I'll be recruiting PhD students (2027 entry) and a postdoc to join the lab at Berkeley. Interests: • continuous person perception in interactive contexts • impression management and its biases • social perception in digital spaces Get in touch if there's overlap. Very excited for this next chapter!

I will be recruiting a lab manager to start in fall 2026 and will be accepting applications for Ph.D. students to start in fall 2027. For more information (& contact info), please reach out through my website: jlcrawford.netlify.app

Jennifer L. Crawford

Postdoctoral Fellow

jlcrawford.netlify.app

🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu) "Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks" We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context. How might this work...? 🧵1/8

Your stomach called – your striatum picked up! But does this actually happen in humans? Using simultaneous dopamine PET/fMRI, we show that the gut hormone ghrelin helps the brain adjust motivation to current metabolic need. Here’s what we found👇 Preprint: shorturl.at/pq4A3 #neuroskyence #🩺

We’re hiring a technician!! We’re an inclusive team of behavioral neuroscientists trying to discover the brain circuits of learning, decision making, and habit. More info👇 wassumlab.psych.ucla.edu/join-the-lab/ Job posting: jobs.ucla.edu/jobs/8968

📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly 🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ

Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others

Nature Communications - When learning to make choices that simultaneously affect the self and others, asymmetric encoding of information guides future social behaviors across mutually beneficial,...

rdcu.be

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Thrilled to share our new preprint highlighting distinct neurocomputational mechanisms underlying how reward and punishment determine adaptive cognitive control - a massive fMRI study and collaborative team effort with the @shenhavlab.bsky.social 🧠 Link here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control

Human motivation is fundamentally shaped by one's expectations of the reward they could earn for good performance or the punishment they would avoid for poor performance. However, the extent to which ...

biorxiv.org

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

So... I did some analysis of grants that did receive noncompetitive renewals. In particular, I looked a those award where the title of the grant changed. Warning: The results are just what I expected, but oooph... 1/4

a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket .

ALT: a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket .

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New preprint🔊🧓: Why do we trust our friends more? We show that people are more efficient at evaluating information when making trust decisions about friends. This is preserved across the adult life span. W/ @jjfcastrellon.bsky.social . Feedback welcome: osf.io/tkpmv_v1

How do children figure out what other people believe, especially when those beliefs are wrong? And what kinds of mental effort does it take to get that right? New paper out now:

I updated my NIH D-SPAN repo (github.com/wj-mitchell/...) to reflect the current state of the mechanism, which - like other diversity awards - is not good. It made my day the handful of times folks reached out to share how it helped. I'm leaving it otherwise unaltered in memoriam.

GitHub - wj-mitchell/DSPAN_Details: Information and Materials Related to My NIH DSPAN F99/K00 Award

Information and Materials Related to My NIH DSPAN F99/K00 Award - wj-mitchell/DSPAN_Details

github.com

Exclusive: Weeks after President Donald Trump’s administration ordered NIH to pull $250 million in biomedical research grants to Columbia University, the agency is freezing all remaining grant money owed to the university until further notice. scim.ag/4if5Rg1

NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University

Amid negotiations with Trump, the university could risk losing nearly $700 million

scim.ag

It’s here! It’s here! Our Black In Neuro Annual Report for FY23-24 (July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024) 🎉 We would like to thank our BIN team, Daniela Franco for preparing this report, and Ni-ka Ford for the beautiful cover art 😍 static1.squarespace.com/static/5f022... 🧵 1/8

New work by Mercedes Munoz with @yarrowdunham.bsky.social @olsonista.bsky.social Kristin Pauker & May Ling Halim! White kids are above chance in ingroup biases in attitudes, resource allocation & interpersonal distance; results vary for Black, Latine, & Asian kids online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

every person involved in this needs to be in prison

Jenny Cohn@jennycohn.bsky.social · last yr.

“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”

I’m at SAS! Come check out my poster during tomorrow’s session if you want to hear about my undergrad thesis work!

This is a fucking shitty ass day but at some point STEM faculty have to recognize that what we are seeing happen with federal funding of biomedical research through the NIH and NSF is being used and manipulated to punish and defund higher education institutions.

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

Los Angeles people: join us 12pm March 7 for a rally for science at the Federal Building in Westwood, and please spread the word to any pro-science folks you know. @standupforscience.bsky.social @latimes.com @ktla.com @abc7.bsky.social @kcrw.com @laist.com @crooked.com @nbcla.com @foxla.bsky.social

So excited to announce Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration conference: 30th Sept-1st Oct @Brown University. Amazing speakers sites.google.com/view/informa... and free! Abstract submissions open until 7th July w/ Romy Frömer, Ohad Dan, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Matt Nassar. Please share!

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨 Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv

A dual-pathway architecture for stress to disrupt agency and promote habit - Nature

Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain path...

nature.com

Firings are happening right now at the National Science Foundation. Essential staff are being cut. This isn’t about the budget. If it was, they’d be going after the military (17%) or state appropriations (38%). NSF is 0.7% of the federal budget. All federal employees make up only 4% of the budget.

Thanks to all of the NIHers and their friends who reached out to me. I am still here (DM me or Signal jeremymberg.78) I still have a very incomplete picture but based on what I have been told, the damage to NIH and to many wonderful people who work(ed) there is/was impossible for me to imagine 1/n

The damage today (actually yesterday) to the intramural program appears to especially bad. It also appears (although I need more confirmation) that most or all of the tenure track investigators in their first 2 years in several, and perhaps all, institutes were terminated. 7/n

Get in dorks, we're going protesting! STAND UP FOR SCIENCE WITH US ON MARCH 7TH, 2025 WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL Because science is for everyone! Find us at standupforscience2025.org #standupforscience2025 #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

BREAKING: 22 states sue NIH over Trump administration's new 15% cap on overhead for federal research grants. Suit filed federal court in Boston contends lifesaving research 'will grind to a halt' under the policy. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

F99/R00 AND K99/R00 DIVERSITY AWARD APPLICANTS If you have applied for a F99/R00 or K99/R00 Diversity award and the study section for review is not listed on your eRA Commons page, please reach out to me. DM me, email berg.grants.2029@gmail.com, Signal jeremymberg.78 THANK YOU

a picture of a cartoon character with the words call me on it

ALT: a picture of a cartoon character with the words call me on it

media.tenor.com

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.