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

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

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

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.

My lab at USC is recruiting! 1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829 2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/

October office hours now posted for 10/10 1-3 pm EDT. Theme=applications (for lab manager jobs, grad school, post-docs, fac jobs, whatever you're applying for) but feel free to bring unrelated questions too! Sign up here: calendly.com/lah2201/open.... #AcademicSky #PhdSky #PsychSciSky

Open Office Hours: October 2025 - Larisa Heiphetz Solomon

calendly.com

Larisa Heiphetz Solomon@drlarisa.bsky.social · 11mo ago

1. Open office hours are back for 2025-2026! Chat with me about whatever job-related questions are on your mind. First set on 9/16, 10:30-12:30, via Zoom. Sign up here: calendly.com/lah2201/open.... More info in thread below. #AcademicSky #PhdSky #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #CogPsyc

In the latest #UndertheCortex episode, cognitive scientists @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social‬ of ‪@mit.edu ‬and @kosakowski.bsky.social of ‪@harvard.edu‬ discuss their groundbreaking findings about the development of the brain’s face-processing network.

How Our Brains Grasp Faces

Podcast: In this episode, cognitive scientists Rebecca Saxe of MIT and Heather Kosakowski join host Scott Sleek to discuss their groundbreaking findings about the development of the brain’s face-proce...

psychologicalscience.org

We were blown away by the public response to our findings that the infant brain can store memories. Many people wrote to share with us their first memories. To help us capture these reports, we created a short, anonymous survey. We hope you might also consider taking it. Please share with others! 🧠🧪

Tristan Yates@tristansyates.bsky.social · last yr.

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The question we ask: when do face responses arise in human infant cortex? Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists (my two disciplines) have different intuitions.

Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · last yr.

Very excited to share this new paper, out this week. An attempt to express an idea I have been working on for more than a decade. Responses, questions, critiques, suggestions encouraged!

Very excited to share this new paper, out this week. An attempt to express an idea I have been working on for more than a decade. Responses, questions, critiques, suggestions encouraged!

Heather L Kosakowski@kosakowski.bsky.social · last yr.

In our recent review, @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social & I bring together fMRI & fNIRS findings from the last decade to argue that babies not only perceive faces but they also attribute meaning to those faces. It’s a short read and we’d love to hear your thoughts. (4/5) doi.org/10.1177/0963...

When you see this image, does it make you wonder what that baby is thinking. Do you think the baby is merely perceiving a set of shapes or do you think that the baby is also inferring meaning from the face they are looking at? (1/5)

This month’s “Liftoff” features @jocelynbreton.bsky.social discussing the importance of patience when opening a lab. And @vivianpaulun.bsky.social shares how she'll use a traditional German custom in her lab to foster a supportive and uplifting culture. #neuroskyence bit.ly/4hFNosx

Liftoff: New lab alerts

Learn about early-career scientists starting their own labs.

thetransmitter.org

Please share Dick Aslin's excellent blog on indirect costs: dickaslin.substack.com/p/are-we-pay...

Are we paying too much for biomedical research?

Trump's attack on NIH

dickaslin.substack.com

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

As if there wasn’t enough to worry about… It turns out the Salience (SAL) and Parietal Memory Networks (PMN) are the same thing! 😩😩😩 🧵

In rough periwinkle snails, embryos form and mature inside the brood pouch at different rates. When it’s time to hatch, youngsters may have to crawl out of mom’s body and into the world on their own.

These snails give live birth, and it’s the babies that may do the labor

Protecting eggs in mom’s body may have given rough periwinkle snails an advantage over egg-laying cousins, letting them spread to far more coastline.

bit.ly

The official website for the #DSPAN F99/K00 transition award is down, together with the official #NINDSDiversity social media account and webpage. This is beyond terrifying. neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov/archived/tra...

Keep in touch with NINDS #DSPANscholars here 🧠 Reply or DM to be added! go.bsky.app/TQdWJr3

NINDS DSPAN Scholars

Join the conversation

go.bsky.app

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

Troland Research Award – NAS

Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within ...

nasonline.org

✨ Do you know anyone who is making a real impact in area of increasing environmental sustainability in neuroimaging research? 🌎 🍃 🏆 Nominate them for an OHBM Sustainability Award today! The recipient will receive $2500 USD! See below for award terms 👇 www.humanbrainmapping.org/i4a/pages/in...

The Organization for Human Brain Mapping@ohbmofficial.bsky.social · 2y ago

🎉 Award Nominations Are Open! 🏆 Nominate outstanding individuals for the 2025 Annual Meeting in Brisbane! 🗓️ Open: Dec 19, 2024 – Feb 4, 2025 🌟 Celebrate excellence in your field. 🔗 Link in comments! #AwardNominations #OHBM2025

😎 SPAN2025 Keynotes, invited symposia speakers, and sponsored symposia just dropped! Take a look at who will be at SPAN2025 and then submit your abstract so you can be there too! More invited speakers will be announced soon. Visit our website for all the details: philandneuro.com

so excited about this one, out now in American Psychologist, "The Detection of Automatic Behavior in Other People" (with Ilona Bass & me) link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-... pre-print: osf.io/preprints/ps...

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None" osf.io/preprints/ps... (this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

New paper from our lab, by Mark Saddler, using machine learning to test the role of temporal coding in hearing. Here is a quick summary. (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Models optimized for real-world tasks reveal the task-dependent necessity of precise temporal coding in hearing - Nature Communications

Ears encode sound with precisely timed spikes, but the perceptual role of this temporal coding remains uncertain. Here, the authors report that high-fidelity temporal coding is necessary for neural ne...

nature.com

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...

Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz@laurasn.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Manybabies4 paper is out! Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1000 babies tested in 37 labs; "Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition"

We are now up to 78 accounts on our Black In Neuro starter pack! Be sure to check back and make sure you have everyone added 🤗 Please let us know if we missed you! #BlackInSTEM #Neuroskyence #Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 go.bsky.app/F8PpdPe

The Manybabies4 paper is out! Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1000 babies tested in 37 labs; "Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition"

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluatio...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

I feel so honored by the publication of this special issue of Neuropsychologia. Thanks so much to my friends and colleagues who put this together. And thanks to all the contributors. There are so many wonderful articles. I can't tell you how delighted I am. 🧪🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

go.bsky.app/TQdWJr3

"results highlight the importance of going beyond the nuclear family towards the impact of the wider family network when examining children's socio-emotional development" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

More Than Just Treats? Effects of Grandparental Support for Children Growing up in Adversity

ABSTRACT This study examined whether grandparental support is a protective factor for children's socio-emotional development in the context of adversity. Using longitudinal data from the Millennium ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com