Cameron Ellis

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain Human brain organization shares a common underlying structure, though recent studies have shown that features of this organization also differ significantly across individual adults. Understanding the...

1/11 Very excited to say that our preprint, Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain, is up on biorxiv!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

New paper examining longitudinal #brain data over 7y & relation to #reading; implications for early intervention/policy @fitngin.bsky.social
Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship with literacy development | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

It was a pleasure to hear from @csavasegal.bsky.social about her impressive body of work. She demonstrates that movies are powerful tools to study individual differences in people's cognitive representations. Can't wait for her upcoming study on real-time manipulation of subjective interpretations!

Movies reveal the fine-grained organization of infant visual cortex The visual system of infants has adult-like properties, and these properties can be revealed at an individual level by having infants watch movies during functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Can you show movies to infants to study their visual system? Yes! Check out the paper showing how movies can be useful in awake infant fMRI. elifesciences.org/articles/92119. Summarized as a digest (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-PR), pod (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-pod), & thread (tinyurl.com/baby-fmri-bsky)

Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

Life update 🚨🧵 This job market season I got close, but no spaghetti 🍝, to landing an assistant professor job. I put in 52 customized applications, expending a level of effort on par w grad school qualifying exams & dissertation defense 😅. I gave it my all at campus interviews, & enjoyed meeting many

What infant fMRI is revealing about the developing mind Cognitive neuroscientists have finally clocked how to perform task-based fMRI experiments in awake babies. Now they want watch cognition take shape.

A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence

Thrilled for @tristansyates.bsky.social that this is out. Don't miss this exciting result that, in alignment with animal findings, rules out many possible explanations for why we don't remember our infancy! Like all good science, it opens more questions: is retrieval or consolidation the culprit?

Last week we were wow'd by @jacob-prince.bsky.social who presented his incisive and compelling work on the emergence of category selectivity in computational models. Check out the paper here (www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...) and keep an eye out for this rising star!

Tristan is a superstar, with a "rewrite the textbooks" study out next week, plus a slew of transformative published papers. This is a tragedy, but I hope she persists. Still, this attack shakes the foundations of the US's leadership in science. Call your dean, your congressman, and your senator.

We were delighted to host Kathy Garcia recently for her talk on how brains and computational models represent social dynamics. She leverages incredible data, cool methods, and exciting questions to tackle big topics in social cognition. Check out her work: garciakathy.github.io

Our memories are not encoded with timestamps. How do we reconstruct the passage of time from our memories? In a new paper (accepted at Psych Science) @samiyousif.bsky.social and I demonstrate a powerful illusion of time that results from repeated experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

A few weeks back, we had the pleasure of hosting Lindsey Mooney, who spoke to us about her thrilling past and present work on infant/toddler memory. We were most excited to hear about her follow-up to her already brilliant 2024 paper. lindseymooney.github.io/files/Memory...

Incredible work by @lillianbehm.bsky.social to corral this paper. Lots of interesting insights, but it also puts into focus some mysteries: Why are females better than males at scanning? Successful scanning does not seem to be a personality trait, so what state predicts success?

Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching Decoding brain activity using a novel paradigm unveils distinct neural signatures of subjective experiences during movie-watching.

Interested in understanding what brain activity during movies means from the perspective of the viewer? Then you absolutely need check out this amazing study by @ravenwallace.bsky.social from THinC Lab out now in @elife.bsky.social

A thread 🧵

elifesciences.org/articles/97731

Troland Research Award – NAS Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within ...

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

Emily presented this to our lab last year and we had a lot of fun chatting about it. Really great to see this out.

Eleanor Maguire, who died 4 January at age 54, pioneered the famous London taxi-driver study and naturalistic approaches for studying spatial and episodic memory in people.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/memory/remem...

Title slide for Áine Dineen's talk, titled: "The Infant Ventral Visual Stream Emphasises Low Spatial Frequency Features"

We were delighted to host @ainedineen.bsky.social in-person for a talk to end last year. She spoke about the spatial frequency tuning of the features that the infant ventral visual stream processes. Using fMRI and computer vision models, she provides a compelling account of the tuning of this area

This one from @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social is a top contender for me

An intrinsic hierarchical, retinotopic organization of visual pulvinar connectivity in the human neonate Despite the immaturity of the visual cortex, infants exhibit remarkable perceptual abilities. The pulvinar is hypothesized to support perceptual abilities in infancy and even scaffold the initial development of cortical visual areas. Here, Ayzenberg et al. examined the organization and maturity of connections between the pulvinar and the visual cortex.

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of pulvino-cortical connections in newborn human infants is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social !

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵

bsky.app/profile/laur...

Introductory slide for Cliona's talk. Title: "Unveiling the Foundations of Visual Recognition using Awake Infant fMRI and Deep Learning"

We were dazzled by @clionaod.bsky.social's talk. Sitting at the apex of AI, neuroimaging, and developmental research, this research is not to be missed. Invite her to give this talk; you won't regret it!

Great opportunity to get involved in groundbreaking research with a phenomenal team

Slide from Dick Aslin’s talk in which he shows what inspires him in developmental psychology

Filled with enthusiasm, joy and appreciation after Dick Aslin’s festschrift. Two days weren’t enough to celebrate his singularly brilliant career. It’s been an honor to work with and know my hero.

Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Nature Human Behaviour Combining results from 76 studies, Kunin et al. find evidence for two distinct drivers of infant looking: the degree to which a stimulus is unexpected and the degree to which it is visually unfamiliar...

🧵 New meta-analysis on sources of infant looking in Nature Hum Behaviour. Led by Linette Kunin, w Sabrina Piccolo & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (paywall) tinyurl.com/33yfwcaa (access to pdf).