We were dazzled by Jucha Willers Moore's research on ultra-high field fMRI in neonates. Combining bleeding-edge technology and analysis, her work has revealed the surprising specificity of function in the infant brain. I have such envy for the precision of her signal!
It was thrilling to host BOTH @marinv.bsky.social and @lukasvogelsang.bsky.social! They combine one-of-a-kind empirical data (kids with recovered sight) with developmentally-motivated computational modeling! I will be citing their AID theory many times in the future. Don't miss it!
~2 weeks til the #FITNG2026 submission deadline! We're taking both individual abstracts and symposia again this year. And we have an exciting lineup of invited speakers, including Drs. Takao Hensch (keynote), Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Victoria Southgate, and Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh.
Join us in Panama!
It is so cool to see this paper out! An incredible effort from a superb team. Clíona and her colleagues opened as many questions as they answered! For instance, what is infant LO doing that is so different from adults and models? Don't miss this!
Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!
Congrats! Your lab is going to be awesome!
We will start the review for this position in a couple of days!
Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out!
New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824
Last week, Sarah Power (@sarahdpower.bsky.social) dazzled us with her unique research. Her research program is one of a kind: she combines precise mouse neuroscience with bold toddler behavioral methods to study infantile amnesia. Hire her!
We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!
More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...
Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
We were impressed by Dr. Céline Spriet's fantastic work on the rate of visual processing during infancy. Understanding the speed of infant cognition needs more attention. Céline's data is compelling, and her perspective is thought-provoking! Check out her work!
Im very excited about this work out from our recent infant ssVEP study! Led by postdoc Maeve Boylan! After infants learn about objects while reading a book with a parent, their brains prioritize the processing of familiarity. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...
This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.
Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇
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...
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...
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!
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)
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
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...
