Dr Poppy Watson
@popwatson.bsky.social
330 followers 680 following 130 posts
University of Technology Sydney, Lecturer in Psychology. Attention, reward, control, associative learning, habits, goal directed, PIT, addiction
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Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
jacasiegel.bsky.social
Would love some recommendations for biostats texts! Especially biostatistics using R. Feeling a little out of my depth with this, but hoping to find a great resource for self-teaching.
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
mattgoldrick.bsky.social
Deadline 11/15 "candidates whose work develops computational methods in any area of linguistics and specifically connects linguistics to artificial intelligence" faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
mehr.nz
"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
philipcball.bsky.social
You might imagine that an event celebrating 75 years of the Turing Test would be all "Wasn't he prescient, and look, now we really do have machines that think!" Mercifully, this event yesterday was close to the opposite. /1
royalsociety.org/science-even...
Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test | Royal Society
An event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test, held at the Royal Society on 2 October 2025.
royalsociety.org
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
astrokatie.com
As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease.

There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done."

1/🧵
popwatson.bsky.social
Thanks for checking. I think there must be something going on with the uni firewall.
popwatson.bsky.social
Thanks for checking. This must be a University thing 🙄, it's actually working for me at home
popwatson.bsky.social
The website for JAMOVI has been down for at least 48 hrs, probably longer. Anyone know if they're coming back?? We usually recommend it for students but might have to switch to another excellent stats programme (JASP)
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
svangaal.bsky.social
Out for a while but forgot to post it. Using pupil size as a proxy for arousal, we show that the inverted-U shaped arousal–performance curve (Yerkes-Dodson law) is not fixed, but can shift globally depending on neuromodulatory state (atomoxetine): arousal recalibration 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 Dr Poppy Watson
stevenmweisberg.bsky.social
🚨The SCANN Lab @ UTA is hiring a postdoctoral researcher!🚨

Topics: 🧭 spatial navigation, 🧠 fMRI, 🎮 VR, 👵 cognitive aging.

Start date: Nov 2025 (flexible).

Salary: NIH levels.

Details 👇
Flyer detailing information about the position, compensation, and requirements. 

If you need alt-text details to apply for this position, please email Steven Weisberg at steven dot weisberg @ uta dot edu for more information! We'd love to have you on board :)
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
dsquared.bsky.social
An amazing opportunity to work with a rising star in the field!
nifti12.bsky.social
🚀 Job Opportunity!

Are you passionate about neuroscience, women’s health, and large-scale neuroimaging studies?

I am hiring a 3-year Postdoc to join the @erc.europa.eu project #MappingPerimenopause!

karriere.charite.de/en/job-vacan...
Postdoctoral Researcher (d/f/m) in Women’s Brain Health (Neuroimaging)
full-time, part-time | 14.10.2025 | Campus Charité Mitte
karriere.charite.de
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
escop.bsky.social
Call for papers on conflict adaptation across single- and multi-tasking paradigms in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition

The deadline for initial submissions is 1 October 2026.
www.apa.org
popwatson.bsky.social
I would say 30 a year, anywhere from 30 mins to 3 hrs, definitely getting quicker though!
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
sirileknes.bsky.social
Please RT
2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD!

Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all!

We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516) | University of Oslo
Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
www.jobbnorge.no
popwatson.bsky.social
Tough at Universities in the Sydney region right now. Consultants reign throughout
amandawise.bsky.social
1/At Macquarie Uni we are losing 50% of our units in my faculty. This is on top of cuts in 2020. We estimate by next year my faculty will be teaching 80% fewer subjects than pre Covid. Disciplines being cut do not have declining enrolments. @jennaprice.bsky.social @michaelwestbiz.bsky.social
popwatson.bsky.social
I haven't seen the original paper but glad to know now not to bother reading it!
sophieehill.bsky.social
My thread on the Neurology paper on sweeteners & cognitive health: skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl...

And a follow-up thread on some weird patterns in the Appendix tables: skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl...

Collated by Skywriter onto a web page for easier reading!
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
sergeahmed.bsky.social
This article is truly impressive, both for the significance of its findings and the enormous amount of work it represents!

Briefly, it demonstrates that the gut-brain vagal axis exerts a considerable influence on dopamine-dependent reward-related processes...

1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
popwatson.bsky.social
I heard about this the other day. Obviously seems problematic
jamiecummins.bsky.social
Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
arxiv.org
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social
How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv
Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature
Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...
www.nature.com
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
jomichell.bsky.social
Many shocking things about the last 24 hours; but the contrast between the Labour government’s response to peaceful protest against genocide, and its non-response to violent racist protest against liberal democracy, is high on the list.
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
danieljdrucker.bsky.social
It was reasonable not to anticipate that bipolar disorders might be a future indication. There is little compelling biology to link GLP-1R signalling to the therapy of this challenging disorder
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
imagingneurosci.bsky.social
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Jared Deighton, Vassilios N. Christopoulos, et al:

Functional ultrasound imaging combined with machine learning for whole-brain analysis of drug-induced hemodynamic changes

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
Reposted by Dr Poppy Watson
jakeembrey.bsky.social
New paper! Different to my usual schtick concerning cognitive costs. We analysed differences in learning between depressed and healthy students and whether Pavlovian biases differed between them. We found mixed evidence... have a read!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...