

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!

Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?

In short, yes!

Its official! Excited to share this and grateful to the amazing team that came together to see this project through!

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Publicly-funded research data are a public good. But the infrastructures housing these data face mounting risks — funding instability, policy shifts + capacity constraints.

Last fall, we kicked off a community-driven strategic planning effort to build a more resilient research data ecosystem. (1/3)

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Here's How Many Jobs HHS Has Lost Since RFK Jr. Took Over See the totals from NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS, too

4,049 people gone from NIH compared to 2024, an 18% loss in staff.

www.medpagetoday.com/washington-w...

Scientist's way of saying 'I ❤️ you'

"I found this paper/preprint that made me think of your project."
"I checked the mice/cells/plates already."
"I just sent you the edits you requested."
"I have a slide/diagram that will work for that."
"I had that problem with [lab equipment], I have a fix."

This is what I call, in Holding It Together, the "myth of the supermom"—the idea that kids are under threat (eg, of not getting into "elite" colleges, and thus not having the "elite" life that goes with that), and that moms are the only ones who can save them, but only by sacrificing themselves.

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

Astrocytes enable amygdala neural representations supporting memory - Nature Astrocytes in the basolateral amygdala dynamically track fear state and support fear memory retrieval and extinction.

Really nice work from the Holmes lab looking at amygdala astrocytes in fear memory and extinction!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

They came to Massachusetts to cure disease. Now they’re packing up their labs. - The Boston Globe In a first-of-its-kind survey, the Globe asked hundreds of scientists about the impact of federal funding cuts.

One Boston Children’s Hospital researcher said, “This is like asking, how do you think dropping an atomic bomb on New York City will affect the future of Broadway musicals? This is a generational loss of innovation, technology, and economic power.” www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

On this day that supports inclusive futures for women and girls in science, let's not forget all the women that were sidelined, ignored, or forced out of science because they:
- had children
- prioritised family/caring
- did science differently
- questioned boundaries & norms
- fought the patriarchy

From Chand: “of potential interest”. Our lab’s first dataset! Tian and friends used Neuropixels to record from 7,500 units across DLPFC and PMd to show how contextual decision making (specifically, XOR computation) occurs and how this differs by location in DLPFC and between areas.

Temporal-orbitofrontal pathway regulates choices across physical reward and visual novelty Novelty can directly impact valuation of future outcomes, affecting how we choose among rewards such as food or money. This is the case even when novelty is objectively valueless. Here, Ogasawara et a...

! New paper from the lab !

How does novelty impact value-based decision making ?

What are the circuits and what mechanisms do they implement?

Congratulations to Dr. Takaya Ogasawara and team

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

Freeman Hrabowski III, the President Emeritus from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, giving a TED talk.

This is a powerful message from Freeman Hrabowski.

🧵

1/12

Prefrontal neural geometry of learned cues guides motivated behaviours - Nature The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes the value, salience and valence of learned stimuli along distinct neural dimensions, and the geometry of these representations shapes motivated behaviours in ...

Can you easily distinguish between value, valence, and salience?

Probably not, but the prefrontal cortex of mice seems to achieve this by creating a sort of multidimensional orthogonal neural space, where each dimension corresponds to one of these subjective elements

www.nature.com/articles/s41...