Narayani Srivastava

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Enlightening the brain

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.

The 10th of these, would you believe?

This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more

Enjoy!

medium.com/the-spike/20...

Nine Practical Guides to Support Your Research in 2026 The Observer has compiled a list of 2025 guides, tutorials, and manuals designed to support psychological scientists as they expand their toolboxes of research practices and methods.

I also want to share some resources that were created for the community based on AMPPS papers. First, there is a new article out in the APS Observer that puts together 9 practical guides for research methods including papers and tutorials www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

How attentional control got too much attention — and how we can rethink latent constructs If attention were a muscle, most of us would swear ours had been skipping leg day. One minute you’re reading an email, the next you’re three tabs deep into a recipe for a croquembouche that looks l…

Is attentional control truly what we think it is? Check out the eye-opening results in the #psynomPBR paper by Alodie Rey-Mermet, Henrik Singmann, and Klaus Oberauer. Post by @brettrmyers.

1/ Here are some (ok, most) of the books I read and listened to this past year, mostly in order. Some real gems, as always. “A life without books is a life not lived” Jay Kristoff.

Disruptions in This Sixth Sense May Drive Mental Illness Disruptions in interoception may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health ailments

New writeup on interoception in Scientific American focusing on its role in mental health:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte...

Adaptive habits: understanding executive function and its development Executive functions (EFs) develop dramatically across childhood and predict important outcomes, including academic achievement. These links are often attributed to individual differences in EF capacities. However, individual difference accounts underemphasize contextual influences on EF. We propose a complementary perspective, the adaptive habits framework, which emphasizes how contextual factors support or hinder EF engagement in children. Contexts that support repeated EF engagement establish habits for engaging EF in similar contexts and in similar ways. Such habits, in turn, reduce the effort associated with engaging EF and thus increase the likelihood of deciding to engage EF in the future. We interpret empirical findings through the lens of adaptive habits, discuss the implications of this framework, and propose novel research approaches and interventions to support EF in children.

Online Now: Adaptive habits: understanding executive function and its development

A graphical abstract showing the research question and the operationalization of the study.

Out now in @ebiomedicine.bsky.social 🚨.
Hunger often affects our mood, but is this a conscious or a subconscious process? Using continuous glucose monitoring, we show that differences in mood are driven by hunger ratings, not just glucose. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI...

What started as a spinoff project for Madeleine's PhD became one of the most striking indications that glucose levels play an important role in regulating everyday stress responses. This shows the potential of biosensors to evaluate whether metabolism alters stress reactivity #neuroskyence 🩺

Our latest is now out at JEP:General, “Quiet Eyes: Visual gaze stability predicts intra- and interindividual variability in attention control.” psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/... (Abstract below)

I hope to have time soon to write a little thread on this, but for now here's the PsyArXiv link to a new preprint from our lab on the construct validity of probed mind-blanking reports. Chandni Lal will be presenting this work as a poster at the upcoming Psychonomics meeting.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼 "𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲" (𝗮𝗸𝗮 𝗵𝗼𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘂𝘀)?
Via Decision Formation Through Multi-Area Population Dynamics
Excellent short review.
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#neuroskyence

Andrew R. A. Conway

Michael J. Kane

PS is excited to announce the launch of "Individual Differences in Cognition” (IDIC), an open-access journal on research in cognitive psychology, science, and neuroscience. Co-Editors-in-Chief are Andrew R.A. Conway & Michael J. Kane. Manuscripts accepted this spring. More information coming soon!

When your heart isn’t in it anymore: cardiac correlates of task disengagement - Communications Biology Multimodal analysis of spontaneous attentional state dynamics during sustained task performance reveals distinctive profiles of brain–heart interaction in mind-wandering and mind-blanking.

Multimodal analysis of spontaneous attentional state dynamics during sustained task performance reveals distinctive profiles of brain-heart interaction in mind-wandering and mind-blanking.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

So heart breaking. I still have his paper on my brain "The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness". I really wanted to see more of his research work on mw and I really had this thought that he would conquer cancer but...... May his soul rest in peace 🙏🏾

🚨 New paper out!
Phase confusion: How inconsistent cardiac labeling obscures interoception research 🫀🧠

We unpack methodological incosistencies and propose a way forward with the HEARTS framework.

In Biol. Psychol. - Open Access:
🔗 shorturl.at/YJhyn

1st paper of great @angeliacaparco.bsky.social!

Excellent work here on brain body interaction, metabolism, and mental health.

We argue that moral expressions—that signal one’s sense of right and wrong—are highly sensitive to social norms. These norms can amplify moral expressions (eg social media) or restrain them (eg work settings)

See our new paper on How Social Influence Shapes Moral Expression:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...

🚨 New preprint! Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference 🧠

We compare humans and neural networks in a learning task, showing how training regime and task similarity interact to drive transfer or interference.

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

AffectTracker allows users to continuously rate their valence and arousal during VR experiences. It features customizable feedback options, including a simplified affect grid and a novel abstract shape ("Flubber"), designed to be intuitive and minimally interfering.

What we found:
AN individuals missed more gut signals despite intact brain/body responses. ❌
Computational models showed biased expectations & reduced precision 🧠
Capsule stimulation also triggered greater hunger increases in AN 🍽

Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵

Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...

New pre-print day! Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex 🧠 (with Ed Awh & @serences.bsky.social)

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

1/4 I’m really excited to share that my first PhD manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Neuroscience 🎉! Until it becomes available, don’t forget to check out our updated preprint (with some additional insights) #JNeurosci

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize across tasks and laboratories. We call for community-driven efforts to systematically test and validate connectivity metrics using shared datasets and protocols, aiming to establish robust, replicable frameworks for cognitive and clinical applications.

Online Now: Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research

I often see papers using GPower for power analysis in repeated measures factorial ANOVA designs. I don’t know what it’s doing, but it’s definitely giving wrong answers: substantially underestimates required sample size. MorePower seems like a much better alternative github.com/LewisPeacock...

Item-based Parsing of Dynamic Scenes in a Combined Attentional Tracking and Working Memory Task Abstract. Human visual processing is limited—we can only track a few moving objects at a time and store a few items in visual working memory (WM). A shared mechanism that may underlie these performanc...

How does the visual system track moving objects while remembering the color of those objects? My latest research article (co-first with Piotr @styrkowiec.bsky.social) exploring this question using EEG is out in JoCN! @jocn.bsky.social #workingmemory #cognition #cogneuro #cogsci #neuro

Tour de force review on “Economics of Attention” by Loewenstein just published in J Econ Lit
@aeajournals.bsky.social

#behavioraleconomics

What Is the Fourier Transform? | Quanta Magazine Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, called the Fourier transform, de...

At 26, during the Reign of Terror in France, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier narrowly avoided the guillotine. A decade later, he made a discovery that changed mathematics forever. @shalmawegs.bsky.social reports:
www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-...

🚨WHOHOO!! I am happy to share that I received the #ERCStG for my project PRECHRON: The Prefrontal Chronometer for Organizing Working Memory.

I am going to study #neuraloscillations during #workingmemory at the @rug.nl @rug-gmw.bsky.social

#brainstimulation #TMS #EEG