Congratulations to Alex on a long and illustrious career!

Challenges in Navigation Research This open access book explores navigation across species using a multidisciplinary approach to address challenges in research and clinical applications.

In Dec 2024, I had the great pleasure of participating in an Ernst Strüngmann Forum on the future of navigation research organized by @noranewcombe.bsky.social and Ken Cheng. The book from that meeting is now out...lots of great chapters to read...open access...

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Hey Vision Science folks...@gkaguirre.com is a candidate for the VSS board. He will do an awesome job...you could not ask for a better representative. Consider giving him your vote.

I will also note that it is quite a feeling to have one of your mentors win an award named for another one of your mentors. I feel immensely privileged to have learned so much from these giants of the field.

Congratulations to @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, winner of the 2026 Ken Nakayama medal from @vssmtg.bsky.social! Nancy is not only a brilliant scientist, she has also been an inspiring mentor to several generations of vision scientists (including me).

Cool...but I'm mostly just amazed to find out that there is a "Nature Cities" (!)

Kinda reminds me of this...

Come to the CRaNE conference in Atlanta in May. Some folks I know will be speaking about spatial navigation (one of them is me!)

My main scenario of concern is that D senate wins in red states (OH, GA, TX, AK) will *not* be certified by R election authorities.

Our results build on previous cool work by @carolinerobertson.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @annamynick.bsky.social @samberens.bsky.social @aidanhorner.bsky.social @neurosteel.bsky.social, among others.

Our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.

Some nice publicity on our recent "Neural compass" paper, from @sfnjournals.bsky.social.

This is a great Postdoc opportunity at UPenn, for recent Ph.D.s who want to collaborate with CogSci (psych, neuro, ling, philo, cs, etc.) faculty and have their own research direction.

That was my breaking point too.

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.

Penn declines!

www.thedp.com/article/2025...

Penn faculty senate passes resolution urging the Penn admin to reject the compact, as MIT and Brown have already done.

The Supreme Court Case That Could Hand the House to Republicans

It's really not clear to me how U.S. democracy gets out of this one alive. Dems would need +6 on the popular vote to have a 50/50 chance of controlling the House. That's a recipe for a one-party state.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

Just Say No to Trump's Compact for Academic Extortion Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania was one of nine targets of the Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." Through it, Trump asks once again for universitie...

The administrations "invitation" to 9 universities is in fact just their latest attempt at extortion. I urge my @upenn.edu colleagues to sign the petition below.

actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

Interested in navigation, VR, fMRI, aging? Here's a great postdoc opportunity in @stevenmweisberg.bsky.social's new lab at U Texas Arlington.

Our new paper Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain is out in Cerebral Cortex! Work by first-author Michael Peer.

academic-oup-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/cercor/artic...

Thanks for the post. You knew that it was out before we did!

I downloaded an electronic version this summer and started to read it...many, many good chapters. I can highly recommend!

This work builds on an extensive line of previous fMRI studies on heading codes (by @wolberslab.bsky.social, @doellerlab.bsky.social, @matthiasnau.bsky.social, @hugospiers.bsky.social, Baumann & Mattingley, Kim & Maguire + others). It was a LONG time in the making so we are thrilled to see it out!!!

When we looked at the model weights, we found that voxelwise peaks were distributed across all directions (like a compass), but the voxelwise troughs tended to be aligned with the main axis of the space. The latter result was unexpected and we think it’s pretty cool!

These heading codes generalized across perceptually different versions of the city, different locations in the city, and different phases of the taxi-cab task—thus fulfilling the expected characteristics of a “neural compass”.

We found heading-related response in retrosplenial complex (RSC) and superior parietal lobe (SPL). This is nicely consistent with previous studies that observed heading codes in these regions using trial-based designs.

How do we keep track of our sense of direction during navigation? Head direction cells in rodents are well-studied, but what about humans? To answer this question, we used an encoding model to analyze fMRI responses while participants performed a “taxi-cab” task in a VR city.

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

"Things the reviewers care more about than we do" + "Things we care about, but we're pretty sure you don't"

This is some very cool work that @ainsleybonin.bsky.social did at Colby College, working with Derek Huffman. If you are fortunate enough to be at CogSci, give it a look.