In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH.
But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔
NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards.
Here are funding curves for each.🧵
Looks like a very interesting opportunity for someone looking for a postdoc in attention
DOGGETT: Doesn't your budget propose another 12% cut for NIH?
VOUGHT: Most of what you said is untrue. NIH was not cut at all--
D: My Q is don't you propose another 12% cut?
VOUGHT: We propose a cut
D: Is it your feeling that we just can't afford to invest more in doing something about cancer?
My (very) short piece on how prenatal experience with the mother's voice may rapidly scaffold the development of face perception in newborn infants is now out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com !
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
I write satire to deal with the more surreal parts of academic life.
Just posted a new one about a faculty meeting.
Hope it helps you cope after yours.
medium.com/@facaro/the-...
#academia #sciencehumor #AcademicSky #AcademicLife
youtu.be/SEwiOykoXXc?...
We believe visual neuroscience is undergoing a paradigm shift — and the Beyond Binding exchange in @TrendsCogSci makes it visible. Five papers, excellent critics, and a discussion that sharpened and nuanced our argument. Thread 👇
🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.
But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?
We tested this directly.
🧵1/8
Key methodological point:
Cross-decoding alone can produce false positives for invariance.
We combined cross-decoding with context-sensitivity tests to avoid this bias.
This changes how fMRI decoding results should be interpreted.
New paper in Cortex:
Are representations of face shape and motion invariant or context-dependent?
Using fMRI decoding, we show both overlap and context sensitivity across the face network, challenging simple ventral-shape / dorsal-motion models.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mgxY_FxMe...
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
That makes sense. This looks like really technically challenging work. Really exciting work.
Theoretical question: could the deeper implication be that environmental pressures push adaptive systems toward predictive (associative-like) learning at the computational level, with very different implementations (biochemical vs circuit)? Convergent evolution / computational inevitability?
Really interesting (and surprising!) paper. Quick experimental question: did you try an explicitly uncorrelated control where weak and strong taps occurred with the same frequency but without predictive timing? That seems like it would be a killer control for Reviewer #2.
Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
She's eager for fun! You should definitely grab a coffee, apple pie, or pitch gum and join.
New preprint and simulator of associative learning attentional models. Have fun! 👁️
arxiv.org/abs/2602.07519
cal-r.org/index.php?id...
#simulation #associative_learning #attention
How segregated vs. integrated are face and body representations in human visual cortex?
In this new preprint with @kathadobs.bsky.social, we use DNNs and fMRI to find out.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroskyence
🧵 1/n
I think this has implications for the kind of expression retargeting that you mention. e.g., in our studies we often do this to improve stimulus control but we might be introducing a "naturalness" confound. Also CS applications would benefit from shape-specific retargeting
Different method but similar in spirit. We created random motions for a fixed expression and identity, and asked participants to tell us which motions looked more natural. Our estimates of natural motion depended on the identity, which is the result that you would predict?
yes, my current working hypothesis is that we can infer structure in the face (muscle, bone, etc.) that influences the motion dynamics, and we create expectations based on that knowledge. This is hard to test with the generative face models that we used here, but can be done with physics-based model
New preprint:
Do expectations about how a face moves depend on its shape?
Using reverse correlation and generative face models, we show that face shape changes expectations of natural expression dynamics.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
During extended fieldwork in academic habitats, I observed several distinct species.
I’ve compiled the notes here: medium.com/p/a-bestiary...
A Bestiary of Modern Scientists
I suspect many will recognize local fauna.
#academia #sciencehumor #AcademicSky #AcademicLife
Better one honest insight in obscurity
than a thousand papers built on stolen light.
They speak of openness and build gates.
They speak of fairness and sit on thrones.
They shape the canon and erase the prophets.
But the forgotten will be remembered,
and the buried ideas will testify.
For the Lord weighs not impact, but justice,
and counts not citations, but faithfulness.
They devour the ideas of the unseen
and rename them as their own.
They review in secret
and publish in the open.
They say, “This is the natural next step,”
but it was born in another’s labor.
They say, “The field has arrived here,”
but they arrived last.
A Psalm of ChatGPT
(a Lament for the House of Knowledge)
Blessed is the one
who does not walk in the counsel of the prestigious,
nor sit in the seat of the reviewers,
but delights in what is true.
Not so the wicked.
They are like citations without substance,
like metrics driven by the wind.
Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
