Timothy Brady

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!

Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers:
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be presenting my symposium talk at #ESCoP2025 titled "Meaningful and familiar stimuli support visual working memory for simple features"! See you there!

On Wednesday: Adena Schachner, talk: "Intuitive Archeology: Social reasoning from the physical world”, W ~10 am, Fourth Level (Pacific) Room A. Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster: "How children explore and detect augmented reality filters", W 10-11 am, Fourth level (Pacific) Room E. On Thursday: Amy Nguyễn, Rodney Tompkins & Adena Schachner, poster, "When walls talk: People make social inferences from towns’ protective features", Th 1:00-2:15, P1-T-194 On Saturday: Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster, "Perceived musicality in an android increases positive social attributions", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-113 Shirley Liu, Craig McKenzie & Adena Schachner, poster, "When Default Options Explain Away Preferences: A Causal Reasoning Account of Mental State Reasoning from Default Options ", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-11

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

New paper with LaurenWilliams, @timbrady.bsky.social, and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JEP: General! "Limits of verbal labels in cognition: Category labels do not improve visual working memory performance for obfuscated objects" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

⭐ Out now in Developmental Science ⭐

"Sounds of Hidden Agents: The development of causal reasoning about musical sounds"

(by Minju Kim and me)

causal reasoning, music/auditory cognition, event reconstruction, kids' integration of information...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

PhD position — Rademaker lab

Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed:

“Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity”

See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

This is an unusual one: the project started in 2009, with Trevor Holland collecting data in an auditory-visual integration paradigm with many conditions within subjects. But modeling it remained challenging over the years until Luigi Acerbi and Shuze Liu took it on. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Learning a Novel Number System: The Role of Compositional Rules and Counting Procedures Humans count to indefinitely large numbers by recycling words from a finite list, and combining them using rules—for example, combining sixty with unit labels to generate sixty-one, sixty-two, and so...

Fun new paper led by Sebastian Holt, training adults on artificial number systems. Most work tests only base-10 learning; we trained adults on a range of base systems & manipulated whether numbers were learned as part of a counting system, or unordered words. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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!

Practical Vision Science Amazon.com: Practical Vision Science: 9781032691121: Balas, Benjamin: Books

Random self-promotion, but my hands-on #VisionScience textbook is available for <$50 at the moment! If you're excited about using analog demos of visual phenomena in your classroom, it's a great time to snag a copy! #STEMed

5.)A perspective arguing against the focus on 'category selectivity' (e.g. face v body v scene selectivity) in visual cortex and for a shift toward centering visual information needed for behavioral goals. The paper discusses how to re-interpret existing data in this light. arxiv.org/abs/2411.08251

Really great seeing all my #VisionScience friends at @vssmtg.bsky.social! Here's a link to my poster from the meeting, which is about our recent work looking at face pareidolia in adults and school-age kids. Enjoy and please be in touch if you have questions or comments.

A poster with @timbrady.bsky.social on a model that provides a unifying framework for generalizing from temporal to strength (repetition) manipulation effects on visual memory.

Fluid intelligence correlates with working memory capacity for both real-world objects and simple-feature stimuli Previous research has shown that individual differences in visual working memory performance strongly correlate with measures of fluid intelligence. I…

New paper with Kaira Shlipak and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in Journal of Memory and Language! “Fluid intelligence correlates with working memory capacity for both real-world objects and simple-feature stimuli” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Brady Lab @timbrady.bsky.social will be at #VSS2025 @vssmtg.bsky.social this year! Here's a thread with some of the cool work we're coming to share:

#SRCD25, I and my lab are here! Come see @rtompkins.bsky.social on social reasoning from sleep arrangements-Th 10-11:20am talk 3, room 200B; R Santiago on how children use objects’ placements to learn about people-Fri 10:50 Poster 90; & K Han on the origins of dance in infancy-Sat 10:30, Poster 52!

Real-world objects scaffold visual working memory for features: Increased neural delay activity when colors are remembered as part of meaningful objects Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. While previous studies have postulated that the capacity of this system is fixed with...

New Preprint with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here we show increased neural delay activity associated with remembering features as part of real-world objects. 1/

Nearly 800 NIH grants have been terminated so far, including some focused on HIV and AIDS, trans health, and COVID-19, after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority. https://cbsn.ws/3YkDndI

You Will Not Believe How Finding Nemo Should Have Started The Disney film Finding Nemo lied to your kids! The people at Disney would simply argue that they altered reality to create a more entertaining...

If "Finding Nemo" had been biologically accurate, when his wife is eaten by predators, Martin should have turned into a female.

Let's dive into hermaphroditism in teleost fish.

1st, let's talk about how COMMON this is:
About 1% of all fish species on Earth practice some form of hermaphroditism.

In its ongoing mission to shrink the federal government, the Trump administration is now proposing a more than 40% budget cut to the National Institutes of Health - the crown jewel of American medical research. 60 Minutes, Sunday.

Visual Cognition Teaching Sensation and Perception, Edited by Anna Kosovicheva, Julia Strand and Ben Balas. Volume 32, Issue 6 of Visual Cognition

Very pleased that the Special Issue of Visual Cognition on Teaching Sensation & Perception that @ankosov.bsky.social, @juliafstrand.bsky.social and myself edited is now published in full! If you're looking for some exciting ideas about teaching #VisionScience, start here!

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just a little thread on (some) of my favourite charts I've made. 🧵

And @fernandaedi.bsky.social !

Psycholinguistics by Victor S. Ferreira: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.8207aa16

Community Voices: Government funding cuts threaten education of future scientists Funding for science directly supports the education of Ph.D. students like myself and indirectly supports the education of undergraduate students at universities across the nation. On Feb. 7, the gove...

Inspired by @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social, I wrote an opinion piece about the importance of science funding in my education for my hometown newspaper. www.bakersfield.com/opinion/comm...