Allie Sinclair

Postdoctoral Researcher

🚨📣 We’re recruiting a postdoc! 📣🚨
Are you curious about how the environments in which people spend time influence their health? Are you motivated by research that promotes climate action, resilience, and wellbeing?
Read more and apply here: www.asc.upenn.edu/node/5905

Check out our new preprint, led by @dcosme.bsky.social, highlighting evidence-based strategies to motivate youth to vote!

The Sinclair Lab website won an award for Best Research Lab or Group Website! Check out the website and the other winners here:

theacademicdesigner.com/2025/winners...

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

🗳️📣Happy election day!! What motivates young people to vote?

In a new preprint, we share key findings from our collaboration with undergraduate students where we developed and tested a theory-guided GOTV messaging campaign doi.org/10.31234/osf... (1/5)

Great talk from @asinclair.bsky.social! Definitely check it out if you missed it.

I’ll be presenting in the MindCORE seminar this Friday! Come hear about exciting empirical insights from our SCIMaP studies, and opportunities to build resilience and engage in advocacy.

New environmental psychology jobs: 1 full professor, 2 postdocs:

Lüneburg, Germany is hiring a Full Professor in “Psychology, in particular Behavior Change and Sustainability Transformation”. www.leuphana.de/en/universit...

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I’ve been thinking of Trump’s government as the Regime of Type One Error.

In statistics, Type 1 error is when you get a false positive, or claim to have found a relationship that isn’t really real. It’s like convicting someone who is actually innocent, for example.

Amidst a government shutdown in which the White House has proposed slashing federal support of science by billions of dollars, our #SCIMaP team continues to assess the impact of research cuts on communities nationwide.

Learn more about our efforts: scienceimpacts.org

With more to come...

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I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

Picture of Dr. Allie Sinclair

Coming up on October 28! Dr. Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social (UPenn/Rice) will be presenting in @motcogmeet.bsky.social series: "Motivational States Bias Choices, Information Consumption, and Memory" 1/

Penn has launched a new website to share climate insights, available to PennKey holders. Our post-doc @asinclair.bsky.social and Emily shared their first insight here: climateinsights.upenn.edu/insights/wha...

Just Say No to Trump's Compact for Academic Extortion Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania was one of nine targets of the Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." Through it, Trump asks once again for universitie...

University of Pennsylvania community: Stand up and speak out against Trump's compact. Sign and share this petition urging Penn's leaders to uphold our values, independence, and integrity:
actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

Attending #SNE2025? Come learn about how we applied insights from cognitive psych/neuro to inform policy-relevant decision making to address the current science funding crisis!

I’ll be presenting a poster this afternoon from 2:45-4 PM, board #48 in the Skyline Foyer! @socforneuroecon.bsky.social

📣 Job opportunity: the SCIMaP team is hiring a Communication + Media Outreach specialist to support our work on mapping and communicating the impact of science funding cuts!

Letters on Wednesday were going out to solicit agreement and feedback from Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia, according to an administration official.

The government is officially shut down, but the Trump administration is trying to get nine selective colleges to agree to major controls on their operations in order to get a leg up on federal funding.

www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Do it yourself: discerning the effects of self-directed activity on conceptual learning npj Science of Learning - Do it yourself: discerning the effects of self-directed activity on conceptual learning

You can learn better by making your own predictions than by watching someone else's predictions, even if they are the same as yours. New computational approach to show the benefits of active/generative learning developed together with the fabulous @ebonawitz.bsky.social rdcu.be/eILdR

Yay!!! So exciting!!!

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

Had a wonderful time ✨ exploring ✨ new ideas and meeting cool people at the Curiosity, Info Seeking, and Exploration symposium #CISE2025! Thanks to all the organizers and Brown for hosting! Hope to be back next time.

🚨 The White House's FY 2026 proposed budget cuts to NSF would lead to expected economic losses of ~$11 billion.

Learn more about this data from the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project in Save NSF's most recent newsletter: mailchi.mp/savensf/prop...

White House FY2026 proposed budget would be lowest funding level in 25+ years. https://joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/white-house-funding-cuts-to-the-national

White House Funding Cuts to the National Science Foundation Threaten America’s Global Leadership in Science
joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/white-hous...

new long-form post joint with @malar0ne.bsky.social, @cl10.bsky.social and @asinclair.bsky.social

Economic loss from the White House's NSF FY 2026 Proposed Budget

New from #SCIMaP - analysis of the White House’s Proposed FY 2026 National Science Foundation Budget.

Take-home: Slashing NSF by >50% will lead to ~$11 billion in economic loss and extensive job loss and reduced training opportunities in communities nationwide.

Report: osf.io/e8rnc

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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...

How did assaults on science become the norm — and what can we do? An insightful book explores attacks on science from a historical and a personal perspective.

Science and scientists are under attack like never before and we need all the tools in the toolbox to fight back. Here's my @nature.com book review of Science Under Siege. Thanks for speaking up for science, @michaelemann.bsky.social and @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our new short correspondence in @nature.com: Protecting science funding in the national budget is crucial, but it’s not enough. We have an impoundment problem.

What happens when money that Congress allocated for science gets withheld?

Looking forward to sharing my work and hearing some other great talks on motivation and cognition!

Excited to share that SCIMaP (scienceimpacts.org) is now supported by a new award from Open Philanthropy!

Read more in the press release here:

cmns.umd.edu/news-events/...

Research integrity needs a kindness agenda or we will lose ECRs Responding to early-career researchers’ honest questions with accusations of misconduct is a travesty of open science, says Madeleine Pownall

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced."

By @maddipow.bsky.social

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

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