Mariam Aly

Awesome news! Congrats! Let me know if you're ever in the Bay Area and want to drop by for a visit 😎

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Thanks so much! Our focus is early career researchers (undergrad/grad student primarily, because the content is introductory). We give examples from the psych/neuro field. Anyone who thinks this will be of interest to them is welcome to join!

Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR) 🌱 Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR) 🌱 Reviewer Zero's Formative and Interactive Review (FAIR) draft feedback program is designed for early career researchers (ECRs) to receive feedback on a draf...

This workshop will be run by me and @mattgoldrick.bsky.social! If you are interested but can't make the workshop, consider signing up for an office hours appointment to ask us your peer review questions!

www.reviewerzero.net/about/format...

Are you an early career scholar interested in learning more about peer review?

Join us for our virtual @reviewerzero.bsky.social workshop! We will help you understand how peer review works and give advice on responding to reviewer comments.

9-10:30am PT / 12-1:30pm ET on October 30th. Register👇🏼

🚨 We are seeking a Digital Presence Coordinator!

Open to psych/neuro grad students, postdocs & faculty who are passionate about improving fairness in peer review.

Job details:

💻 Managing website, socials, newsletters

🕒 4–8 hrs/month | 💵 $500 honorarium | 📅 1-year term

Apply 👉 go.iu.edu/8vxh

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.

It's awfully slow but it works for me. You could try right clicking and copying the link address if the direct bluesky link doesn't' work. Both approaches work for me but it takes a long time for the page to load 🤷🏽‍♀️

Authors retract Science paper on controversial fMRI method Several MRI artifacts contribute to the neuronal activity signal picked up by the method, according to a preprint the authors posted this month.

A method for capturing neuronal activity using fMRI excited the neuroimaging field but couldn’t be replicated. Today, the authors of the original paper retracted their work.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/a...

This looks like a fantastic, comprehensive, and scholarly review paper led by Hannah Tarder-Stoll (who is on fire!), with a wonderful group of colleagues – Melanie Sekeres, Brian Levine, and Morris Moscovitch.

What an all-star team! ⭐

A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized.

Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

UCLA’s funds reinstated after yesterday’s court order! Thanks to the brave researchers and their amazing counsel, including Dean Chemerinsky, who brought suit. This is just another turn in the ongoing fight, but a great result for now.

They are lucky to have you! I'm so excited to see all the amazing work you will continue to do, and the new collaborations that will emerge 🎉

A decade of aphantasia research – and still going! Aphantasia, a term coined in 2015, refers to the lack of wakeful visual imagery. Research since then has clarified the nature of this intriguing varia…

Some people are unable to consciously picture images in their mind's eye – they have aphantasia. What have scientists learned about aphantasia over the past 10 years?

This paper reviews subtypes of aphantasia, its potential functions, and ongoing debates.

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

Neuronal signatures of successful one-shot memory in mid-level visual cortex High-capacity, one-shot visual recognition memory challenges theories of learning and neural coding because it requires rapid, robust, and durable representations. Most studies have focused on the hip...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

So glad this stimulus set may be helpful for you! 😊

Federal judge orders Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA medical research grants A San Francisco-based federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore all National Institutes of Health grants to UCLA, roughly $500 million, that the government suspended in July.

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

Thanks so much! We're excited to use these stimuli in upcoming fMRI experiments – and can't wait to see what kinds of studies they might contribute to in the broader community!

This stimulus set is thanks to the hard work of our amazingly creative grad student, Zall Hirschstein, who had to do some magic to get this all to work.

It's part of an ongoing, fun collaboration with @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social.

Check out the preprint and stimulus set 👇🏼

2/2

8x8 grid depicting the approach to stimulus creation. Feature pairs are on the axes and images are in the cells. The x-axis represents the high-level feature pairs: setting (green) and object (teal). For example, the first column of images all depict “truck” (object) in “field” (setting) rendered in various textures and patterns. The y-axis represents low-level feature pairs: texture (blue) and pattern (purple). For example, the first row of images all depict different objects and settings rendered as if drawn with crayon (texture) and containing large horizontal edges (pattern).

Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings.

We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity.

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Our cognitive maps of the environment contain hierarchical structure, with some spaces nested in others.

Behavioral responses and brain activity in scene-responsive regions reflect this hierarchical structure.

Neat new work by Michael Peer & @russellepstein.bsky.social!

doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Glendon College welcomes new psychology faculty - YFile Two new assistant professors join Glendon’s Department of Psychology, bringing expertise in cognitive neuroscience and misinformation research.

Thank you so much, Peter! And yes, Hannah is one to watch for — for those who don’t know, she just launched her lab 👀 🔥

www.yorku.ca/yfile/2025/0...

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

As someone who thinks (too much) about the hippocampus, I found great satisfaction at comparing/contrasting hippocampal & cerebellar functions, which in some cases have similarities but also some notable contrasts.

Thanks for sharing this wonderful paper!

I read this today and thought it was really awesome! As someone who knows very little about the cerebellum but is increasingly curious about it, this paper was perfect at synthesizing a large body of literature and distilling it into an integrated perspective!

Cerebellar Contributions to Action and Cognition: Prediction, Timescale, and Continuity The cerebellum is implicated in nearly every domain of human cognition, yet our understanding of how this subcortical structure contributes to cognition remains elusive. Efforts on this front have ten...

The cerebellum isn’t just about coordinating movement. It’s implicated in nearly every domain of cognition—from language to social behavior.

But how exactly does the cerebellum contribute to action and cognition? 🧵

Check out our new paper w/ Rich Ivry.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.09818