Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Simon W Davis

AAUP IU Bloomington Chapter @iubaaup.bsky.social · 9h

At IUB, faculty salaries have not kept up with the cost of living. As the graph shows, relative to the cost of living, average faculty salaries declined by 10% between 2019 and 2025. Yet even with a vote of no confidence, Whitten's compensation has ballooned.

Line graph with the title "IU Compensation in Inflation Adjusted 2024 Dollars." Red line goes downward, representing faculty compensation; green line shoots upwards, representing IU President Whitten's compensation. More details in caption/description.

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Helen Barron @helencbarron.bsky.social · 2d

** We have up to TWO funded PhD positions available in our lab!! Apply below to find new ways to enhance memory👇 Pls retweet **

Deadline: 2nd December

1. Cross-species closed-loopTMR: tinyurl.com/bddu4tp6

2. TUS and TMR in humans:
tinyurl.com/jjws5ctj

Happy to chat to interested applicants.

Enhancing memory using cross-species closed-loop Targeted Memory Reactivation | mrcbndu

tinyurl.com

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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 2d

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
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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Celeste Headlee @celesteheadlee.bsky.social · 5d

DeSantis gave it a right-wing overhaul in 2023. Since then, ~40% of the faculty has resigned. It spends more than 10x per student what the other schools do & ranking fell from 76th to 135th.

www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida

Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization.

www.insidehighered.com

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Lexi Decker @lexidecker.bsky.social · 7d

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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Jorge Morales @jorge-morales.bsky.social · 7d

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

arxiv.org

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Simon W Davis @woodforbrains.bsky.social · 8d

And THE Consuming Shadow is 51% off! More fun than a roll of packing tape!

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Karen Campbell 🇨🇦 @karampbell.bsky.social · 8d

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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Roland Benoit @rolandbenoit.bsky.social · 9d

Job alert: We at the University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, are seeking two tenure track Assistant Professors in open areas, incl. cognitive / cognitive neuroscience. It’s a great place here! Apply by Oct 12 via jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta....

Assistant Professor

jobs.colorado.edu

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Simon W Davis @woodforbrains.bsky.social · 10d

It's a Pittsburgh deep cut 🙂

www.pittsburghmagazine.com/why-pittsbur...

Why Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum Has Permanently Removed Its Once-Popular ‘Lion Attacking a Dromedary’ Diorama | Pittsburgh Magazine

The removal is the result of a new museum policy governing the display of artifacts with human remains.

www.pittsburghmagazine.com

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Simon W Davis @woodforbrains.bsky.social · 11d

Watch out for the lions

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 12d

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

www.nsf.gov

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Simon W Davis @woodforbrains.bsky.social · 13d

Congratulations Jan!

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Brielle Stark, PhD {she} @briellestark.bsky.social · 15d

Thanks for the responses to the FOQUSAphasia survey. Manaswita Dutta and I will work hard to make these a reality! Stay tuned, and also check our updated website: www.foqusaphasia.com

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Sabina Srokova @sabina-srokova.bsky.social · 16d

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age.

Link in post below 👇

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 18d

lol. Emil Bove intervened. The guy that Senate Republicans just confirmed for a lifetime position on the federal bench.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

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New ColIege of Florida @newcollegeoffl.bsky.social · Jun 29

"the college administration revealed FOR THE FIRST TIME that, in the current financial year, the Foundation paid $865,000 for “executive salaries”—3x as much as for scholarships and more than 1/3 of the total support it provided to New College."

Hell yeah. Money. For us!

wslr.org/trustees-app...

Trustees approve New College Foundation's finances - WSLR+Fogartyville

Despite questions about transparency and threat of lawsuit, the board gives unanimous go-ahead.

wslr.org

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Simon W Davis @woodforbrains.bsky.social · 19d

www.cnn.com/2025/09/19/p...

Trump imposes $100K fee on H-1B visas in new immigration action | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Friday to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas — in an effort to curb what the administration says is overuse of the program.

www.cnn.com

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Michael W. Cole @mwcole.bsky.social · 24d

The graphical lasso functional connectivity approach that performed best in the paper can be implemented using the Activity Flow Toolbox: colelab.github.io/ActflowToolb...
And also using the paper's code release: github.com/ColeLab/Reli... [12/n]

ActflowToolbox

colelab.github.io

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Brynn Sherman @brynnsherman.bsky.social · 19d

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Moments Lab

www.momentslab.org

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Brielle Stark, PhD {she} @briellestark.bsky.social · 21d

Join us for a virtual information session about our #PhD program in #SLHS #CSD #COMD! All faculty are accepting new students. Email Graduate Coordinator Susan (spalmiot [at] iu.edu) to get the link for the session. It'll be 12-1PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, September 24th.

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CL @cllantz.bsky.social · 22d

New funding opportunity from the BRAIN Initiative! Applications due Oct 28!

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

RFA-DA-27-004: BRAIN Initiative: Theories, Models and Methods for Analysis of Complex Data from the Brain (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: BRAIN Initiative: Theories, Models and Methods for Analysis of Complex Data from the Brain (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allo...

grants.nih.gov

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Cam-CAN @camcan-2010.bsky.social · 21d

"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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jeanette-mumford.bsky.social @jeanette-mumford.bsky.social · 26d

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

GitHub - jmumford/randomise-prep: Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses.

Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. - jmumford/randomise-prep

github.com

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DrBreaky @drbreaky.bsky.social · 24d

Interested in hippocampal dynamics and their interactions with cortical rhythms?

Our physically constrained model of cortico-hippocampal interactions - complete with fast geometrically informed numerical simulation (available at embedded github repo)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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