I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics.

It turns out I was wrong.

Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

As we read this about the Roberts Court let’s remember the shadow docket grievously harmed American scientific research, cancer cures, and public health over the past year.

For ex, KBJ’s “Calvinball” quote was in an NIH case. More, short 🧵 1/

Excited to be at #SANS2026! Looking forward to talking about information seeking about threat and reuniting with lovely colleagues. Come say hi!

I'm thrilled to be attending #SANS2026 this week! I'll be presenting "Prospection Explains Age-Related Increases in the Use of Situation Selection for Emotion Regulation" (P1-A-f-62) on Thursday, 4/16. Catch the highlights at the 3pm spotlight or come chat at the boards from 3:30-5pm!

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

Research in Action: Lessons from Policy Advocacy How can researchers better champion their work and make the case for evidence-based policy?

How can researchers better champion evidence-based policy? Join us on Monday in Guild Lounge for a conversation with Dean Karlan, @katieinsel.bsky.social, and @statstipton.bsky.social on engaging policymakers and advocating for research-informed policy.
Register ➡️ spr.ly/63321B6xywD

Human exploration strategically balances approaching and avoiding uncertainty Strategic avoidance of uncertainty emerges under high cognitive demands, enabling faster decisions without impairing learning.

This is finally out as Version of Record 🎉

Read to find out how and when humans strategically switch between approaching and avoiding uncertainty

with Michael Shadlen and Daphna Shohamy

elifesciences.org/articles/94231

🧵:

A line graph showing awards over time at NSF's SBE. The line for this year, 2026, is extremely FLAT compared to prior years. By this time in 2025, 179 grants had been awarded. In 2021, it was 243. This year... 16.

NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October.

No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out.

Why...?

1/x

source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
🟦🧠 #academicsky

Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron!

Here is a download link (free for 50 days):
authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH...

Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social

🧵

Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan - Nature fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan...

Check out this @nature.com paper on how the brain’s functional hierarchy evolves from birth to 100. Infants' gradient architecture is anchored by sensory systems, differentiates along association and control axes during childhood/adolescence & dedifferentiates in aging
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint!🚨

How do people learn how to search the visual world?

Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.

NIH grant terminations affected women scientists more than men, study finds A new paper shows that women, particularly those early in their careers, have been disproportionately affected by NIH grant terminations.

When I retired only around 25% of Full Professors in STEM were women. I was proud be one of them, and to support the success of fellow women in STEM through mentoring.

This was not an organic process. It took hard work and persistence.

And now The Regime is setting us back decades.

NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18.

osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

Longitudinal changes in T1w/T2w estimates of cortical myelin with age and pubertal timing | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability Abstract. We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N =

New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...

New paper in Nature Neuroscience! We developed personalized fMRI-based predictive models tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in chronic pain patients—trained on 6+ months of densely sampled data. A true team effort. Deeply grateful to our participants! doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02221-3

Federally funded DEI training programs and grants are disappearing. Meet seven neuroscientists who are filling the gaps.

By Paige Miranda

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/dei/we-still...

BREAKING: We reached a settlement that requires the Trump administration to permanently maintain medical research that had been erased on a government website.

The government doesn't get to censor science.

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

So proud of @meganspurney.bsky.social and team for this exciting new paper from my lab!

Younger adolescents' working memory performance benefits more from reward than older teens and young adults.

This occurs even though all ages report similar preferences about reward value and cognitive demand.

Dense Phenotyping of Human Brain Network Organization Using Precision fMRI The advent of noninvasive imaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) transformed cognitive neuroscience, providing insights into large-scale brain networks and their link to cog...

My review with @caterinagratton.bsky.social is (apparently) open access for those who couldn't see it before:

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We discuss individual differences in brain network organization and how to home in on and talk about commonalities in the face of such differences

The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network!
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU83BtfH...
1/n 🧵👇

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

Dominance and Prestige Motivations to Lead in Adolescence Introduction Dual strategy frameworks of motivation to lead differentiate Dominance motivations, which leverage fear and control to gain power and status, from Prestige motivations, which rely on re...

Speaking of early leadership motivations, I'm thrilled that this paper is finally out - we establish the emergence of dominance and prestige leadership motivations in adolescence, and further show nomological networks identical to young adults

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

APHA v. NIH | American Civil Liberties Union APHA v. NIH is a legal challenge to the unprecedented and ideologically-driven purge of hundreds of biomedical research projects by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Years of research on a wide...

For anyone trying to keep up with the grant termination/delay litigation against NIH, the ACLU has a good page with summaries and links.

www.aclu.org/cases/apha-v...

netneurotools: a trainee-oriented approach to network neuroscience | doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our lab’s internal toolkit for accomplishing everyday tasks in brain imaging ⤵️

Very happy to share our paper on the "summer slide" in kid's cognitive test scores is out now in @pnas.org!
We find a replicable dip in performance across multiple domains of cognition in >23,000 kids across 4 datasets!

Check out the 🧵 from @ariellekeller.bsky.social below! 👇

Share Your Story and Your Science Competition Participate in APS's social media video competition designed to bring the importance of psychological science to the public. Deadline: January 12, 2026

The APS Advocacy Task Force is mobilizing scientists to communicate their stories, their research, and the real-world impact of their work.

Learn more about APS's #WhyPsychScience video competition and submit by Jan 12! #AcademicSky #PsychSciSky

www.psychologicalscience.org/2025-why-psy...

This is a fundraising post!

An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure!

giving.mit.edu/search/node/...

Details below...