Dr Poppy Watson

Time to vote for your favourite Aussie bird…

"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

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.

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...

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."

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Thanks for checking. I think there must be something going on with the uni firewall.

Thanks for checking. This must be a University thing 🙄, it's actually working for me at home

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)

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/...

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 :)

🚨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 👇

An amazing opportunity to work with a rising star in the field!

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.

I would say 30 a year, anywhere from 30 mins to 3 hrs, definitely getting quicker though!

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516) | University of Oslo Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025

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...

Tough at Universities in the Sydney region right now. Consultants reign throughout

I haven't seen the original paper but glad to know now not to bother reading it!

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...

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

I heard about this the other day. Obviously seems problematic

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...

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

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.

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

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...

Fabrizi, Lorenzo: Postdoc Opportunity in Neonatal Brain Imaging in London – Apply by 25 September

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...

Here's the link to their "stakeholder survey on the use of AI in grant assessment":

www.surveymonkey.com/r/X7PY5GL

Notre Dame is hiring in Psychology! We have an open-rank, tenure/TT position in Cognitive Neuroscience: apply.interfolio.com/170229

Application deadline is soon (Sept. 15)

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making - Nature Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

The brain's priors have been found! They were hiding everywhere: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... So if this is true for "simple" decisions, it should also be true for more complex ones, like, say, emotions, right?

Deadline for applications is 16th September!

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

This looks interesting, thanks for sharing

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...