Nicholas A. Vest

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

Does Focusing on the Unit of Change Help Children Learn Growing Pattern Skills? Children regularly encounter growing and decreasing patterns in songs, games, and daily routines. Over development, children learn to extend and abstract (i.e., recreate the pattern using different...

📣📣 A recent paper by Nicholas A. Vest and colleagues:

Does Focusing on the Unit of Change Help Children Learn Growing Pattern Skills? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@nicholasvest.bsky.social
@marthaalibali.bsky.social

So excited to be at #MCLS2025 🌟🔢🐒

The abstract for the 2002 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article by Miller et al., entitled "Extensive Individual Differences in Brain Activations Associated with Episodic Retrieval Are Reliable Over Time"

A key result figure from the Miller et al. (2002) study (Figure 2), showing that the average brain activation results for the entire group are quite different from the activation patterns shown at the level of individual participants.

Do you know of any recent papers reporting good data showing that group "averages" may not capture what's going on at the individual level? If so, please share here.

Example 1: Miller et al.'s 2002 imaging study showing reliable indiv. diffs in brain activation patterns vs. group average. (1/2)

Wow.

Look at how rapidly preregistration has become the norm in experimental economics.

Grieving the potential loss of incredible undergraduate and graduate students - both recently admitted and current!

NSF just cancelled ALL grants to Harvard researchers. That’s right - physics, astronomy, bio, CAREER - ALL. Professors won’t get paid. Postdocs won’t get paid. PhD students won’t get paid. This is insane!

If they can do this to Harvard, they can do this to your school.

“It found 90% of respondents think federal investment in STEM education is important for future economic prosperity, and the majority of respondents from both parties are concerned about policy changes that might make it harder for the U.S. to attract and retain top scientists.”

Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.

Spencer is stepping in at the best time-- if you need bridge funding for your research after losing NSF, look into this!

Jisun Kim is presenting work in collaboration with @gilliangrose.bsky.social, Tess Levinson, and @lkfazio.bsky.social. We received exciting news this week that the manuscript on this work was accepted - Congrats, Jisun! @mcls-official.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #Devpsych #Cogsci

Hello #SCRD!☘️

Join our roundtable Friday on May 2 at 1:20 PM (Room 200E, level 2)

“Contributions of Research in majority world countries to the understanding of child development”
🇿🇦🇨🇱🇺🇸🇬🇧🇧🇷🇮🇪

#DevPsyc #CogSci
@srcdorg.bsky.social

Excited to see everyone at #SRCD2025! Come check out our symposium on children's books as a tool for parent-child ethnic-racial socialization on Friday at 11:30AM (Room 101E).

a list of various presentations from the Bonawitz lab at SRCD

If you're at SRCD please consider checking out these talks and posters featuring members of the CoCoDev lab and our awesome collaborators.
#SRCD2025

Come check out the UChicago Social Kids Lab (PIs Katherine Kinzler and Alex Shaw) at #SRCD2025. My labmates have lots of exciting projects I can't wait to watch them present.

Graph showing how much competitive federal research funding has slowed under current administration

Current NIH funding slump represents:
- Research labs closing
- PhD students abandoning their dreams.
- Trial participants left to their own devices mid study.
- A halt to scientific progress and innovation for cancer, chronic and infectious diseases.
- Minority health research terminated.
Etc.

BTW. If you’re a scientist and are feeling hollowed out, depressed, fried, frustrated, confused, and simply exhausted by everything, I understand you. You are perfectly sane and you are not alone.

Attending a conference where researchers in my field (studying online misinformation and manipulation) are commiserating over all of our canceled grants, all in service of this: so this man and his regime of propagandists and conspiracy theorists can dictate (un)reality without challenge.

Science Explains How Children Best Learn Math—And Yes, Timed Practice Helps A new report shows that children learn arithmetic most effectively when instruction combines conceptual understanding and timed practice.

If you study numerical cognition/math education or teach math to children, check out the latest issue of "Psychological Science in the Public Interest," written by @nicolemmcneil.bsky.social, @numcog.bsky.social, & colleagues. This piece offers useful evidence-based teaching/policy recommendations.

All NIDA F31 diversity scholars officially losing their funding...

I barely have words.

Expected at this point but so so disappointing and unfair. We are effectively punishing some of America's best science students for telling the government they are from an underrepresented community.

Interested in numerical cognitive development, school readiness, STEM education? Be sure to check out our work at #SRCD2025! 😀

Reminder: If you're interested in being a speaker in our MCLS Trainee virtual session on participatory design in math cognition and learning research, applications are due in 2 weeks (on April 1)!

I sincerely think that universities should suspend their productivity standards for scientists and ask them instead to hold town halls in schools, public libraries, museums, shopping malls, and anywhere else and communicate what is being lost with the collapse of the research ecosystem.

I'll share what I conveyed to a grad student recently:

There is much that remains unknown and out of our control right now. The future is extremely uncertain. Multiple job markets have already imploded. Focus on what you can control. Can you finish the dissertation? Then finish the dissertation.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

I'm writing today with a big request during a difficult time for all of us. Together, we've grown Children Helping Science into a cornerstone for online developmental research. Researchers from roughly 150 institutions have conducted remote studies with over 15,000 families since 2020, with many of those families returning to participate in multiple studies across labs. The CHS team and infrastructure is currently supported almost entirely by the United States government (NSF and NIH). Like many US researchers, we're facing substantial uncertainty about what this means for our financial stability over the coming months and years, and we are hard at work pursuing every angle to keep this platform available to the community. This includes exploring new funding strategies we have previously not considered, like possibly allowing some carefully vetted companies to display ads to families. Researchers will continue to be able to use the CHS platform for free, but your support right now is critical. At the same time, we know that many of you, especially those of you in the United States, are facing the same instability to present and future funding as we are. Today, we are asking for three FREE actions from all of you to support our immediate fundraising efforts:

**Send us your citations.** If you have publications that collected data or advertised studies through CHS or Lookit, please share those references. These citations are essential for demonstrating CHS’s impact to funders. A list of all the citations we're aware of is linked here, in case you're not sure whether we have your recent articles. **Send us publicly shareable materials and press coverage.** If you have cute study designs, engaging visuals, or images of adorable kids (with the necessary permissions) we’d love to use them in presentations to potential funders. Similarly, if your research has been covered in any public media (university publications, podcasts, news articles), please send these to us. **Share your funding applications and ideas.** If you are preparing a grant proposal (to any funding source), please reach out to discuss how you can include a budget line to support CHS. If you have ideas for joint projects, or even of funders you think we should reach out to - we're all ears! And if you have ever received funding to conduct studies using CHS/Lookit, please also make sure we know about it.

You can do all of these things right now at this link (https://forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZizMK8). Please also feel free to email us (best address: mekline@mit.edu) with any other questions or ideas. We are committed to keeping CHS running and serving this community, and we will do everything in our power to keep the lights on. Thank you for helping to make CHS such a wonderful community resource and for helping us in whatever ways you can! With appreciation, Melissa Kline Struhl Executive Director Laura Schulz Scientific Director

The platform I run, Children Helping Science, is supported almost entirely by US government science funding, both directly and in collaboration with CHS researchers.

Here's the note we sent to users today - we need help gathering your stories and citations! Submit here: forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZ...

In unsettling times, we set PRs! 🏃‍♂️

114 CAREER awards given between Jan 20 to now in FY25, versus 299 in FY24.

NSF's CAREER program is almost 200 awards behind where it was this time last year.

This program had its deadline almost 8 months ago (July 2024). It's often the first NSF award for many early-career researchers starting their career as PIs (e.g., asst profs).

Brief thread 🧵

Scientists make solutions 💙 Madison, WI standing up for science today!