Jamie Murray

It's exam season. So, I wrote up my exam taking tips as a blog post. It comes with a set of PowerPoint slides, too. Wishing all students all the best for their exams! You've got this!

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :)

Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun

This was my lab's first foray into event cognition

gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Urgh, can’t have anything nice. Back to in person exams and now data collection.

Life Sciences PhD studentships available in amazing Glasgow! Deadline Jan 12

General details here: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...

My project, on cognitive mapping in 3D space in mice and humans, available here: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...

Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.

Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉

As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

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...

Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...

New Pre-Print:
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning.

Overview 🧵 below...

Phase-locking saccades to posterior alpha oscillations improves the neural representation of visual objects during memory formation Visual memory formation begins with the intake and neural processing of discrete samples provided by gaze fixations and saccades. Past research has highlighted a functional relationship between the ti...

Memory might depend on when you look, not just what you see

Happy to share a new preprint from my postdoctoral work with Jed Meltzer, @drjenryan.bsky.social, and @rosannaolsen.bsky.social

Paper: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Wee trip to Belfast was fun. Lots to do at the titanic quarter alone!

This gives me much hope for the future of Psychology.
Over my career, I've seen many tech fads come and go (or often not go), each displacing the basic effort of theoretical clarity by something that works off laziness.
Here, the latest fad is being shown for what it is very early in its lifetime.

Engrams Formed in Virtual Reality Exhibit Reduced Familiarity Upon Retrieval: Electrophysiological Correlates of Source Memory Retrieval Indicate Modality‐Dependent Differences in Recognition Memory The study examines whether the retrieval of virtual reality (VR)-engrams is more profoundly based on recollection than on familiarity compared to PC-engrams, and whether the encoding modality functio...

Engrams Formed in Virtual Reality Exhibit Reduced Familiarity Upon Retrieval: Electrophysiological Correlates of Source Memory Retrieval Indicate Modality-Dependent Differences in Recognition Memory
doi.org/10.1111/ejn....
#neuroscience

Open postdoc position👈
We have an open position, starting early 2026, to work on an exciting project aiming at better understanding the role of thalamo-cortical brain oscillations in perception with a comparative, cross-species (animal-human) component based on electrophysiology (incl. scalp EEG).

Why do some gamers invert their controls? Scientists now have answers, but they’re not what you think The phenomenal response to an article we published on this question led to detailed cognitive research – and the findings have implications that go way beyond gamers

Interesting article about why some people invert their game controls. Short story… it’s complicated 🤣

www.theguardian.com/games/2025/s...

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain Extensive work has shown that the visual cortex is reactivated during mental imagery, and that models trained on visual data can predict imagery activity and decode imagined stimuli. These findings ma...

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Recent trip to Dunkeld which luckily for me is less than a 40min drive.

One person in this picture is super fit and can climb near vertically without breaking a sweat. The other person is me… near death and really not wearing the appropriate footwear.

‘Easy in, easy out’: Chinese students say UK ‘like assembly line’ International students feel marketisation has brought easier admissions but lower teaching standards at prestigious British universities, finds new study

“Chinese students resent “assembly line” teaching that makes them feel like “tinned tomatoes”…
The study was one of the first to put Chinese students’ voices at the forefront, revealing the damaging impact of being seen mainly as sources of income”
😐😔
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/easy-ea...

Studying memory narratives with natural language processing Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Reblog: How To Convince Students To Use Effective Study Strategies? — The Learning Scientists I’m currently preparing teaching for the upcoming academic year. One focus for me has been student self-regulated learning and time management skills. So, as I’m developing resources for students and...

NEW POST: "Reblog: How To Convince Students To Use Effective Study Strategies?" by @drckt.bsky.social

www.learningscientists.org/blog/2023/6/...

🚨 New preprint alert!

Excited to share our latest work on alpha/beta activity, eye movements, and memory.

Across 4 experiments combining scalp EEG/iEEG with eye tracking, we show that alpha/beta activity directly reflects eye movements, and only indirectly relates to memory.

👇 Highlights (1/7):

I don’t have experience lifting my own weight but plank was part of my routine last year and I struggled with anything beyond 2 minutes. Hated it every time.

I think the plank is probably for about 90% of us though. Ooft.

My American summer students have been impressed with Scotlands coffee scene. Here’s my favourite coffee shop which is in Dundee - JA Braithwaites. It’s like walking into a Time Machine and they know their stuff!

Game Boy™ 72046 | LEGO® Super Mario™ | Buy online at the Official LEGO® Shop GB Nintendo® themed collectible building set for adults

😍😍😍😍😍

www.lego.com/en-gb/produc...

Centre for Neurodiversity and Development Public Lecture Why autism isn't what you think it is (and why that matters) - end of fellowship Public Lecture by Dr Monique Botha

PUBLIC LECTURE:

My end of @leverhulme.ac.uk fellowship lecture is on the 24th of September! It will be in person at @durhampsych.bsky.social and also streamed online. Tickets are available on Eventbrite.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/centre-for...

Picture of Glencoe

Took the kids to Glencoe for a wee day trip. It’s a pretty amazing place that we are lucky enough to have on our doorstep (well maybe not a doorstep but def within a 2 hour drive)…

Huge congratulations to Simon Hanzal for passing his PhD today 🎉 And to @jamiemurray86.bsky.social and @drgbuckingham.bsky.social for examining (and most excellent post-viva chat)👌🏻 @ccniuofg.bsky.social

Examining a PhD thesis – internal examiner One of the things which will eventually land on your lap as a new lecturer is a request to examine a doctoral thesis. In the UK (where the vast majority of these requests will come from, if you are…

My first time internal examining PhD candidate went extremely well. Congratulations Simon! It helped that the external was @drgbuckingham.bsky.social who helpfully wrote the book (…well blog) on what to expect as an internal examiner!

gavinbuckingham.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/e...

I loved the first culture novel, the second was okay and I bombed out of the 3rd. I just couldn’t handle all the sassy drones.