Marco Gandolfo

Multi-task fMRI outperforms resting-state fMRI for revealing task-invariant organization of the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.09.710558v1

Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think.

We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science.

Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

How the brain predicts objects in a changing world | Radboud University In everyday life, we often encounter objects that are partially hidden or only seen from the corner of our eye. Our brain is remarkably good at keeping track of objects, and new research reveals how t...

New research from @peelen.bsky.social, shows our brain actively predicts how they should look based on the 3D structure of the environment. Even when objects are temporarily hidden from view, their expected orientation can be decoded from activity in the visual cortex. 👇

www.ru.nl/en/donders-i...

Now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: our short response to @neurosteven.bsky.social & Edward de Haan's recent paper on the binding problem. We argue that the binding problem arises because of tradeoffs faced by any information processing system, including the brain and DNNs. shorturl.at/RGXzt

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Home - ESCAN 2026 ESCAN 2026 is the 9th ESCAN Conference, the biennial meeting of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The ESCAN 2026 website is now live! → escan2026.eu

Join us in Rome, 3–6 June 2026, for the next European meeting in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

Find the registration info, venue details, and updates all in one place.

More news soon.
#ESCAN2026 #Neuroscience #Rome2026

Scientific Director Donders Institute | Radboud University Do you want to work as a Scientific Director Donders Institute at the Donders Institute? Check our vacancy!

Donders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠

Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Meetings Resources, data and code to help you run a TMS laboratory - TMSMultiLab/TMSMultiLab

This month's #TMS MultiLab meeting will be given by @phivph.com Phivos Phylactou, on:

"The eyes are the window to t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶u̶l̶ brain excitability"

Friday 28th, 14:00 GMT

👀🧠🧲⚡️

Get the meeting link from our GitHub pages or Slack channel - get in touch if you can't find it!

github.com/TMSMultiLab/...

Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory | Radboud University Do you want to work as a Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory at the Faculty of Social Sciences? Check our vacancy!

🚨🧠🚨 POSTDOC POSITION 🚨🧠🚨 in my lab: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Connectivity in Working Memory. Deadline 12 Nov! Apply via website; please repost.

Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain Abstract. The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)sc...

🧠 Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

(still uncorrected proofs, but they should post the corrected one soon--also OA is forthcoming, for now PDF at brainandexperience.org/pdf/10.1162-...)

👀 Interacting or non-interacting: that is the research question...

📢 New pre-print out on social interaction perception in preverbal infants: osf.io/preprints/ps.... In collaboration with @Emilie Serraille, @jrhochmann.bsky.social and @ljubapi.bsky.social.

🧵 An animated thread 👇

#neuroskyence

PhD Position: Theory of Learning in Artificial and Biologically Inspired Neural Networks | Radboud University Do you want to work as a PhD candidate Theory of Learning in Artificial and Biologically Inspired Neural Network? Check our vacancy!

Please RT - Open PhD position in my group at the Donders Center for Neuroscience, Radboud University.

We're looking for a PhD candidate interested in developing theories of learning in neural networks.

Applications are open until October 20th.

For more info: www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

🚨WHOHOO!! I am happy to share that I received the #ERCStG for my project PRECHRON: The Prefrontal Chronometer for Organizing Working Memory.

I am going to study #neuraloscillations during #workingmemory at the @rug.nl @rug-gmw.bsky.social

#brainstimulation #TMS #EEG

Donders Cube Award for Sharon Unsworth during Donders Day | Radboud University As part of the Donders Sessions, this year’s annual poster session was expanded into a full-day event featuring engaging talks and poster presentations. Sharon Unsworth was awarded the Donders Cube fo...

🎉 #Donders #Cube Award for Sharon Unsworth 🎉 for her outstanding commitment to the #Kletskoppen #Festival.

🏆 Poster prizes went to:

• Danielle Houwing (MPI)
• Marco Gandolfo (DCC)
• Chinmaya Mishra (MPI)
• Zehra Kazmi (DCN)
• Umut Can ALTIN (DCC)

www.ru.nl/en/donders-i...

The TMS-RAT v1.0 is now being tested!

It's a checklist / guidance tool to help researchers report #TMS studies & to facilitate quantitative comparisons in #systematicreviews & #meta-analyses

All the data will be made freely available; an interactive website will be coming. Stay tuned!

tms-rat.org

PhD Call 📢📢📢
Are you interested in a PhD in Cognitive and Social Neuroscience? Join us! We are booking for highly motivated and inspired future researchers! Waiting for you in Rome!

🗓️ Deadline 19th June

Useful links👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻
phd.uniroma1.it/web/concorso...

phd.uniroma1.it/web/pagina.a...

Visitors muZIEum contribute to science | Radboud University A study by Marco Gandolfo shows how our brain processes information and how this differs by gender and age. 14 thousand participants in this study were visitors to the muZIEum in Nijmegen who took par...

👁️💡 How much do we really see?

@marco-gandolfo.bsky.social reveals how our brains process the unexpected, with surprising differences across age and gender.

With over 14,000 participants at muZIEum, it’s the largest public #inattentional #blindness experiment to date.

🔗 www.ru.nl/en/donders-i...

New preprint out!

“Separate Neural Representations for Physical and Communicative Social Interactions: Evidence from Data-driven Voxel Decomposition” w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social @lisik.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

A collection of modules, datasets, and other resources for learning to program in R, geared toward students in psychology and neuroscience: ritcheym.github.io/ppn/

PhD position opening in Padova. It is a multidisciplinary project in Experimental Aesthetics and Psychology of Art.
www.bertamini.org/lab/MIRACLE....

Human head models and populational framework for simulating brain stimulations - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Human head models and populational framework for simulating brain stimulations

🚨New Publication🚨 Do you work with e-field modeling in NIBS? Do you not always want to use Ernie, but you have no access to MRIs?

We share 100 fully preprocessed head models for e-field simulations based on the HCP.

Thanks! @alekseichuk.bsky.social & Taylor Berger

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

This work in collaboration with @Paul E. Downing and @Cosimo Urgesi has now been published published in NeuroImage 🚨
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interactions revealed by Garner tasks likely emerge during the perceptual analysis of the stimuli, rather than via top-down links between the social categories. Further, our findings confirm that ccPAS is a promising protocol for investigating of bottom-up and top-down processes in visual cognition!

After boosting forward connectivity between V1 and the EBA the interference of sex on emotion judgments was eliminated, suggesting that attentional interferences for body judgments emerge at a forward stage of processing.

In a second experiment we use an offline TMS protocol (cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation) to strengthen forward or feedback connectivity between the primary visual and body-selective cortex.

Using the Garner selective attention paradigm we show that judgements of body fearful and happy emotion is slowed down by the task irrelevant variation of body sex.

This work in collaboration with @Paul E. Downing and @Cosimo Urgesi has now been published published in NeuroImage 🚨
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A body detection inversion effect revealed by a large-scale inattentional blindness experiment As a social species, humans preferentially attend to the faces and bodies of other people. Previous research revealed specialized cognitive mechanisms…

New Paper out in @Cognition with @peelen.bsky.social !🚨📣
In a large-scale (N = 13539!) inattentional blindness experiment ran on naive museum visitors we demonstrate visual sensitivity to the 🚶‍♀️ upright human form 🚶‍♂️
@dondersinst.bsky.social

Open access link
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Donders Citylab | Radboud University Donders Citylab fosters curiosity for science and brings researchers and society together to learn, connect, educate, and make discoveries about our brains.

Thanks also to the Donders CityLab - www.ru.nl/en/donders-i... for making this collaboration with a local museum possible!