My department is hiring 2 (TWO!) Tenure Track faculty in Developmental Psych and Biological Psych, to start Fall 2027. Deadlines 9/1 (Developmental) and 10/1 (Biological). More info here: www.carleton.edu/psychology/i.... Reach out with questions! carleton.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Carlet...

Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology

The Carleton Psychology Department is seeking candidates for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Developmental Psychology (preferably with a focus on social, personality, and/or identity de...

carleton.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

We have a few spots left in our upcoming workshop in Eugene, OR October 12-14, 2026. Please join us! greenhouselab.github.io/motorbrainst... #neuroskyence #sensorimotor #TranscranialMagneticStimulation

How many subjects do you actually need for reliable task fMRI studies? Much larger samples are often recommended—but that depends on how you analyze the data. New preprint with @neuranna.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Scaling laws for group-constrained, subject-specific task fMRI analyses

Functional MRI provides a powerful way to characterize the architecture of the human brain. Yet individual brains often vary in the exact anatomic locations of functionally specific regions; as a resu...

biorxiv.org

We're hiring! Postdoc position to study the neural control of reaching using high-density multi-area electrophysiology. 5 years of funding, great collaborative environment. Please share with anyone who may be interested. For details, see: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Pruszynski Postdoc 2026

Postdoctoral Researcher, Control Policies in the Primate Motor Circuit Pruszynski Lab @ Sensorimotor Superlab​ The Pruszynski Laboratory at Western University is seeking a postdoctoral researcher to j...

docs.google.com

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

We have recently published work in Psych Science and JEP:LMC showing a surprising relationship between initial capture and learned suppression of salient distractors. Ultimately, this has led us to believe that attentional control is much more flexible than often assumed. Read more on my blog!

From Capture to Suppression: How Distraction Shapes Attentional Control

By Nick Gaspelin and Yue Zhang Zhang, Y. & Gaspelin, N. (2026a). From capture to control: Initial capture increases learned suppression. Psychological Science. 37(4), 2…

gaspelinblog.wordpress.com

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Unsupervised nonmotor learning in the human cerebellum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.740142v1

1/ I am thrilled to begin sharing the latest release of pyEM, a Python package I built for fitting cognitive computational models to behavioral data using hierarchical expectation maximization (EM) with maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP). github.com/shawnrhoads/...

Our cerebellum+RL paper is now out in the Journal of Neuroscience! "The Human Cerebellum Encodes Temporally Sensitive Reinforcement Learning Signals" @sfnjournals.bsky.social @sfn.org www.jneurosci.org/content/46/2...

The Human Cerebellum Encodes Temporally Sensitive Reinforcement Learning Signals

In addition to supervised motor learning, the cerebellum also supports nonmotor forms of learning, including reinforcement learning (RL). Recent studies in animal models have identified core RL signal...

jneurosci.org

A cartoon by Natalie Horberg.

Natural behavior unfolds as a continuous stream of actions. Because these actions often occur in rapid succession, the brain must prepare multiple future actions while the current action is being executed. Our TICS piece explores how this works. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Have you thought about how you type? A new preprint from graduate student Rubi Ruopp changes how we think about automaticity in everyday behaviors. Automatic ≠ skilled www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #sensorimotor #neuroskyence #neurosky #psychscisky

Motor automaticity in natural keyboard typing

Certain features of everyday motor skills become automatic while others remain controlled. Here we use a novel keyboard typing task to investigate whether motor automaticity depends on the frequency o...

biorxiv.org

✨ VERY excited to share our new paper led by Holly Bowen (SMU) & former ugrad Kyle Thurmann "Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis" finally in press @ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 💵🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thread 1/n

Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis

Extensive evidence suggests that cognitive performance is typically enhanced under increased motivation, often in the form of reward anticipation. Whi…

sciencedirect.com

I forgot to link the paper! 🤦‍♂️ I'm blaming my new four-month old. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Wouter Kool@wouterkool.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.

🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.

🎉Save the date! Black In Neuro Week 2026 is July 27–Aug 2. We're celebrating our 6th annual BIN Week with returning favorites like #NeuroRacism, #NeuroAcrossTheDiaspora, and #BINRollCall plus a brand new theme: #BlackInTime. ✨ 🧠 #BINW26 #AReimaginedFuture

"A coalition of ~40 organizations representing hard-science disciplines...recently told Congress...that losing the SBE division could lead to 'long-lasting, potentially permanent' damage to national research... The stickiest barriers to progress in... AI, biotechnology—are 'fundamentally human'"

Kasey Buckles@kaseybuckles.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Excellent article in The Atlantic about what's going on at NSF. Share with people in your circle--too many aren't aware!

In 2011, my interests in cognitive neuroscience converged on one stubborn intuition: it made no sense that how the brain learns and how it pays attention should be two fundamentally different processes.

Ignacio Saez, PhD@ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.14.724968v1

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.14.724968v1

Working Memory Early-career Researchers all around the world! A reminder that it’s 3 more days until WMS abstract submission deadline (May 31st).  If you have cool WM research that you want to share to the vibrant community of WM researchers, please submit your abstract (forms.gle/MccRLJC1xXQ3...)

Minion Memory Alert Animation

ALT: Minion Memory Alert Animation

static.klipy.com

Perceptual and conceptual influences on memory judgments New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com by the prolific @rmt93.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... We tested predictions of the global matching model to quantify the interference associated with perceptual or conceptual lure similarity

Very excited about this project, led by @zachladwig.bsky.social We show that an individual’s lateral prefrontal cortex has reliable and highly detailed network organization missed in past group approaches. Full🧵 coming soon!

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Trying to read while people talk nearby? Our new eye-tracking study shows that irrelevant speech increases rereading for low-frequency and semantically unpredictable words, despite little evidence for disruption during initial lexical processing. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I’m trying to read here! How does irrelevant speech affect how you read? - Cognitive Processing

Reading involves a remarkable coordination of perceptual and linguistic processes. This coordination is reflected by a close coupling between reading eye movements and lexical properties of words, suc...

link.springer.com

I love this work

Sam McDougle@actlab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One year later - my reflections on what's happened to US science since the National Science Foundation grant terminations last year. The problem of misinformation isn't going away, but our ability to study and understand it is under attack. 1/ 🧪 www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

I researched misinformation, until the government stopped me | Opinion

A researcher's NSF grant termination reveals a broader attack on science funding and misinformation research, despite rising AI-generated falsehoods.

tennessean.com

Thrilled about our latest paper published in eLife where we found something cool: A representation of your partner's goals and actions modulates your own "intelligent reflexes", prior to voluntary movement. Led by the phenomenal, Seth Sullivan. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

We're hiring! FT research assistant @ UT Dallas Join our team to work on a longitudinal neuroimaging study of midlife brain aging. Strong opportunity for those interested in brain networks, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease risk. App. deadline now May 15. Details: jobs.utdallas.edu/postings/31680