We're hiring! 2 postdocs + 3 PhD students to join InfantNeuroAI at Trinity College Dublin: awake infant fMRI & OPM-MEG, plus computational models of how infants learn. Aims: understand infant visual cognition, infant neuroimaging methods, more energy-efficient learning 🧵 www.cusacklab.org/vacancies

New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNAS

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

pnas.org

Excited to share our review in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with @lauriebayet.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! We describe how implementing principles from child development can advance the mechanistic plausibility and capacities of AI models We packed A LOT into this review, here's a quick 🧵

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Jessica (@cantlonlab.bsky.social) lost her funding because she dared to include gender as a relevant variable in studying how people learn math. Only the enemies of truth seek to suppress the search for it. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/c...

She Studied Ways to Make People Smarter. Then Her Grant Was Cut. (Gift Article)

Jessica Cantlon had a grant with the U.S. Navy to explore whether people could improve spatial problem-solving skills through training. Then the program was cut.

nytimes.com

A stellar new developmental cog neuro lab with the coolest lab name and PI. Congrats to Tess and all her future trainees!!!

Tess Forest@tessforest.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm starting a lab at the University of Notre Dame! 🎉🍀🧠 Doors open Jan 2027. I'm most excited to meet my future students (recruiting psych grad students for 2027!), help grow a budding neuroscience area, and head home to the midwest after many years away. Please reach out! @notredame.bsky.social

Delighted to share that I’ve been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for #InfantNeuroAI The project will investigate how human infants learn to understand the visual world, by combining awake infant neuroimaging (fMRI and OPM-MEG) with computational models from AI.

This is one of the coolest things the FIT’NG society does: gather a bunch of scientists in a room to discuss big questions and unsolved problems in our field. If you are attending FIT’NG (or thinking of extending your stay after ICIS…), I highly recommend signing up!

Fetal, Infant, & Toddler Neuroimaging Group—FIT’NG@fitngin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The FIT’NG Trainee Committee is seeking enthusiastic graduate students or postdocs to serve as moderators for this year’s “Elephants in the Room” sessions on Saturday, July 11th at the Conference in Panama! If interested, please fill out this form by June 12th at 5pm EST : forms.gle/kxAw41yj9qVX...

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

Woohoo!!

Erica Busch@elbusch.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🎉🎉🎉🎉 I'm thrilled and humbled to share some major updates! (A 🧵 but TLDR: graduated from Yale, joining Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea as an IBS Young Scientist Fellow this summer, and starting as an assistant professor in Vanderbilt's College of Connected Computing in Fall 2027!)

With so many eyes on Pittsburgh during the NFL Draft this weekend, it feels like a fitting moment to share some personal news — I'm excited to be joining the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2027!

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

New paper alert🚨 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Two takeaways. First, 2- to 4-year-olds can use a process called second-order correlation (SOC) learning -- e.g., A & B go together and B & C go together, then A and C go together -- in a category context to make causal inferences.

Second-order correlation learning in 2- to 4-year-old children, and its underlying mechanism

Second-order correlation learning—or the capacity to infer an indirect relation between features based on separate direct relations—has been studied e…

sciencedirect.com

Beautiful and impressive work from Cliona and team on visual development — with awake 2 month olds in the MRI scanner (!!)

Cliona O'Doherty@clionaod.bsky.social · 8mo ago

6/7 Our results further highlight the first year of life as a time of intricate brain function. Infants possess the foundations of visual cognition to group the world from very early on. Read more in Nature Neuroscience! 📖🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41....

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

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/...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

Deep learning in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into everyday tasks and work environments. However, its adoption in medical image analys…

sciencedirect.com

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

How Prediction of the Future Affects Encoding of the Present: Cooperation or Competition?

Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...

direct.mit.edu

We can use past experience to make predictions about the future. How do predictions affect our memory for the present? My own work (tinyurl.com/42kyukch) suggests that predictions compete with memory. But other recent work (tinyurl.com/2ekd4wr6) found the opposite--cooperation! What's going on here?

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Nature Portfolio@natureportfolio.nature.com · 8mo ago

Training people to activate a part of the brain linked to reward and positive expectations may be associated with an increase in the body’s immune response to a vaccine, according to a study in Nature Medicine. go.nature.com/4sQo3mK #medsky 🧪

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath. p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Agency alters memory organization during free recall - PubMed

This study examined how agentic decisions in the absence of explicit rewards influence memory organization. Participants studied lists of items to assign as gifts to two characters-either choosing freely (Choice group) or following instructions (Fixed group). During free recall, participants in the …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This project is trying to raise science awareness by doing short videos about cancelled research — including mine.

What We'll Never Know@never-know.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A new video in the What We'll Never Know series, featuring Jessica Cantlon's groundbreaking research on improving spatial intelligence 🧪@sciencehomecoming.bsky.social @cantlonlab.bsky.social

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-...

Join us on Thursday, December 4th at 10am EST (7am PST, 3pm GMT) for our next free Functional Analysis Fall event: Brain age modeling with fetal and neonatal neuroimaging data, featuring @huilisun.bsky.social and Dr. Kiho Im! Register at: tinyurl.com/FAF3brainage

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🥳 So pleased to share our new publication: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... The whole @kinderstudien.bsky.social lab got together to do a little scientific retreat last year and this is the result - a truly developmental perspective on the phenomenon of interpersonal neural synchrony 🧠🧠 👨‍🍼👩‍🍼

A developmental framework of interpersonal neural synchrony

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS), the temporal alignment of brain activities between individuals, has been proposed as a biomarker for successful …

sciencedirect.com

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

If Books Could Kill@ifbookspod.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

Inspiring Q and A with Dick Aslin! Look for more such content over the next few months from @psychscience.bsky.social www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Collective Action Is Essential for Universities in Current Political Climate

In this Q&A, Richard Aslin shares his thoughts on the real meaning of “academic freedom” and why members of the higher education community have reason to be cautiously optimistic.

psychologicalscience.org

Join us on Tuesday, November 18th at 11:00am EST for our next free Functional Analysis Fall event: Encoding Models for Understanding High-Level Representations in Early Development, featuring Dr. Freddy Kamps and Dr. Sarah Jessen! Register at: tinyurl.com/fitngFAF2rep...