Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

The Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at WashU is recruiting postdoctoral fellows. The Center offers a unique opportunity to craft a transdisciplinary research program with an unusual degree of independence.

ctcn.wustl.edu/postdoc-fell...

Dear #VSS2025 attendees! Our lab will be presenting 5 posters over the next two days. We’re excited to share our work: Come visit us!

Come see our VSS presentations!

Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Model-based planning in structured foraging environments: https://osf.io/8z3qv

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success.
@atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I dunno! In the paper, the link to the OSF is described as "containing more detailed information", but only has a vague description of the research question and it lists several questionnaires, roughly half of which do not get reported in the paper.

Yes, they did. I am considering emailing the editor to restate that I think this misrepresentation should be a serious enough violation to qualify for rejection.

This is in an Elsevier journal, by the way.

Just reviewed a paper with an OSF preregistration that was mostly empty and uninformative (e.g., analysis plan just said “anova”, see image). I recommended rejection, but the editor asked for revision without addressing this issue in the decision letter. What would you do in this case?

Excited that we are recruiting for a new postdoctoral program in Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience at #WashU! Get in touch if you have questions!
sites.wustl.edu/systemsneuro...

Apply for a FREE virtual workshop on "R Programming for Psychology and Neuroscience." Sponsored by NSF and will take place this summer. Enrollment is open to all students. Direct training on using R to analyze data from psychological tasks. Applications due 4/30. 🤓🧑‍💻

sites.google.com/view/r-progr...

This way, she gets a time series of model-predicted attentional states for each participant. These states predict a variety of independent behavioral patterns, including speeding up of RTs under mind wandering, self-reported task-unrelated thoughts, and a shift towards these thoughts across time.

Second, Cathy @cathyzhang.bsky.social has developed a new framework to infer mind wandering (lapses of attention) from behavior. She combines the GLM-HMMs from @jpillowtime.bsky.social's group with a parametric version of the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART).

osf.io/preprints/ps...

People trade off this cost with interference demands! They become more likely to choose lists of more incongruent Stroop trials if this minimizes switches between attentional states. This work nicely complements the work on "reconfiguration costs" by Ivan Grahek from the @shenhavlab.bsky.social.

Two new preprints from my group at WashU!

First, Merve @mileritayar.bsky.social tests whether people place an effort cost on switching between cognitive control settings. We find that people avoid switching between focused and relaxed attentional states.

osf.io/preprints/os...

Yet, the effect (I think) captures the system setting itself up for subsequent conflict (not current conflict). Thinking of this as a model-free (implicit?) form of adjustment for the future makes sense to me, because control demands are typically more predictable than in cog psych experiments.

I agree with Harrison: a bit of both. The adjustment is reactive: it occurs in response to demand. Moreover, it is observed in blocks with 50% congruent trials. In those, the congruency of the next trial can't be predicted: thinking of these adjustments as (intentionally) proactive feels silly.

Gheza & Kool show that, in multidimensional environments, people allocate attention to individual distractors based on their interference with the current task. A neural model supports these findings and suggests revising cognitive control theories.
https://go.nature.co...

Davide's paper has been in the works for a while and involved a lengthy review process. There's a ton to unpack here: just take a look at his 50-page supplementary material with almost as many figures!