It's about what your brain considers drudgery ... tedium ... boring; not your attention.
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
Stimulant drugs (Ritalin) wake you up & boost reward anticipation, they don't make you pay attention better.
Since they help with ADHD, it begs the question ... is that a misnomer?

🚨 Preprint altert 🚨

**Opposite Effects of Alpha Oscillations on Mind-wandering With Eyes Open and Closed**

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

Led by Esther Thielking and Luca Iemi!

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex?

Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut.

🧵 ↓ 1/n

However, when we trained on less broad distributions of viewing size, the topographic responses became less invariant to retinotopic variation. At small sizes, scenes responded more like objects, and at large sizes, objects responded more like scenes.

9/n

A schematic of the process of extrusion where a block of material is passed through a sheet with a hole of a certain shape which cuts the block. The block is labeled “cognitive science”, the sheet “some arbitrary cogsci methodology”, and the shaped block on the other side “a fundamentally novel research field, the likes of which we’ve never seen before”.

Ok here’s a very general template people can build on. Some will use this as a meme template. Others will use it as a template to build careers out of extruding fields from cognitive science. There’s something for everyone!

The brain’s action-mode is created by a dedicated action-mode network (AMN) rdcu.be/d5odm. In the brain’s mode continuum, AMN sits opposite DMN’s default-mode, as yin-yang. AMN might be key in pain, apathy, Parkinson’s. New @natrevneurosci.bsky.social w/ Marc Raichle & @gordonneuro.bsky.social 🧵 ⬇️

"The reproducibility buddy", what an interesting concept!

Non-visual spatial and sensorimotor strategies are as effective as visuospatial ones in visual working memory tasks. This challenges the “visual” vs. “verbal” dichotomy and highlights the role of non-visual representations in working memory.

The project by Gökberk et al. is now out 🥁🧬📖🧠

We found partly shared genetic contributions to individual differences in language and musicality-related traits. In line with other human traits, Neanderthal alleles displayed reduced contribution to overall genetic associations.
More in the link.