New paper out: Led by super grad student Jim Zhang and in collaboration with Greg Cogan, we review and synthesize Insights into the neural mechanisms supporting cognitive stability and flexibility from human intracranial electroencephalography. For free access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nRYWY3M3p...
Changrun Huang
@changrun-huang.bsky.social
Postdoc @ Egner Lab | Duke University Cognitive control | Distractor suppression | Statistical learning
We're recruiting postdocs to study how people build structured knowledge from experience & use it to act flexibly. Behavioral work, fMRI, computational & AI models, with a lifespan focus. You don't need experience with every method; fit & curiosity matter most. Please repost & share! 🧠
Finally out: my review in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social covering how my lab and others have been ‘Looking into working memory through micro eye movements’ over the years. What does the microsaccade bias buy us? A lot I argue. Go see for yourself at: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Redirecting
doi.org
Focus. Relax. Focus again. Turns out people would rather not do that! With my amazing mentors Wouter Kool and Julie Bugg, we show that people actively avoid switching between control states even in a single task, and trade off this demand against conflict. More in Wouter's thread and paper below!
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.
🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵
Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n
Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.14.724968v1
Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵
Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand - Nature Neuroscience
By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...
nature.com
Investigations into whether we can search for multiple targets in a simultaneous fashion have led to mixed findings. In this new PsychScience article, we report that people CAN search concurrently, but don't always DO so... 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Traveling waves steer neural timing across cortex, causally linking wave propagation to working-memory performance and sensory processing. Traveling-wave transcranial alternating current stimulation (twtACS) causally links neural timing to cognitive function doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
doi.org
Announcing: a new interactive online tool for a quick and simple start of encoding or encoding: 🧠 fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, spikes… preprocessing 💬 text 🔊 audio ▶️ video 🏞️ image… embeddings 📦 pip install neuralset 🔍https://facebookresearch.github.io/neuroai/neuralset/index.html
Past experiences shape current selection. But when and how strong are past and present targets represented in the brain? In our newest paper, we show that past and present search targets are concurrently represented in the brain. Out now in @plosbiology.org doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience
Past and present goals are represented concurrently during visual search
Past experience and our current goals guide what information to focus on. But how and when does the brain represent the past and the present? This new study shows that the brain represents the past an...
doi.org
What do we look for when searching for objects in our daily-life environments? Very happy that I can now share this review, together with @suryagayet.bsky.social , @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social🥳 A brief thread below!
Online Now: Attention in the wild: balancing flexibility and stability
the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Informal connections outweigh coauthorship ties in academic impact | PNAS
Past work has documented the importance of formal collaboration, particularly coauthorship, in increasing research productivity and innovation. How...
pnas.org
I will retire from the VU this year (but not from doing science). As a full-circle moment: here is paper on the paradigm with which it all started for me some 35 years ago, in the journal where it all started. A paper on the do’s and don’ts using the additional singleton paradigm. rdcu.be/ffUfa
35+ years of the additional singleton task: Design features and guidelines
rdcu.be
A multi-lab replication effort (@eegmanylabs.bsky.social) of the contralateral delay activity (CDA) has just been published online! In brief, the set-size effect appears to be robustly observed, but CDA correlation with VWM capacity is not reliably strong. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
Redirecting
doi.org
ESCoP 2026 will be held in Hangzhou (31 Aug–4 Sept). Great keynote speakers, strong programme, and a chance to experience China. Easy travel via Shanghai + high-speed train. Abstracts still open! www.escop-copm-2026.com
New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)
📣 Postdoc in Human Neurophysiology & Neurorehab 📣 The Real-Time NeuroRehabilitation Lab at the U of Iowa is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar! Motor control, EEG/TMS, neurorehabilitation, and real-time multimodal methods. 📅 Summer/Fall 2026 📧 sara-hussain@uiowa.edu Please share!
When the visual system extracts regularities from the environment, what coordinate system does it use? doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... doi.org/10.1037/xhp0...
APA PsycNet
doi.org
Dr. Matthew Warburton and I put together a guide on "how to conduct behavioural experiments online"—something we wish we had when we were getting started. Hopefully it’s useful, and we’d very much welcome any feedback!
How to conduct behavioural experiments online
Children get better at reasoning from memory as they grow up. But is it the same brain process getting stronger, or something more fundamental changing? In our new paper, we use fMRI and computational modeling to test that question directly 🧵
🚨🚨JOB ALERT🚨🚨 I'm hiring a cogsci/philosophy/compneuro postdoc at @ucl.ac.uk @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH486/p... Come to London & work on frameworks for "testing" for consciousness using Bayesian belief updating & latent variable modeling. Pls share!
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL
Discover Postdoctoral Research Fellow jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.
jobs.ac.uk
This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-lived adjustments and slower, more enduring adaptations. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Cognitive flexibility versus stability via activation-based and weight-based adaptations - Communications Psychology
This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-liv...
nature.com
New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
Constituent-constrained word prediction during language comprehension - Nature Neuroscience
Zou et al. reveal a key difference between human brains and large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategi...
nature.com
We're happy to release NeuralSet: a simple, fast, scalable package for Neuro-AI Supports: 🧠 fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, spikes… preprocessing 💬 text 🔊 audio ▶️ video 🏞️ image… embeddings 📦 pip install neuralset 🔍 facebookresearch.github.io/neuroai/neur... 📄 kingjr.github.io/files/neural... 🧵 Details👇
Just wrote a new blogpost trying to summarize my thoughts on the question of how and whether to use AI for research in psychology and cognitive science: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/usin...
Using AI to improve (not automate away) academic research
Blog about fatherhood, langauge, developmental psychology, and cognitive science.
babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com
Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social & @valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.
We’re hiring! Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me? We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven. RTs much appreciated! www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...
PhD researcher for the project: Cognitive Control and Multitasking in the Digital Age
We are looking for a motivated PhD researcher to study the behavioral and neural dynamics between cognitive control and multitasking in young and aging populations.
kuleuven.be
This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab: Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex @nature.com "..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex - Nature
Face cells in the macaque inferotemporal cortex are initially able to detect faces and then rapidly switch to a face-specific neural code to discriminate between different face identities.
nature.com
My first paper with @jkragel.bsky.social and Joel Voss came out yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! It’s real! :D www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS
The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...
pnas.org