Jan R. Wessel

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

new paper in TICS officially out today. great learning from and writing with Anastasia, and super cool cover art from Prof. Pinar Yoldas.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Brave of you to publicly admit to using MATLAB. You're lucky the most vocal proponents of "you have to convert your entire codebase to a free and open language instead of MATLAB" have since moved to lucrative jobs making commercial software products

Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

The amount of neuro PhDs I know that went to work for neuro-junk companies with the explicit attitude of 'yeah of course what they're claiming will never work' is still baffling to me.

Like if the idea is to make a bunch of money while doing nothing of value, just do Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

Does anodal tDCS over M1 really enhance motor sequence learning? A non-replication of earlier findings in a double-blind, pre-registered large-sample study in humans Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is one of the most widely used noninvasive neuromodulation methods. Despite its popularity, some recent studies highlighted issues about the r...

One of my two last (ever) papers on tDCS:
Does anodal tDCS over M1 really enhance motor sequence learning? A non-replication of earlier findings in a double-blind, pre-registered large-sample study in humans
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

"What if I showed you a way in which AI could not only suck up all societal resources and research funds in the sole service of enriching the dumbest, most annoying motherfuckers of all time, but it also made YOUR WORK specifically actively worse?"
Cool, yeah, I'd LOVE to know more.

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

Sometimes I learn a new concept online - like "AI-generated participants in Psych experiments" - and I wonder whether the purpose of the whole internet is just is finding ever more bespoke pieces of information that make me specifically as angry as humanly possible.

If you’re a @cogneuronews.bsky.social member, check out and vote on the great lineup of symposia for 2026, and plz consider our symposium “Non-invasive meso-scale dynamics of perception and cognition”, organized by @adykstra.bsky.social including James Bonauito and @lonikefaes.bsky.social!

Big day in the household as my wife Kristi Hendrickson won the Dean's Scholar Award for outstanding tenure package, and I was named Clement T. and Sylvia H. Hanson Family Chair of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Many thanks to the University of Iowa for continuing to support both of us!

🚨Postdoc job offer🚨
Are you interested in beta bursts? Want to help drive methods for laminar inference with MEG? Now hiring a postdoc: run head-cast MEG experiments, help build our laMEG toolbox, and collaborate across Lyon–Marseille–Strasbourg. emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...
Please repost! 🧠📈

The NoA of one of our R01s finally came through.
You know what they say: Better six months too late and cut by 25% than never.

Back from vacay. Reading recommendations:

Harvey - Orbital (Deserves all accolades)
Akbar - Martyr! (Strong debut by an IC local)
Murakami - The City & Its Uncertain Walls (The boy is back on form)
Harp - The Fort Bragg Cartel (Amazing in-depth research)

Don't bother:
Stegner - Crossing to safety.

I would stay in 1980s Beirut before I stayed in a Casino in Reno

Love to field “Why would you live in Iowa?!” questions while paying 30 bucks for 3 coffees in America’s Shittiest City™, the 100 square mile strip mall parking lot that is Reno, Nevada.

Currently trying to get a hold of literally anyone in a German lab and received out of office messages from
- the PI directing me to the postdoc
- the postdoc directing me to the grad student
- the grad student saying that they will not be reachable in any way under any circumstances at all.

EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory The removal of no-longer-relevant information from visual working memory (WM) is important for the functioning of WM, given its severe capacity limitation. Previously, with an “ABC-retrocuing” WM task...

EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory
Jiangang Shan and Bradley R. Postle
Journal of Neuroscience 9 July 2025, 45 (28) e2414242025; doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

You should come and be our colleague!
The senior level search is open area FYI

A Tale of Two Science Reform Movements Reflections from meetings of Metascience 2025 and the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science

New post! "A Tale of Two Science Reform Movements," in which I compare the recent #Metascience2025 and #SIPS2025 conferences, and find that I am much more at home at one than the other. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-...

Movement-responsive deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease using a remotely optimized neural decoder - Nature Biomedical Engineering An adaptive deep brain stimulation algorithm delivers targeted stimulation increases during movement using brain motor signals.

Happy to share our latest study led by Tanner Dixon and our team @ucsfhealth.bsky.social and @neurosurgucsf.bsky.social out today in Nature BME! Movement Responsive, AI programmed, BCI-aDBS improves naturalistic movements and reduces excessive movements at rest in PD.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Earlier, I posted a 🧵 about the articles that students liked in my graduate course on executive function (EF)👇.

In this new 🧵 (the last one based on this class, I promise!), I thought I'd share some of the thoughts I had while teaching this course. If you’re interested in EF, read on. (1/12)

Official job ad is now live: jobs.uiowa.edu/postdoc/view...

Wessel Cognitive Neurology Lab | The University of Iowa Thanks for visiting the Cognitive Neurology Lab at the University of Iowa. The lab is directed by Dr. Jan R. Wessel. We are affiliated with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Depa...

I will be looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, using EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI, or related methods.

If you know anybody, please tell them to email me.

Formal ad to follow. Lab website: wessellab.org

Happy Bday @bradpostle.bsky.social

The new NIH grant review template *.doc is even more bugged than the old one. A true achievement. Congratulations to everyone involved.

♩♩
Jealousy,
turning chop into the suey,
swimming through sick lullabies,
when angels deserve to die,
But it's just the price I pay,
why have you forsaken me,
open up my eager eyes,
self-righteous suicide
♩♩

Pretty sure mr brightside is the millennial mr brightside

Had a great time at @cogneuronews.bsky.social
It's become my favorite meeting over the last few years.
Kudos to the organizers for another outstanding program!
Boston is quite lovely, too.
#CNS2025 #CCC #LotsOfMoneyAtIowa

"Baked loaf" was my nickname in college. Oh wait, maybe it was "oaf" ..

FWIW our 4% RO1 changed from "Pending Council Meeting" to just "Pending" today, but a new AC meeting has also been announced for 4/10/25 in the actual Commons Status page for that grant. This is NINDS btw.

Either way I'm treating this as good-ish news..

Thanks for all the updates and insights!