Vishnu Sreekumar

1) Term papers written in class. Paper and pen. Allowed one hand-written cheat sheet w/ org plan and refs.
2) Ungrading with personalized SMART goals: No more incentive to maximize performance using AI since doing better than someone else does not lead to a better grade.

Episodic details are better remembered in plausible relative to implausible counterfactual simulations - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review People often engage in episodic counterfactual thinking, or mentally simulating how the experienced past might have been different from how it was. A commonly held view is that mentally simulating alt...

This was a fun paper to write, and one that fits nicely with some recent work I've been doing on the role of counterfactual simulation in memory encoding. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Teaching this fall?

Here is a handy webpage that will help you generate a list of the days your course(s) meet:

wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

four brain maps showing noise ceiling estimates in response to image presentation

New CNeuroMod-THINGS open-access fMRI dataset: 4 participants · ~4 000 images (720 categories) each shown 3× (12k trials per subject)· individual functional localizers & NSD-inspired QC . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.09024 Congrats Marie St-Laurent and @martinhebart.bsky.social !!

Mitochondrial origins of the pressure to sleep - Nature Research on Drosophila neurons shows links between the need to sleep and aerobic metabolism, indicating that the pressure to sleep may have a mitochondrial origin.

Beautiful and inspiring work from Gero Miesenböck and colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please consider helping us out if you meet the criteria mentioned in the ad! We will pay $10 for ~20 minutes of your valuable time and expertise. Please share widely!

The power law repealed: The case for an exponential law of practice - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review The power function is treated as the law relating response time to practice trials. However, the evidence for a power law is flawed, because it is based on averaged data. We report a survey that asses...

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Looks like my account was hacked recently. I was unable to access the account for a while until now. I don't use bsky that much. Apologies if anything inappropriate was broadcast from this account!

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Also, to clarify, I really don't know much about causal inference; I'm trying to learn more.

Ok, thanks. I thought you might be referring to something about the justifications (or the lack thereof) for causal models in psychology and how that might limit us from using the full power of Bayesian (causal) inference, but I guess I made a leap there in assuming you were referring to DAGs.

I'm curious to understand more about why you call it a "tribal artifact." If you have written about it in detail elsewhere, could you please point me to it?

Our lab (www.mandalab.org) turned 4 yesterday.

Some pics with all the awesome folks I get to do science with every day.

Interesting results. See pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11182079/ for a more detailed answer to your question, Alina.

📢 New preprint: "Comparing Cue and Target Roles in Cued Recall Reveals Limits of Intrinsic Word Memorability".

See lnkd.in/gXs48uyx for a tweet thread. Congrats, Anuska Maity, for your first preprint (and hopefully published paper soon)!

A first-year PhD scholar in the lab, Ozoswita Deb, has been selected to attend Neurohackademy 2025. I'm super happy about this because she will get to learn from the best (@russpoldrack.org and others)! :)

www.linkedin.com/posts/vishnu...

The obituary: www.legacy.com/.../legacy......

Incredibly saddened by Prof. David Huron's passing. His legacy will live on through the many students he inspired. David was one of the most important mentors in my life. Here's more about the lessons he taught me and the impact he's had on me: mandalabodyssey.blogspot.com/.../remember....

Is there a good way to post Twitter threads to bsky without having to redo the whole thing? Anyway, here's a thread about our recent paper demonstrating an issue with a narrative flow measure introduced by Sap et al. (2022, PNAS): x.com/vishnusreekr...

That looks great, thanks!

Rethinking retrosplenial cortex: Perspectives and predictions The last decade has produced exciting new ideas about retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and its role in integrating diverse inputs. Here, we review the diver…

This a formidable summary of what we know (and don't know) about the retrosplenial cortex including an amazing section on anatomy and the lack of common definitions. I honestly rarely read a piece like this that addresses all my questions.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Alternatively, is there an online fMRI course that might do the same, i.e., go beyond the basics and help a student build up to both ROI-based and whole brain mvpa along with appropriate statistical methods like TFCE by providing clear code examples?

What are the best fMRI summer schools out there (preferably outside of the US)? Ideally something where a grad student who has taken a course on fMRI can bring their own research questions and dataset and get to a point where they are comfortable doing mvpa?

Want to get editing experience? If you have a PhD & are a member of a group that’s historically underrepresented in editorial roles, apply for a 1 yr editorial fellowship at one of APS’s journals (including Psych Science)! Deadline 7 Feb.
Please share!

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Ten simple rules for good model-sharing practices Computational models are complex scientific constructs that have become essential for us to better understand the world. Many models are valuable for peers within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. H...

Ten simple rules for good model-sharing practices
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Emotions are reactions to situations we encounter in daily life. In our new paper in Psych Review (psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...; with @oisinryan.bsky.social and @fdabl.bsky.social), we take a first step towards building a generative model for emotion dynamics based on this simple principle 1/4

Philosophy & Theory of Neuroscience Conference 🧠 next week @ Chapman & available via zoom.Talks by @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social Newsome, Yassa, Roskies, Carolyn Parkinson, Frederick Eberhardt & many others!

www.chapman.edu/scst/confere...

#philsky #philsci #neuroskyence

Noninvasive modulation of the hippocampal-entorhinal complex during spatial navigation in humans Transcranial temporal interference stimulation allows noninvasive modulation of the hippocampus leading to better navigation.

Wow, non-invasive stimulation of the human hippocampus & entorhinal cortex during VR-navigation inside the MRI scanner! Impressive technical achievement and interesting result. By Beanato et al. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Amazing talk by Bea Luna on E/I balance and critical period plasticity during adolescence. The optimal outcome obviously being @dylanggee.bsky.social

You may think you’re a Bayesian. But do you live on…