Cameron Ellis
@camerontellis.bsky.social
1.3K followers 210 following 41 posts
Wannabe baby mind reader. Also, I'm from New Zealand. Lab website: https://soc.stanford.edu/
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Reposted by Cameron Ellis
dyamins.bsky.social
Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737
arxiv.org
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
drdamienfair.bsky.social
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
vayzenb.bsky.social
My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...
Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children
The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.
doi.org
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
gaablab.bsky.social
New paper examining longitudinal #brain data over 7y & relation to #reading; implications for early intervention/policy @fitngin.bsky.social
Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship with literacy development | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
lillianbehm.bsky.social
So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...
authors.elsevier.com
camerontellis.bsky.social
It was a pleasure to hear from @csavasegal.bsky.social about her impressive body of work. She demonstrates that movies are powerful tools to study individual differences in people's cognitive representations. Can't wait for her upcoming study on real-time manipulation of subjective interpretations!
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
lauraabusta.bsky.social
Life update 🚨🧵 This job market season I got close, but no spaghetti 🍝, to landing an assistant professor job. I put in 52 customized applications, expending a level of effort on par w grad school qualifying exams & dissertation defense 😅. I gave it my all at campus interviews, & enjoyed meeting many
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
callimcflurry.bsky.social
A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence
What infant fMRI is revealing about the developing mind
Cognitive neuroscientists have finally clocked how to perform task-based fMRI experiments in awake babies. Now they want watch cognition take shape.
www.thetransmitter.org
camerontellis.bsky.social
Thrilled for @tristansyates.bsky.social that this is out. Don't miss this exciting result that, in alignment with animal findings, rules out many possible explanations for why we don't remember our infancy! Like all good science, it opens more questions: is retrieval or consolidation the culprit?
tristansyates.bsky.social
Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants
Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...
www.science.org
camerontellis.bsky.social
Last week we were wow'd by @jacob-prince.bsky.social who presented his incisive and compelling work on the emergence of category selectivity in computational models. Check out the paper here (www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...) and keep an eye out for this rising star!
camerontellis.bsky.social
Tristan is a superstar, with a "rewrite the textbooks" study out next week, plus a slew of transformative published papers. This is a tragedy, but I hope she persists. Still, this attack shakes the foundations of the US's leadership in science. Call your dean, your congressman, and your senator.
tristansyates.bsky.social
Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.
camerontellis.bsky.social
We were delighted to host Kathy Garcia recently for her talk on how brains and computational models represent social dynamics. She leverages incredible data, cool methods, and exciting questions to tackle big topics in social cognition. Check out her work: garciakathy.github.io
Kathy Garcia
garciakathy.github.io
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
brynnsherman.bsky.social
Our memories are not encoded with timestamps. How do we reconstruct the passage of time from our memories? In a new paper (accepted at Psych Science) @samiyousif.bsky.social and I demonstrate a powerful illusion of time that results from repeated experience osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
camerontellis.bsky.social
A few weeks back, we had the pleasure of hosting Lindsey Mooney, who spoke to us about her thrilling past and present work on infant/toddler memory. We were most excited to hear about her follow-up to her already brilliant 2024 paper. lindseymooney.github.io/files/Memory...
lindseymooney.github.io
camerontellis.bsky.social
Incredible work by @lillianbehm.bsky.social to corral this paper. Lots of interesting insights, but it also puts into focus some mysteries: Why are females better than males at scanning? Successful scanning does not seem to be a personality trait, so what state predicts success?
lillianbehm.bsky.social
What factors impact the success of an awake infant fMRI scan? What can be done to maximize the data we collect from each infant?

In our new preprint, the Turk-Browne Lab and Saxe Lab combine our data from over 750 attempted scans to try to answer these questions:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Data retention in awake infant fMRI: Lessons from more than 750 scanning sessions
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signific...
www.biorxiv.org
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
Reposted by Cameron Ellis
evfedorenko.bsky.social
So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...
Troland Research Award – NAS
Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within ...
www.nasonline.org
camerontellis.bsky.social
Emily presented this to our lab last year and we had a lot of fun chatting about it. Really great to see this out.
emilymeyer.bsky.social
Excited to share my first first-author paper out now in PNAS! By comparing retinotopically-defined visual areas in macaques and humans, we found that evolutionary expansion is reflected in the size, not number, of visual areas. #neuroskyence #neuroscience
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
camerontellis.bsky.social
We were delighted to host @ainedineen.bsky.social in-person for a talk to end last year. She spoke about the spatial frequency tuning of the features that the infant ventral visual stream processes. Using fMRI and computer vision models, she provides a compelling account of the tuning of this area
Title slide for Áine Dineen's talk, titled: "The Infant Ventral Visual Stream Emphasises Low Spatial Frequency Features"
camerontellis.bsky.social
This one from @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social is a top contender for me