Lots of stories across Pennsylvania about NIH grant terminations at Pitt and Penn. This is why speaking out matters. Even Congress critters who generally support the administration get pressured into actually supporting their constituents. www.wesanews.org/health-scien...

McCormick, Fetterman question termination of more than 100 health research grants

Pennsylvania’s senators are demanding information about more than 150 health research grants canceled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this summer.

wesanews.org

Lab member updates! Sad but so excited for both of them that @paigesev.bsky.social is heading off to do her PhD with @maureenritchey.bsky.social at UCLA!! And SO thrilled to welcome @daniel-carstensen.bsky.social here as PhD student & @sydneybergstrom.bsky.social as RA!! schapirolab.org/people.html

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.

nature.com

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

Also if you're at #CCN2026 come chat with me about Minds, Machines, and Brains @mmb-journal.bsky.social A new journal we are launching with @mitpress.bsky.social with my co-EICs Kendrick Kay & Ellie Pavlick, and the rest of the wonderful editorial board: direct.mit.edu/mmb/pages/ed...

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · last mo.

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Really excited about this project! If you want to chat about repulsion and representational changes in hippocampus, come by our poster at #CCN2026 tomorrow at 9:30!

Anna Schapiro@annaschapiro.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Here's where to find the Penn Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience next week! See you in NYC!

Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.

Yay, the field needs this! Excited to serve as an associate editor!

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · last mo.

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Here's where to find the Penn Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience next week! See you in NYC!

If you have an academic in your life, please be gentle with them this weekend because they're probably freaking the fuck out.

Joseph M. Adelman@jmadelman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Because the 1st is a Saturday, “How is it August already?!” will be observed today, Friday, July 31, 2026. Please panic accordingly.

So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/f...

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…

retractionwatch.com

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques - Nature Neuroscience

In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...

nature.com

Please spread the word: We’re recruiting a postdoc! 📣 We study how shifting brain & attentional states shape memory and how people experience their worlds. fMRI/iEEG + a fun, supportive lab community + space to pursue your own ideas. 📅 Apply by Aug 15 tinyurl.com/fx5k7teb

What should we make of recent language model advancements in mathematics? In my new post, I reflect on long-standing cognitive debates about symbols and neural networks in light of this progress. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/symbols-ne...

Symbols, neural networks, and mathematical intelligence

Some reflections on connectionism and the basis of higher-level cognition

infinitefaculty.substack.com

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Unsupervised nonmotor learning in the human cerebellum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.740142v1

We have now reached the "AI models escaping their test environments to conduct autonomous cyberattacks" part of the story

Techmeme@techmeme.com · 2mo ago

OpenAI says the Hugging Face breach was driven by a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" (Ina Fried/Axios) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies - Nature Machine Intelligence

Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...

nature.com

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

My fMRI study from the Mack Lab (@drmack.bsky.social) is now published on JNeuro! Here, we look into how hippocampal subfields flexibly update category knowledge representations in the face of novel exceptions. Check out the article here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU....

Distinct Hippocampal Subfield Representational Shifts Underlie Category Exception Learning

When we encounter an exception to our prior category knowledge, such as a leaf-like butterfly that perceptually diverges from the butterflies we commonly see, we must update our knowledge to reconcile...

doi.org

"NSF employees are now concerned that the $1 billion of withheld funds will not be released. If they are not, the combination of withheld funds and clawbacks would result in funding cuts of more than 30% for most directorates compared with their planned spending for 2025"

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New: The National Science Foundation is preparing to claw back some $500 million in funds from some of its core science programs in physics, math, computer science, and engineering in order to fund a project from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Why do we forget our dreams? Dreams are the kind of experiences that in principle should stick well in memory: emotional and often bizarre. If we would encounter typical dream content during wakefulness, we would likely never forget it. Yet, we forget most dreams soon after awakening. (1/3)

And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦

Dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions

Abstract. The hippocampus is involved in learning predictive associations, responding to prediction errors as well as representing predictions of future in

royalsocietypublishing.org

Peter Kok@peterkok.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

Out today! Our (w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social) review of the alignment between the C-HORSE model and the hippocampal structure learning literature. We find strong congruence with the model's key principles and propose several avenues for future investigation!

Evidence for complementary learning systems within the hippocampus

Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str

royalsocietypublishing.org

Very excited to share our new review on C-HORSE, our model of the hippocampus! We think there is very encouraging alignment between C-HORSE proposals and the extant empirical literature, though we also note plenty of areas for further model development. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Evidence for complementary learning systems within the hippocampus

Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str

royalsocietypublishing.org

Keep those comments on the OMB proposed rule coming! www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Comments Flood OMB Proposal on Political Control of Grants

The White House Office of Management and Budget has so far received 90,000 public comments on its plans as scientific and other groups rally against them.

insidehighered.com

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

Volume 381 Issue 1954 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

royalsocietypublishing.org

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. New work w/ @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social – part of the theme issue on hippocampal predictions!

The hippocampus rapidly integrates sequence representations during novel multistep predictions

Abstract. Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the

royalsocietypublishing.org

The dean of Yale Law School and some members of its faculty are trying to stop a settlement between the university and the Trump administration, warning that an agreement could jeopardize Yale’s independence, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.

Yale Law School Fights to Stop Trump Deal

nytimes.com