Hugo Spiers

The majority of UK academic institutions now no longer post on X - LSE Impact For the first time, more UK universities and associated organisations are inactive on X than active.

💥New post | The majority of UK academic institutions now no longer post on X

✍️ @andytattersall.bsky.social

#AcademicSky #X #AcademicSocialMedia

Deep learning approaches to map individual differences in macroscopic neural structure with variations in spatial navigation behavior Understanding the association between structural properties of the human brain and individual differences in behavior is an ongoing endeavor, challeng…

From @stevenmweisberg.bsky.social's lab:

Deep learning approaches to map individual differences in macroscopic neural structure with variations in spatial navigation behavior

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

yep, that's one fig from many.

For that reason I always try to have 2 reviews on the go at any time..

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

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

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Sleep spindles promote hippocampal network downregulation during sleep Sleep is thought to globally downregulate neuronal network activity and synaptic connections enhanced during prior wakefulness and, in parallel, to up…

Sleep spindles promote hippocampal network downregulation during sleep

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Egocentric Spatial Memory Deficit in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment Revealed Through Virtual Reality: Cross-Sectional Study Background: Spatial navigation relies on egocentric and allocentric frames of reference, with the latter critically impaired in Alzheimer disease (AD) due to hippocampal involvement. Recent evidence s...

Check out this fascinating article aging.jmir.org/2026/1/e79224

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

Climate Map of Chile

More about the country: brilliantmaps.com/country-m...

Crafting tales of science with Theanne Griffith A lifelong passion for writing helped the neuroscientist land a book deal and publish 15 chapter books for early readers, covering topics ranging from what the cerebellum does to how a cake bakes.

A lifelong passion for writing helped rising star @doctheagrif.bsky.social land a book deal and publish 15 chapter books for early readers, covering topics ranging from what the cerebellum does to how a cake bakes.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

The diagrams are really beautiful.

A close-up of a small horse figurine carved from mammoth ivory with a weathered surface. The figure features a bowed head and arched neck, and all four legs are broken off. It's displayed on a dark, speckled platform against a black background, with soft lighting highlighting its contours.

As I'm attending a conference in Tübingen today, for #findsfriday an #IceAge masterpiece that is on display at the University museum: a tiny but most splendid figurine from the Swabian Jura - a #horse carved in mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago - the oldest known sculpture of a horse.

📷me

🏺

Cosmic UCL poster with Jon Butterworth, Mark Miodownik, Maggie Aderin, Helen Czerski, Kevin Fong, Adam Rutherford

London ppl... University College London is 200 this year & so we have a fabulous evening of science & creativity for you on May 6th. All the UCL-based usual suspects will be there (in the SAME event!), & more to be announced. Join us & bring your friends!

www.bloomsburytheatre.com/event/2026/0...

thank you, this is super relevant!

same here, not easy, but I get it.

Here's a striking visual illusion - the 9 purple dots.

Focus your eyes on the top left dot. That one is more purple than the others, right? Now try another dot... that one becomes the purple one! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41744429/

How well can you remember yesterday? We are looking for people over the age of 30 to take part in our short questionnaire. Takes around 15 minutes. Does involve some free typing so might be easier on tablet or laptop.

westminsterpsych.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

If Grid Cells are the Answer, What is the Question? A Review of Normative Grid Cell Theory For 20 years the beautiful structure in the grid cell code has presented an attractive puzzle: what computation do these representations subserve, and why does it manifest so curiously in neurons. The...

2) Grid review.

A detailed tour of the ingredients needed to get grid cells that actually look real. It boils down to:
✅ Path integration
✅ Non-linear readout
✅ Bio constraints (non-negativity and energy)

Almost there on understanding grids!
arxiv.org/abs/2601.12424

(2/3)

"Show what you looked like before you joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine."

Ukrainian Defenders share photos from before they joined the military and after.

📷: drewndel / Threads

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

Cracker of a story from @stokel.bsky.social www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

A provocative paper by @quiltydunn.bsky.social and @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social arguing that cognitive science essentially ignores conscious, deliberative *thinking*

🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?

How do people end up following their satnavs into danger? The experts have their say after an Amazon delivery driver got stuck in mudflats this week.

My friends must be sick of me saying "don't use sat nav when you don't have to"- "use it or lose it", and when it comes to the hippocampus, you really don't want to lose it- that's the region badly hit in Alzheimer's. Now I can ref @hugospiers.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #neuroskyence

New preprint, collab wth Dr Catalina Turuc's lab @thebartlettucl.bsky.social

Urban Green Space and Mental Health and Well-being: A Multi-Level Spatially Layered Framework for a Field Experiment in London

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Come work with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself! 3 yr Postdoc on category learning w/ structured, program-like representations. Funded by the www.theadaptivemind.de Excellence Cluster! Deadline is Mar 15th, details 👇 Please share widely 🙏

I doubt that is policy! But the time pressure is an issue.

Registration open 🎉

MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep

www.zi-mannheim.de/forschung/ab...

Indeed! Really useful to have the precision