alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett
@alexbarnett.bsky.social
2.1K followers 390 following 42 posts
assistant prof at McGill / memory / fMRI / epilepsy / opinions are my brain's / he / him
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
mikexcohen.bsky.social
Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d
Why I left academia and neuroscience.

This post on Substack has gained a lot of traction. I think many people identify with it.
(Most of my posts are technical tutorials on machine-learning and LLM-mechanisms.)
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...
Why I left academia and neuroscience
Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.
mikexcohen.substack.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
karampbell.bsky.social
Karen Campbell 🇨🇦 @karampbell.bsky.social · 7d
The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4
Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology
Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.
www.nature.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
borismontreal.bsky.social
Boris Bernhardt @borismontreal.bsky.social · 6d
🚨 New paper in Nature Methods:
HippoMaps: multiscale cartography of the human hippocampus

Open-source tools & data to explore structure and function of the 🍤🧠 (histology, in/ex vivo MRI, iEEG)

Led by @jordandekraker.bsky.social

docs: hippomaps.readthedocs.io
paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
lexidecker.bsky.social
Lexi Decker @lexidecker.bsky.social · 6d
Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!
DeckerLab
www.deckerlab.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
alexatompary.bsky.social
Alexa Tompary @alexatompary.bsky.social · 12d
The MAC lab at Drexel is looking for a new post-doc to work on NIH-funded projects investigating the intersection of prior knowledge and long-term memory consolidation. Please pass along to any interested lab members! careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...
Careers at Drexel - Human Resources
careers.drexel.edu
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
drlaschowski.bsky.social
Brokoslaw Laschowski @drlaschowski.bsky.social · Sep 5
Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...
Professor - Computational Cognitive Neuroscience
Professor - Computational Cognitive Neuroscience
jobs.utoronto.ca
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
bjherrmann.bsky.social
Björn Herrmann @bjherrmann.bsky.social · 21d
Our lab auditoryaging.com at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest in Toronto is recruiting a graduate student for Fall 2026. We work on cognition, hearing, hearing loss, and social consequences of hearing loss. Get in-touch (email). For UofT admission details www.sgs.utoronto.ca/programs/psy...
Home | Auditory Aging
The Auditory Aging lab uses behavioral, brain recording, and qualitative social methods to understand the impact of age-related hearing loss.
www.auditoryaging.com
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · 21d
New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding
People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...
www.biorxiv.org
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · Sep 8
Congrats Georgia! Incredible milestone
Reposted by Alex Barnett
buddhikabellana.bsky.social
Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5
How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · Sep 4
a man is wearing a yellow hoodie and says you need to chill out
ALT: a man is wearing a yellow hoodie and says you need to chill out
media.tenor.com
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · Sep 4
We are talking about it in lab meeting today!
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
adibuoy23.bsky.social
Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3
1/ 🚨 Preprint alert!
How does the brain make sense of continuous experience?
We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
psychonomicsociety.bsky.social
Psychonomic Society @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social · Aug 28
Need to control visual similarity in your experiments? A new open database by Robbins and colleagues @michaelhout.bsky.social @haywardgodwin.bsky.social, published in #psynomBRM, maps similarity among 1,200 objects in 20 categories using MDS—validated & ready to use.
Resources for Research
This section provides brief summaries of selected resources for research that have been published in journals of the Psychonomic Society, typically Behavior Research Methods. These resources consis…
wp.me
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
matthiasnau.bsky.social
Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · Aug 28
Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Studying memory narratives with natural language processing
Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...
www.cell.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
matthiasnau.bsky.social
Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · Aug 25
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
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...
doi.org
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
omersharon.bsky.social
Omer Sharon @omersharon.bsky.social · Aug 11
No one ever steps in the same movie twice. Anticipatory gaze 👁️ indicate episodic memory seconds before an event occurs. 🧠🐾 Very robust effects across both natural and crafted movies, and of course, after sleep! 😴. Out today in Communication Psychology:
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Check it out!
Anticipatory eye gaze as a marker of memory - Communications Psychology
Anticipatory eye movements during repeated movie viewing reveal when and what is remembered. Gaze patterns correlate with explicit reports, offering a method to detect memory for events without verbal...
www.nature.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
cneuromod.ca
Courtois Project on Neuronal Modelling @cneuromod.ca · Jul 30
New CNeuroMod-THINGS open-access fMRI dataset: 4 participants · ~4 000 images (720 categories) each shown 3× (12k trials per subject)· individual functional localizers & NSD-inspired QC . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.09024 Congrats Marie St-Laurent and @martinhebart.bsky.social !!
four brain maps showing noise ceiling estimates in response to image presentation
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
danilobzdok.bsky.social
danilobzdok @danilobzdok.bsky.social · Jul 28
📢 job opening: software developer at Mila Quebec AI Institute & McGill

As of now, my team is looking to hire a new technical staff member with abackground in a STEM area for running and curating existing AI analysis pipelines, as well as designing GUIs around them.

Please DM or email me, with CV
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
codydong.bsky.social
Cody Dong @codydong.bsky.social · Jul 26
My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv...

Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)
authors.elsevier.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
agilboa.bsky.social
Asaf Gilboa @agilboa.bsky.social · Jul 17
Happy to share our study showing a new role for ventromedial PFC in prospection. tinyurl.com/e7kudkby
#neuroskyence #psychscisky
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex and Intention Representation in Prospective Memory
Prospective memory (PM) consists of (i) a retrospective component, comprised of memory for intentions and for the cues that should trigger an action, …
tinyurl.com
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
theneuro.bsky.social
Le Neuro (Institut-Hôpital neurologique de Montréal) @theneuro.bsky.social · Jul 15
Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · Jul 11
I think you deserve a pass on that one ☺️
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alexbarnett.bsky.social
Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · Jul 10
It emotionally exhausted me. Eventually there is just a looming feeling of “if anything good happens, something much more effed up is gonna come and destroy it”
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Reposted by Alex Barnett
claeneuro.bsky.social
CLaE @claeneuro.bsky.social · Jul 5
Nature Communications

A network correspondence toolbox for quantitative evaluation of novel neuroimaging results

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A network correspondence toolbox for quantitative evaluation of novel neuroimaging results - Nature Communications
Here, the authors present the Network Correspondence Toolbox, which enables researchers to examine and report spatial correspondence between their neuroimaging results and widely used brain atlases.
www.nature.com
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