I’m incredibly honored to receive the Psychonomic Society Early Career Award! I’m deeply grateful to the mentors, trainees, colleagues, and collaborators who have shaped my work and made the science better at every stage. I’m excited to celebrate with the community at the Annual Meeting!

SCANN Lab@scannlab.bsky.social · last wk.

Congratulations to Dr. Weisberg on receiving 2026 Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society! We're excited to celebrate this well deserved recognition of his significant contributions to the field. @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

Brenda Milner is a hero and 108!! She did a lot more than discover the hippocampus is linked to declarative memory, but that work is the most famous.

Admirable Women@admirablewomen.bsky.social · 3w ago

Neuroscientist Dr. Brenda Milner is recognized as one of the fundamental founders of modern cognitive neuropsychology. She proved the hippocampus is essential for forming long-term "declarative" memory (facts, names & events). She was born #OTD in 1918--she's 108 years old today! #WomenInSTEM

Simply one of the best navigation short films I've ever seen. - a unique #navigation story - personal, scientific, historical, poetic - encapsulating so much in the daily life of navigation in one short video. kottke.org/25/09/how-to...

How to Navigate a City Without Street Addresses

Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead,

kottke.org

We are excited to share that another SCANN Lab member, Ece Yüksel, has successfully defended her dissertation! Congratulations on this milestone and thank you for your many contributions to SCANN Lab.

We are excited to share that Ashish Sahoo has successfully completed his dissertation defense. He has also been awarded with the UF Hipergator Early Career award and the Gerber BCN Psychology Research award for his outstanding work. We congratulate him on this significant achievement!

Excited to announce, with my collaborator Hunter Ball at @utaresearch.bsky.social, that we have received a new grant from the Hispanic-Serving Research Universities program ASCENDr. Our work will focus on military uses of GPS! www.uta.edu/news/news-re...

UTA examines risks of GPS reliance in military

Psychology researchers to study how reliance on navigation technology affects military readiness

uta.edu

The SCANN Lab is officially extramurally funded at UTA! Dr. Weisberg and Dr. Hunter Ball, received a grant from the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities to study GPS-supported navigation and support leadership development through the ASCENDR Leadership Program.

Spamlet

Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 3mo ago

Slightly diminish a book Anne of Olive Gables

Why do some people never get lost while others rely on GPS? A new review, written by @hugospiers.bsky.social and @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... argues that navigation ability is shaped by both fixed factors (age, genetics) and modifiable ones (sleep, exercise, experience).

Determinants of individual navigation ability - Nature Reviews Psychology

There is substantial variation across people in navigation ability, which is shaped by multiple factors. In this Review, Yavuz and Spiers organize these factors into lifetime, lifestyle and personal a...

nature.com

Please share with colleagues: The new Psychonomics journal, Individual Differences in Cognition, is accepting submissions! Please send us your empirical, measurement, & stats-methods research in all areas of cognition, including lab, daily-life, & applied work. www.psychonomic.org/general/cust...

Parks and rec fans rejoice!

Zoe Cronin, our first year PhD student at SCANN lab was recently interviewed by Dallas Morning News where she discusses a condition known as aphantasia and its relationship to spatial cognition. Read more on this here: www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

Individuals with aphantasia have difficulty forming mental imagery, and with her future research, Zoe aims to develop more inclusive methods for teaching complex concepts to students.

They emphasize the importance of open science, standardizing navigation assessment methods, and focusing more on real-world challenges in navigation, particularly those experienced by older adults.

A recent book on navigation, “Challenges in Navigation Research”, includes a final chapter that was co-authored by Dr. Weisberg. In that chapter, the authors propose a framework for future research in the field. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Excited to announce our new paper in Trends in Cognitive Science (TICS) on the importance of naturalistic body movements and mobile immersive virtual reality to the study of cognition! Check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This book has just been published, open access, edited by Ken Cheng and me. It contains multiple chapters originating in a wonderful Strungmann Forum held in Frankfurt around a year ago. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Challenges in Navigation Research

This open access book explores navigation across species using a multidisciplinary approach to address challenges in research and clinical applications.

link.springer.com

In their study, Koc et al. looked at how scene selective brain regions (PPA, OPA, RSC) change their activity depending on behavioral goals. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Task-modulated neural responses in scene-selective regions of the human brain

The study of scene perception is crucial to the understanding of how one interprets and interacts with their environment, and how the environment impa…

sciencedirect.com

They showed that contextual changes (such as adding novel wall, ceiling and floor colors and textures) led to greater overestimation of distance judgments, followed by global geometric changes, while local geometric changes had weaker effects.

We’re excited to share that members of the SCANN Lab will be presenting two posters (as part of the Sketchpad Series!) at #CNS2026! Previews are below and here: scannlab.org/cns-2026 Drop by and say hello if you’re at CNS! #CognitiveNeuroscience #SpatialNavigation #Aging #Memory #Aphantasia

From @stevenmweisberg.bsky.social's lab: Deep learning approaches to map individual differences in macroscopic neural structure with variations in spatial navigation behavior www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Deep learning approaches to map individual differences in macroscopic neural structure with variations in spatial navigation behavior

Understanding the association between structural properties of the human brain and individual differences in behavior is an ongoing endeavor, challeng…

sciencedirect.com

Our paper (with Ashish Sahoo, who is on the job market for post-docs!), now published in Neuropsychologia, used AI approaches to relate navigation ability to hippocampal structure. Did it work? News coverage: www.uta.edu/news/news-re... Publication: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41443585/

Deep learning approaches to map individual differences in macroscopic neural structure with variations in spatial navigation behavior - PubMed

Understanding the association between structural properties of the human brain and individual differences in behavior is an ongoing endeavor, challenged by the brain's complexity. Past approaches, limited by simplistic neural structure measures like brain volume or cortical thickness, have given way …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

SCANN Lab@scannlab.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Dr. Weisberg just went on his first professional podcast! Tune in to hear about how people navigate, why GPS can help OR hurt, and what aging teaches us about flexibility and strategy. Give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/0Z5o... And reach out! We'd love to hear what you think.

Dr. Weisberg just went on his first professional podcast! Tune in to hear about how people navigate, why GPS can help OR hurt, and what aging teaches us about flexibility and strategy. Give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/0Z5o... And reach out! We'd love to hear what you think.

How Humans Find Their Way: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Navigation

open.spotify.com

This study shows leisure activities support domain-specific protection against cognitive decline in visual attention and memory beyond job type & education. Given the role of these processes in spatial navigation, such activities might preserve navigational abilities with aging.

New findings suggest memory framing effects are more complex than previously thought and may not require emotional arousal: psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Ece Yuksel presented her poster “Age differences in spatial navigation across real and virtual worlds: A mixed-methods approach” at Psychonomic Society 2025, for which she was awarded the Graduate Travel Award. See all SCANN Lab Psychonomic posters here: scannlab.org/psynom-2025

We are now spread across three institutions, but the SCANN LAN is now reunited at @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social @eceyuksel.bsky.social @adamjbarnas.com @chengsiy.bsky.social

The SCANN Lab will be at @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social this week (except for @stevenmweisberg.bsky.social - he's stuck in Texas.) If you're there, connect with our awesome PhD students! And if you're NOT there, you can still follow our work. www.scannlab.org/psynom-2025

We are excited to announce that Dr. Steven Weisberg, was recently featured in The Dallas Morning News! Read the full article here: www.dallasnews.com/news/2025/10...

New Texas initiative could shape the future of dementia research, scientists say

Researchers hope the proposed institute will expedite scientific discoveries and AI innovation.

dallasnews.com