Shichen Jia
shichen-j.bsky.social
Shichen Jia
@shichen-j.bsky.social
Student of psychology(brain and cognition) at University of Amsterdam
Back home in China! 🏮 Surprised to find out my dad had surgery last month, but grateful to be here for him.

Also, finally retired my 5-year-old ThinkPad! 💻 Currently breaking it in with Python exercises & prepping for the Logic & Comp minor. Dec burnout is gone; momentum is building for Feb! 🧠🔋
January 8, 2026 at 1:23 AM
London is incredibly quiet today. Depending on how much you enjoy the silence, Christmas is either the best time to be here—or the worst. I personally love it. 🇬🇧🚶‍♂️
December 25, 2025 at 7:06 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...
www.nature.com
December 4, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
🚨UK Biobank has ADHD + ASD + Emotionality questionnaires in an older population now! Huge potential to study ppl born a little early to have been recognized/diagnosed. Especially Women (who are still less likely to be observed to have symptoms and be referred): biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/showcase/lab...
: Category 517
biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk
November 21, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...
Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search
Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.
doi.org
November 10, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com

Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
October 31, 2025 at 2:47 PM
--When was the last time your happiness feeling peaked?
--When my Scientific Programming assignment passed with all greenlights😆
October 29, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
‘I discovered there's a world of phenomena driven by common knowledge…’

Prof Steven Pinker @harvard.edu is author of ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage’.

Repost for your chance to win a copy!

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...
‘I discovered there's a world of phenomena driven by common knowledge’ | BPS
Our editor Dr Jon Sutton meets Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of new book ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… Common Knowledge and the S...
www.bps.org.uk
September 30, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Taking courses on AI and consciousness. When we debate "where does consciousness begin in evolution?" I keep thinking of a single cell. It's already this complex, functional system that behaves in a way to actively exclude toxic stimuli from the outside environment.
I love this series from @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and also remember having such a strong impression from reading this paper in grad school. Even tiny parts of the cell are wildly crowded and complex! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
October 27, 2025 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
A new, Short and Sweet open-access paper on how briefly hiding the hand impedes goal-directed arm movements. Briefly is really brief: we find a decrease in performance in goal-directed movements due to just a few ms without vision of the hand (target remains visible). doi.org/10.1177/0301...
October 27, 2025 at 10:49 AM
There is always so much to learn, so much to comprehend and so much to feel thrilled about. “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”
October 27, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
How do our brains learn when choices affect both ourselves and others?

New work by @shawnrhoadsphd.com, @aa-marsh.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, @drjocutler.bsky.social, et al. in @natcomms.nature.com reveals shared neural computations for prosocial & antisocial learning

rdcu.be/eL8mZ
October 22, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
We (I and @willenjoy.bsky.social) created a toolbox for simulations of EEG/MEG because we needed to simulate data. Our initial aim was to simulate connectivity. For this short clip, I simulated two sources with phase connectivity using our toolbox.
#brainmovie
meegsim.readthedocs.io/en/stable/in...
October 3, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
UCL’s Consciousness Club series resumes tomorrow Wed 22nd Oct with Ken Paller @paller.bsky.social on “Two Sides of Sleep and Memory: Conscious and Unconscious”

3pm-430pm UK time

All welcome, for zoom details please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...
October 21, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
Join @matthiasmichel.bsky.social and me (over Zoom), won't you, for next speaker at the MIT Consciousness Club. Today at noon EDT
Rachel Denison (Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Boston University) - "Attentional Distortions of Subjective Perception"
sites.google.com/view/mit-con...
October 16, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
📣 Out in TINS (@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social):

Neural processing is often described as either externally or internally directed. In our new Forum article, we (@freekvanede.bsky.social & Kia Nobre) propose a multilevel framework for conceptualising external and internal continua of brain processes.
October 19, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
This is a great idea except for the fact that it's wrong. You can obtain the same learning speed across dramatically different interstimulus intervals (T) as long as the intertrial interval (I) is kept in a fixed ratio with the interstimulus interval (Gallistel & Gibbon, 2000).
October 10, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597
October 2, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
What is agency? How did it emerge through evolution? Why is it key to understanding complexity? Check out this brilliant Open Access book by my dear colleagues Alvaro Moreno & @julipereto.bsky.social. A deep exploration of a crucial concept. Highly recommended! link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
October 1, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
👁️🧠 New preprint: We demonstrate the first data-driven neural control framework for a visual cortical implant in a blind human!

TL;DR Deep learning lets us synthesize efficient stimulation patterns that reliably evoke percepts, outperforming conventional calibration.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 27, 2025 at 2:52 AM
Wow, there are still new illusions to be discovered in vision!
A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...
September 26, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Shichen Jia
I love growing all the 3D organoids, but here is cortical neurons appreciation 🧠 iPSC-derived TUJ1 + (green) cells
#FluorescenceFriday
September 19, 2025 at 5:19 PM