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Billy Mitchell

@wj-mitchell.bsky.social

CogNeuro PostDoc at Rutgers • social decision-making, emotion, & self-regulation • NIH D-SPAN and F32 Awardee • Union Organizer • https://wj-mitchell.github.io/

118 Posts226 Follower155 Folgt
Jamie Reilly 🦜@reilly-coglab.com · 2mo ago

When a university administrator says ‘right sizing’ I want to throw up. 2% increase in administration and 40% decrease in TT faculty is not right sizing. It’s naked capitalism and ineptitude.

Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Take the high stress, long work hours, and low pay that have characterized early career academia for years with even more abysmal job prospects than usual, an ever expanding horizon of domains we're each responsible for mastering, and the state of things at large and it's no wonder. (1/?)

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field@wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Early-career scientists surveyed early 2025: “Barely half of respondents now say they are likely to remain in academia, down 22pp from how they felt 6 months earlier. The fraction likely to stay in the United States fell by 21pp. Even satisfaction w having pursued a PhD in science declined by 16pp”

Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Forty years to the date of the MOVE Bombing, Philly more or less resurrected the Mulford Act against Black Lion members because a cop purportedly challenged Birdsong to a gunfight. Just like with the BPP, no gun control groups condemning Philly PD. www.axios.com/local/philad...

Scoop: Philly revokes gun permits for Black Panther-style patrol group members

The group's lawyer says the permits were yanked over an encounter with police earlier this year.

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Deepu Murty@vpmurty.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Our first foray into horror movies was recently published. Former grad student David Gregory used them as a means to study temporal memory for threatening events. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41965942/

Arousal and valence differentially shape temporal memory for naturalistic events - PubMed

While emotional arousal and negative valence both alter episodic memory, their contributions to different facets of temporal memory remain unclear. Here, we examined two components of temporal memory ...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I’m doing a panel for the Rutgers Addiction Research Center—geared toward undergrads interested in addiction research! We’ll talk where to start, what grad school is like ,etc. I’ll probably ramble about organized labor and successfully stumbling into good things. Please join and/or pass along!

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Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 6mo ago

If the CBA is repudiated, arguably, so is the no-strike clause. Fellows might be federal employees (I don't know if so) which complicates striking, but a work slowdown certainly is still on the table regardless.

I-270, Exit 1@i270exit1.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Podcast Jay continues to attack the very people he promises to support, early career investigators. Now he wants to rip up the collective bargaining agreement with the NIH Fellows Union (illegal, BTW). Who's next, the NIH police union? The firefighters? www.notus.org/health-scien...

Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 7mo ago

When I won my NIH DSPAN, I shared my materials in a public repo—many people told me it helped. After Trump killed DSPAN before I could use the K, I applied for an F32 and just found out I got it. In the spirit of transparency and community, I’ve shared those materials too: github.com/wj-mitchell/...

GitHub - wj-mitchell/F32_Details: Information and Materials Related to My NIH NIDA F32 Award

Information and Materials Related to My NIH NIDA F32 Award - wj-mitchell/F32_Details

github.com

Mark Thornton@markthornton.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

Figure 1. Experimental stimuli and paradigm. 1A. Manipulation timeline. Each video features a total of 12 IM moments, half of which were silenced in version 1, and the other half silenced in version 2. This produces two versions of each video where only half of the IMs are audible to the participant. 1B. Voice removal. Background sounds were preserved in both versions, regardless of IM presence. 1C. fMRI paradigm. Participants were randomly assigned a version and watched both videos in a counter-balanced order. 1D. Afterwards, they made trait ratings on each video’s main character in random order before rating them on subsequent traits. Figure 2. Scanner and online participant trait rating results. A. Scanner participants arrive at similar conclusions about characters across versions by the end of each video. B. Trait ratings at the end of the videos are correlated between online and scanner participants. C. The IM manipulation had a significant effect on the trait ratings across the duration of the videos, such that different versions led to different trait impressions. D. Participants who saw different versions changed their ratings for both clip types but changed to a greater degree after seeing the IM segments relative to the NIM. Figure 3. ISC results. Gaining access to the same mental state knowledge in earlier IM clips led to significantly (p < .05, corrected) more aligned neural activity in subsequent NIM clips across a wide swath of the temporal lobe, as well as the frontal pole and SPL. Figure 4. Representational similarity analysis results. 4A. RSA pipeline. Clip-specific patterns of brain activity were correlated across movies within segment type (NIM or IM) to create a correlation distance matrix for each participant. Corresponding trait ratings were partitioned into components specific to each of the two versions of each film or shared across both versions. RDMs based on those traits were used to predict the neural RDMs. The resulting coefficients were sorted into matched (version), unmatched (version), and shared across version, and inference was performed via t-tests across participants. See methods section for further details of this analysis. 4B. Prior trait rating results. 1. While watching IM clips of the same version, the prior trait ratings predict activity in the bilateral A1, STS, STG, and right VLPFC. 2. Prior trait rating predicts activity in these regions again in the same-version NIM clips. 3. Across the two versions, while watching the NIM clips, the prior trait ratings predicted activity in the right occipitotemporal cortex. 4C. Trait updating results. 1. While watching NIM clips, the right STS & MTG predict version-matched trait updating. 2. In the unmatched NIM clips, STS & MTG again predict trait updating. 3. Across the two versions, the precuneus and LOC show pattern similarity for trait updating in participants.
PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Access to others' internal monologues aligns neural processing of narratives and trait impressions: https://osf.io/7v9md

Billy Mitchell@wj-mitchell.bsky.social · 10mo ago

What kind of a spineless, backwater shithole suspends a graduate instructor for grading according to a long established and otherwise unproblematic rubric? If you refuse to educate, you aren't an educational institution. You're just a bad hedge fund.

Razia Sahi@raziasahi.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Managing emotions is not easy - we often get by with a little help. In the NEW Social Interaction and Emotion Lab at Rutgers-Newark, we’ll study how social interactions regulate emotion using experiments, naturalistic data, and multi-modal approaches. ✨ Now recruiting! ✨🙌 Learn more: raziasahi.com

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg@sherylnyt.bsky.social · 11mo ago

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Sam Nastase@samnastase.bsky.social · 12mo ago

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.

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