Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 5d

We're a month further into the job market - how are things looking? The good news is that the market does seem to have been delayed: ~150 new listings have appeared since my last post. The bad news is that the total is still substantially lower than what it was during the covid dip.

2 20 47

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Eric Hehman @erichehman.bsky.social · 5d

Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

4 10

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Anna (Anya) Ivanova @neuranna.bsky.social · 9d

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social
built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets!

We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it!
1/

neurotaha @neurotaha.bsky.social · 9d

🚨 Paper alert:
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop

LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models

📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io

1 6 30

Sebastian Speer @sebospeer.bsky.social · 12d

@falklab.bsky.social wrote a nice summary of our hyperscanning work on how people form social connection and find agreement through conversation: www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows

Brain imaging is illuminating the patterns linked to productive, positive dialogue, and those insights could help people connect with others

www.scientificamerican.com

3 14

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Fernando Rosas @frosas.bsky.social · 14d

Finally published:
“Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An information-theoretic framework to analyse complex multivariate dynamical processes ✨

Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition | PNAS

Our ability to understand and control complex systems of many interacting parts remains limited. A key challenge is that we still do not know how b...

www.pnas.org

2 6 28

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Dani Cosme @dcosme.bsky.social · 14d

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Aug 25

With LLMs, researchers can develop software entirely through natural language conversations. This shift is transforming how research gets done, offering new opportunities and new challenges, writes ‪Benjamin Dichter.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

Should neuroscientists ‘vibe code’?

Researchers are developing software entirely through natural language conversations with advanced large language models. The trend is transforming how research gets done—but it also presents new…

www.thetransmitter.org

2 3

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Nature Computational Science @natcomputsci.nature.com · 22d

📢Out now! @jixingli.bsky.social, @lamb-cityuhk.bsky.social and colleagues assess whether instruction tuning can enhance LLM's ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #compneuro #ArtificialIntelligence

Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain - Nature Computational Science

Larger LLMs’ self-attention more accurately predicts readers’ regressive saccades and fMRI responses in language regions, whereas instruction tuning adds no benefit.

www.nature.com

5 12

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Heejung Jung @jungheejung.bsky.social · Sep 4

New Open dataset alert:
🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience!

N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks!

🧵below

3 58 120

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Jamie Reilly 🦜 @reilly-coglab.com · Aug 22

How to compute surprisal (Shannon Information) for every word in your language sample. Then --- correlate surprisal with other major lexical-semantic variables (concreteness, semantic neighborhoods, freq). reilly-lab.github.io/Surprisal.html

Semantic Distance fMRI: Analyses, Psycholinguistic Correlations

reilly-lab.github.io

1 7 26

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · Aug 11

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

6 200 310

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Kelly T. Cosgrove @kellytcosgrove.bsky.social · Aug 4

My brilliant labmate, Keith Dodd, created this non-aggressive denoising pipeline for fMRI data for his dissertation! It has been super useful on some of our high-motion datasets, and I highly suggest folks check it out for their own studies 🧠📈🪲:
direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

CICADA: An automated and flexible tool for comprehensive fMRI noise reduction

Abstract. Independent component analysis (ICA) denoising methods can be highly effective for reducing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) noise. ICA denoising method success heavily depends, ...

direct.mit.edu

1 9 27

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Aug 1

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

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

14 46

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

David Schultner @davidschultner.bsky.social · Jul 28

If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of our reward learning account of social learning—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—check out our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies - Nature Human Behaviour

This research advances a mechanistic reward learning account of social learning strategies. Through experiments and simulations, it shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shapin...

www.nature.com

1 3 5

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Jamie Reilly 🦜 @reilly-coglab.com · Jul 22

Our conversation analysis software is now on CRAN! Reach out with any questions. We hope it’s useful for all you language and social interaction folks out there.

CRAN Package Updates Bot @cranberriesfeed.bsky.social · Jul 22

New CRAN package ConversationAlign with initial version 0.2.0
#rstats
https://cran.r-project.org/package=ConversationAlign

CRAN: Package ConversationAlign

Imports conversation transcripts into R, concatenates them into a single dataframe appending event identifiers, cleans and formats the text, then yokes user-specified psycholinguistic database values to each word. 'ConversationAlign' then computes alignment indices between two interlocutors across each transcript for >40 possible semantic, lexical, and affective dimensions. In addition to alignment, 'ConversationAlign' also produces a table of analytics (e.g., token count, type-token-ratio) in a summary table describing your particular text corpus.

cran.r-project.org

2 15 39

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social · Jul 22

"We propose a unified quantitative model that integrates decision-making and communication, revealing how verbal framing of probabilistic expression both reflects and shapes beliefs in speakers and listeners."

Read more here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

2 1

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · Jul 22

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS

Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

www.pnas.org

2 36 92

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · Jul 21

Optimistic people have functional MRI commonality of neural processing for imagining the future (whereas pessimists have a diverse pattern)
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

14 43 260

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Robert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · Jul 21

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory."

arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog

As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...

arxiv.org

5 13

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Jul 19

Been really enjoying the Complexity Science Discussion Group hosted by Paul Middlebrooks, where we're working our way through the Santa Fe Institute's "Classic Papers in Complexity Science". The group is open for anyone interested:

braininspired.co/complexity-g...

Complexity Group Email List | Brain Inspired

braininspired.co

7 26 89

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Jamie Reilly 🦜 @reilly-coglab.com · Jul 10

Major updates to our ConversationAlign R package - submitted to CRAN and JOSS today. If you're interested in computing alignment and main effects for >40 psycholinguistic dimensions in naturalistic conversation, this is the package for you reilly-conceptscognitionlab.github.io/Conversation...

ConversationAlign

Reads conversation transcripts into R, cleans and formats them, and yokes user-specified psycholinguistic database values to each word. ConversationAlign computes alignment indices between two interlo...

reilly-conceptscognitionlab.github.io

1 10 28

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Robert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · Jul 10

Seamless Interaction dataset with 4000+ hrs of face-to-face dyadic interactions! 🤯

Seems like it could be a game changer for studying embodied turn-taking & mutual adaptation complementary with CANDOR, etc...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset

Human communication involves a complex interplay of verbal and nonverbal signals, essential for conveying meaning and achieving interpersonal goals. To develop socially intelligent AI technologies, it...

arxiv.org

2 8 19

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · Jul 2

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

9 140 330

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Jan Engelmann @janengelmann.bsky.social · Jun 19

Check out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets.
With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Disagreement drives metacognitive development

Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent rese…

www.sciencedirect.com

15 19

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Natalie Peluso 🧠🫁😊 @nataliepeluso.com · Jul 1

What a fantastic resource! Super valuable for those of us teaching experimental methods for undergrads (not to mention staying crystal clear on our own procedures) 👇

Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · Jul 1

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

1 6

Reposted by Sebastian Speer

Marta Silva @martamasilva.bsky.social · Jul 1

🧠 Paper out!

We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that:

🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries
🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall

Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories!

rdcu.be/eui9l

Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries

Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...

rdcu.be

8 67 150