Marco Chia-Ho Lai

Thanks for the invite. Looking forward to seeing many of you online!

Assistant Professor of Psychology - Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

UCDavis Psych is hiring an Assistant Professor in Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠✨

Come join a vibrant, collaborative dept and live in a fun college town near Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and Lake Tahoe. Applications due Oct.21.

Please share widely!

recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

That's a wrap for CCN2025 -- and so planning for CCN2026 in New York is starting today! Save travels to all participants and remember to fill out the feedback survey sent via email!

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

New paper out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (open access)!

Using behavioral masked priming and single word reading with concurrent MEG recording, we investigate how our brain spots the tiny pieces of words (a.k.a. morphemes)—even when they’re playing hide-and-seek. 👀

Link ⬇️

Brennan standing next to his title slide "Exploring the neural network for sign language comprehension across deaf signers"

I'm thrilled to introduce DR. Brennan Terhune-Cotter who defended his dissertation last week! His work shows that occipital (visual) cortex is recruited during high-level language processing for ASL and that deaf adults who lack early sign access show greater activation in occipital cortex

Species-specific chromatin architecture and neurogenesis mediated by a human enhancer Genomic modifications underlie the evolution of human features, including a larger neocortex and enhanced cognition. Human Accelerated Regions (HARs) are highly-conserved loci containing human-specifi...

Fascinating new work by @federicamosti.bsky.social
@debbysilver.bsky.social on
human-specific neurodevelopment, linking ‘Human Accelerated Regions’ to chromatin architecture, cortical cell fate and expansion and folding of brains 🧪🧠🧬

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

example lab structures

tryin' to be in the band, not the band manager. todd.gureckislab.org/2024/09/25/l...

Frontiers | Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells and visual processing: ipRGCs beyond non-image-forming functions Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) are relatively newly discovered photoreceptors other than rods and cones. For the last decade, p...

Check out the mini-review I wrote about ipRGCs on visual processing!

doi.org/10.3389/fnin...

Nice preprint on the neuroscience of cross-modality 🧪🧠
👇

Read all about the neural network for sign language comprehension! New review paper with Brennan Terhune-Cotter! Please email me (or Brennan) for a copy if you can't access the paper compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Excited to share that our work, "Changes in auditory evoked responses at different levels of linguistic processing in adults and school-age children: An MEG study," is now out in Neuropsychologia!
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lVCr_fKKp...

This was such a fun collaboration! I am thrilled to see this out today!! Amazing work by Cody Dong comparing memory-augmented LLMs to human episodic memory.

We are hiring for several research positions for this grant, starting early next year. Please reach out if you're interested!
More details on the jobs here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists !
Full program here:
www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Fantastic work by our (now former) lab manager Liv Christiano. We assess the test-retest reliability of OPM and compare it to fMRI and iEEG. 🧠📄🧵

Visual adaptation stronger at the horizontal than the vertical meridian: Linking performance with V1 cortical surface area | PNAS Visual adaptation reduces bioenergetic expenditure by decreasing sensitivity to repetitive and similar stimuli. In human adults, visual performance...

Check out our new paper “Visual adaptation stronger at the horizontal than the vertical meridian: Linking performance with V1 cortical surface area” in PNAS!

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

How Language Bias Persists in Scientific Publishing Despite AI Tools | Stanford HAI Stanford researchers highlight the ongoing challenges of language discrimination in academic publishing, revealing that AI tools may not be the solution for non-native speakers.

Stanford researchers found that bias against non-native speakers persists even when AI tools are used, highlighting the ongoing challenges of language discrimination in academic publishing. hai.stanford.edu/news/how-lan...

Black-and-white scientific illustration of the first EEG topoplot by Koiti Motokawa (1944). G = glabella P = protuberantia occipitalis externa, S = central sulcus

this figure from 1944 is cited as the first topoplot, from Koiti Motokawa. in an era where only handful of EEG channels across space were used, he measured the mean alpha amplitude for 90 points across the scalp. ❗

(compiling a presentation about the evolution of topoplots, cool stuff out there 🙂)

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

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.

Honored and thrilled to receive the GGN Early Career Award @jlugiessen.bsky.social 🏆 Huge thanks to my awesome supervisors Daniel @dkaiserlab.bsky.social & Marius @peelen.bsky.social , all my collaborators, and the amazing colleagues from both labs — couldn’t have done it without you! 💗

St Catz Hosts International Workshop on Next-Generation Brain Imaging - St Catherine's College In early June, researchers from the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA) ran a highly successful four-day international workshop...

www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/st-catz-host...

Decoding words during sentence production with ECoG reveals syntactic role encoding and structure-dependent temporal dynamics Communications Psychology - Using electrical recordings taken from the surface of the brain, researchers decode what words neurosurgical patients are saying and show that the brain plans words in a...

🧠 Newly out: Paper-with-a-way-too-long-name-for-social-media! How does the brain turn words into sentences? We tracked words in participants' brains while they produced sentences, and found some unexpectedly neat patterns. 🧵1/9
rdcu.be/epA1J in @commspsychol.nature.com

Super proud of this! Thread to come soon…

Parallel and dynamic attention allocation during natural reading During natural reading, attention constantly shifts across words, yet how linguistic properties (e.g., lexical frequency) impact the allocation of attention remains unclear. In this study, we co-regis...

Our latest study on reading using MEG, eyetracking and Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging headed by Yali Pan from @thechbh.bsky.social : Parallel and dynamic attention allocation during natural reading
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Sentence Processing

Excited to share the new OECS article on 'Sentence Processing' written by Matt Wagers and myself! It's humbling to be included in the OECS, we hope you enjoy :)

oecs.mit.edu/pub/mn7mjhx9...

🚨Our Brain & AI team at Meta opens a new contingent worker position in US (or UK).

If you have solid Python experience and/or a background in neuroimaging, you can apply here:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

From the lab to a career in data science Nature Reviews Psychology - Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Teon Brooks about his journey...

I had a lovely time chatting with @teresaschubert.bsky.social of @natrevpsychol.nature.com about my experience transitioning from a career as an academic research scientist to an industry data scientist. Gift link below

🧪🧠👨🏾‍🔬 #science #psychsky #neuroskyence #SciFri
cc: @blackinneuro.bsky.social