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

It's often said that play is the work of the child, and research continues to back that up. Kids aren't just having fun when they play—they're building creativity, empathy, emotional regulation and other skills that can last a lifetime. theconversation.com/play-is-esse...

📖How do children learn to read? "Even when children within a classroom receive the same reading instruction... they learn at different paces." Iliana Karipidis, Simon Rammerstorfer & Silvia Brem explain that reading develops at different paces for different children. boldscience.org/how-do-child...

How do children learn to read?

Reading develops at different paces for different children

boldscience.org

I think “Compliance Fridays”should be a thing. My day: completed the common form c & p doc, wrote & uploaded RPPR docs, a 3 hour research security training featuring Mork & Mindy, IRB edits, and finally textbook adoption & “simple” syllabus creation. This is all stuff I do just so I can do my job.

Great story and interview with former @bcdlab.bsky.social member @charissepickron.bsky.social about her work at the U of M’s Institute of Child Development! www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Inside the U’s baby science research lab, a look at how the world learns

The University of Minnesota Child Brain and Perception Lab explores how infants and toddlers make sense of the people around them. MPR News spent a day recently at the lab watching one of the “pilot b...

mprnews.org

Workers are getting worse health care, parental leave, and retirement benefits, showing once and for all that your job doesn’t love you back. www.wired.com/story/compan...

Companies Keep Slashing Employees’ Benefits for the Worst Reasons

Workers are getting worse health care, parental leave, and retirement benefits, showing once and for all that your job doesn’t love you back.

wired.com

New ep! 🚨 In Part I of this 2-part episode, Jenny & Deon discuss connectionist modeling, developmental change, developmental tasks, one-hot vs. distributed representations, the give-N task, Bayesian models, Marr’s levels, & more. Stay tuned for Part II! itsinnate.fireside.fm/38

Give-N you Bayes and Backpropagation (Pt. I)

itsinnate.fireside.fm

When under anesthesia, the hippocampus is listening to, categorizing, and predicting the meaning of words and sounds. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus - Nature

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

nature.com

So excited to see this fabulous work by stellar MD-PhD student Briana Macedo now out as a preprint. Briana reports some of the strongest results I've ever seen -- very strong (25% variance, out-of-sample) associations between the childhood environment and white matter. Thread below!

How much does the childhood environment shape the brain? In our new preprint, we study the exposome (300+ environmental exposures) and link it to white matter structure in 8,000+ kids. 🧠✨ 🔗 Read the preprint: bit.ly/4wfsybZ 🧵 Thread below

A pigeon displays auto-shaping in the wild. BF Skinner would be proud. (This is a post for old academic psychology sorts who remember their behaviorism.)

Cristian Farias@cristianfarias.com · 3mo ago

“Not for rinsing or washing,” they said. (Seen at Union Station.)

Finally, this double dissociation is quite cool because aIns and dACC often co-activate and are thought of as being part of the same network (salience network). Here, we show that they bias learning from feedback in two different ways: ... 7/9

“Everyday experiences – playing with friends, eating a meal, reading a book, spending time alone – have an impact on development.” @elmanubohn.bsky.social explains how different experiences foster learning in different cultural contexts. #ChildDevelopment boldscience.org/how-do-child...

How do children learn through everyday experiences?

Different experiences foster learning in different cultural contexts

boldscience.org

My close friend/colleague (Dr Pengfei Xu) has published an impressive 7-yr prospective study with nearly 400 young people, showing that functional brain dynamics in early childhood relate to adolescent anxiety and depression. www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000... #PsychSciSky

Childhood electroencephalographic signatures predict distinct developmental trajectories to adolescent anxiety and depression

Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the onset of anxiety and depression, yet their neurodevelopmental origins remain unclear.

biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com

The #MatildaEffect (systematic denial of recognition to women scientists) was named after suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage (d. #OTD in 1898). "The woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time" was a writer, activist, abolitionist & Native American rights advocate. #WomensHistoryMonth

Once a year I ask my students to imagine a red star. It’s cognitive psychology and we are about to talk about whether “imagery” is the same or different from “perception”, but first, I like to check in on what our class experience when we imagine something. Friends, the results NEVER disappoint!

Lego brain! Very relaxing spring break activity!

Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World Jody C. Culham and Eva Deligiannis 👀🧠 #neuroskyence www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World

Vision science has demonstrated considerable success in characterizing early- and mid-level visual processes through reductionism and tightly controlled experiments. However, an understanding of high-...

annualreviews.org

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

For more such works and threads, also check out this blogpost (will be expanding with new threads over time) irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚

Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…

irisvanrooijcogsci.com

We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨ 🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes

Bye clinical trials for experimental research? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NIH rolls back red tape on some experiments — spurring excitement and concern

Some human research will no longer be classified as a clinical trial, easing the paperwork burden, but not everyone agrees with the approach.

nature.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

Thrilled to share our paper on the formation of brain shape in human newborns, just out @natneuro.nature.com: tinyurl.com/2ty4ef43 Using #fractal analysis of #MRI data from the developing Human Connectome Project (lnkd.in/dxeHbJX6), we show that brain shape closely captures infant age and genetics ⬇️

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The self-reference memory bias is preceded by an other-reference bias in infancy - Nature Communications

A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

nature.com

Walz: "What's happening in MN defies belief. News reports simply don't do justice to the level of chaos & disruption & trauma the federal govt is raining down... This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it's a campaign of organized brutality against the people of MN"

Income insufficiency impacts early #brain development in infants facing increased psychosocial adversity: A network-based approach @PNAS.org

Income insufficiency impacts early #brain development in infants facing increased psychosocial adversity: A network-based approach

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 2, January 2026. SignificanceThis paper demonstrates the key role of adversity on the earliest stages of postnatal brain development. Data from the Baby Steps study, an ongoing longitudinal study collecting electroencephalography (EEG) and socioeconomic status related ...

dlvr.it

Dressed in a spotted owl sweater handmade by his wife, ecologist Rocky Gutierrez explains why he thinks so many people share his love for owls. 🦉

#FLORIDA AUTHOR E-BOOK DEAL ALERT: Bookseller & author @legroff.bsky.social brilliant novel MATRIX is only $1.99 for Kindle today. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...

Matrix: A Novel

Matrix: A Novel - Kindle edition by Groff, Lauren. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Matrix: A Novel.

amazon.com

We have longitudinal multimodal (EEG, MRI) datasets to richly characterize developmental plasticity and an interest in public health relevant prenatal factors (e.g. iron deficiency, prenatal stress) and postnatal factors: caregiving, music, and language experiences!

Laurel Joy Gabard-Durnam@laurelgd.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Yes, PINE Lab is accepting doctoral applications this cycle in Psychology! Apps due Dec 1! Interested in early life human neuroplasticity? how early pre- and post-natal experiences/exposures (promotional/adverse) shape malleable brains? Current research here: drive.google.com/file/d/1wFZj...