calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

New paper: across 3 EEG experiments, we examined how do we edit WM at test. Imagine you were asked to memorize 4 colored squares during encoding: at test, when you were given a single test probe, are you able to remove the items at irrelevant positions (upper), or do you have to keep'em (lower)? 1/n

We've known that socioeconomics (SES) matters for the 🧠. New & 🤯 is that SES drowns out all other brain associations, incl. IQ. If you train an algorithm to predict IQ from brain data, it's still way better at predicting SES. Science Mag: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @smarek0502.bsky.social 👀🧵👇

Scott Marek@smarek0502.bsky.social · 2mo ago

What matters most for childhood brain organization? We analyzed 649 variables. The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers. Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES. In Science today: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going destroy American Science

elizabethginexi.substack.com

Check out my poster at #VSS2026 in banyan breezeway tomorrow afternoon! We find that stimulus memorability parameters (hit and FA rate) robustly affect performance in a task with no recognition memory requirements (visual search with trial-unique images). With @utochkin.bsky.social and Ed Awh

@vssmtg.bsky.social l | Distracted during talks? Maybe your brain has better things to do. 🌊☀️🍹🏖️ Sunday, May 17, 9:30am, Talk Room 1 — I’ll present our new goal-competition theory with @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social.

If you are at #VSS2026 check out our poster 36.320 in the Sunday afternoon session. I'll tell what we learned about the neural signatures of stimulus memorability from EEG decoding in a large visual memory dataset In collaboration w/Leo Chang, Ed Vogel (@edvogel.bsky.social), and Ed Awh

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...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

Spatial attention and working memory are popularly thought to be tightly coupled. Yet, distinct neural activity tracks attentional breadth and WM load. In a new paper @jocn.bsky.social, we show that pupil size independently tracks breadth and load. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

We found attentional suppression might be related to re-coding salient singleton locations in a inverted format to target locations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rapid inversion of singleton distractor representations underlies learned attentional suppression

In visually complex and dynamically changing environments, humans often face the challenge of filtering out salient stimuli that are presently irrelevant to their tasks. Recent evidence suggests that ...

biorxiv.org

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

How does the visual system track moving objects while remembering the color of those objects? My latest research article (co-first with Piotr @styrkowiec.bsky.social) exploring this question using EEG is out in JoCN! @jocn.bsky.social #workingmemory #cognition #cogneuro #cogsci #neuro

Item-based Parsing of Dynamic Scenes in a Combined Attentional Tracking and Working Memory Task

Abstract. Human visual processing is limited—we can only track a few moving objects at a time and store a few items in visual working memory (WM). A shared mechanism that may underlie these performanc...

doi.org

New pre-print day! Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex 🧠 (with Ed Awh & @serences.bsky.social) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex

Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...

biorxiv.org

Very excited to announce my first paper is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using EEG, we identify an item-based measure of storage in working memory that generalizes across auditory and visual items. authors.elsevier.com/a/1ljFF3QW8S... #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #workingmemory

Splitting 5-4 (with Chief Justice Roberts joining the three Democratic appointees in dissent), #SCOTUS grants *partial* stay to Trump administration in NIH funding case; holds that challenges to grant terminations (but *not* the underlying guidance) need to be filed in the Court of Federal Claims:

Domain general frontoparietal regions show modality-dependent coding of auditory and visual rules direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

Domain general frontoparietal regions show modality-dependent coding of auditory and visual rules

Abstract. A defining feature of human cognition is our ability to respond flexibly to what we see and hear, changing how we respond depending on our current goals. In fact, we can rapidly associate al...

direct.mit.edu

Not looking forward to this getting quoted - may be one of the dumbest words committed to judicial opinion. Don't assume that "experts" are correct, but assume that judges are better at science than scientists?

UChicago has ~$108 million in NIH grants. According to most recent F&A rate info I found (2019-20), UChicago has an F&A rate of 62% for on-campus grants, so around $67million in F&A support. If the rate is cut to 15%, that’ll be a loss of $50 million in support. That’s thousands of jobs lost

One doctor’s recommendation to deny a 43-year-woman coverage “contained errors on practically every aspect” of her condition, the Labor Department said in 2012. United and other insurers continued to hire the doctor over the next decade. propub.li/3BQjJ1e

Insurers Continue to Rely on Doctors Whose Judgments Have Been Criticized by Courts

In dozens of cases ProPublica reviewed, judges found that some doctors working for these companies engaged in “selective readings” of medical evidence and “shut their eyes” to medical opinions opposing their conclusions.

propub.li

variable names *are* code comments

Terrific! Paywalls are disappearing! No more 12 month embargo between when NIH funded work appears in a journal and when it becomes accessible to all (as of December 2025). www.nih.gov/about-nih/wh...

A modern staging of Agamemnon where the chorus is referred to as “chat.”