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
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Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯♂️
(With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
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...
🚨 Jewelia’s new preprint! We report the first pRF mapping in teens + reveal functional fingerprints of category regions in high-level visual cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/
Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!
Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.
Excited to share our new publication “The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia”, published in JNeurosci 🧠
➡️ www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...
with @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @mvandermosten.bsky.social 🤝
Check out @stanfordbrain.bsky.social ’s summary of it ⬇️
Now in press at Nature Communications!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Check it out if you are interested in category selectivity, the organization of visual cortex, and topographic models!
Excited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉
David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops.
📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...
How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world
Perspective by Shari Liu, Seda Karakose-Akbiyik, Joseph Outa & Minjae J. Kim
Web: go.nature.com/3Xwo40J
PDF: rdcu.be/eSMfa
We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!
More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...
Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
Figure 1 showing alignment pipeline using CLIP models on BabyView data.
Figure 2: human judgments are correlated with CLIP scores.
Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out!
New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824
Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/
We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉
I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).
See lab page and doc below for details!
infant data from experiment 1
conceptual schema for different habituation models
title page
results from experiment 2 with adults
Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:
A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard!
Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it?
We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵
Flyer for the event!
*Sharing for our department’s trainees*
🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology?
✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered!
📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025
New Open dataset alert:
🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience!
N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks!
🧵below
🚨New preprint with my stellar student Junsong
A Small-World Mind Theory of social cognition doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Big network, close connection🤯
It explains why low-dimensional findings dominate & high-dimensional evidence emerges
Naturalistic designs matter to understanding the complex mind
Can self supervised learning help understand how the brain learns to see the world?
Our latest study, led by Josephine Raugel (FAIR, ENS), is now out:
📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18226
🧵 thread below
❗New Paper Alert ❗
We found some (but overall weak) evidence for greater differential responses in brain networks underlying theory of mind inferences than those involved in empathic responses in autism. #neuroskyence #autism #openaccess
@hilaryrichardson.bsky.social
rdcu.be/eBZwE
Two new preprints from our lab!
@sabinemuzellec.bsky.social leads work on reverse(Brain➡ ANN) predictivity showing gaps in forward(ANN ➡ Brain) metrics shorturl.at/bnoFl
@marenwehrheim.bsky.social leads work on facial expression emerging from shared not segregated neural subspaces. shorturl.at/QAIl4
Job alert: I'm hiring a postdoc for my lab at CU Boulder starting Fall 2026!
We study person perception, stereotyping & prejudice, and intervention science using behavioral & neuroimaging methods.
Link: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...
Review starts Nov 1 and continues until filled.
So cool to see our project, spearheaded by Igor Bascandziev, featured in Harvard's 'Usable Knowledge'!
New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵 1/n
Lazarus et al. (2025): A simple act with a lasting impact: Holding babies skin-to-skin in the NICU helped support their development and reduced differences linked to family income. Early touch can be a powerful way to promote equity from the very start #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...
next preprint is out - ever wonder why findings about VWFA differ so much? @jyeatman.bsky.social @mayayablonski.bsky.social , Mia Fuentes-Jimenez, Hannah Stone, and I might have the answer...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.
📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵
