Francesco Poli

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think.

We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science.

Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

Tax heavens do not receive enough hate. The rethoric of "oh if you increase taxation, billionaires will leave" only works because tax heavens exist. Treat tax heavens as a threat to democracy. Stop free trade and start heavy sanctions for tax heavens - then let's see who's gonna leave.

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

New preprint by @semihaktepe.bsky.social 🎉

We compare ANOVA/SDT/GLMM for binary judgments in 20 datasets of the truth effect. #lme4

Main conclusion:
"GLMMs are a theoretically sound and practically robust method and thus superior for analyzing binary judgments in social and cognitive psychology.”

I'm curious about how you sync them! Does LSL work with fnirs? @tommasoghi.bsky.social is also interested and might also know!

Do you still need a sticker on the head to test with eyelink? If so, I don't see the advantage over tobii. If not, it boils down to price and tobii with no license is the cheapest option.

I think tobii is the best, connecting with python is very easy (devstart.org/CONTENT/EyeT...), and you can do it even without a license. We don't even buy tobii license, which cuts costs massively. Also, 300Hz are more than enough for gaze and pupil with infants!

Amazing work! Going to the top of my reading list :)

The Reward Positivity signals a goal prediction error The Reward Positivity (RewP) is an electroencephalogram (EEG) feature that emerges following performance feedback and is commonly understood to index both positive and negative reward-prediction error (RPE+ and RPE−, respectively) signals. In contrast to this dominant perspective, we argue that the RewP is an independent EEG feature that selectively responds to positive RPE and is superimposed on a common background signal. We further propose that the RewP signals a goal prediction error: it is elicited by abstract signals instead of by hedonic 'rewards'. This goal prediction error appears to be produced by a critic-like architecture that is associated with the actor–critic framework in reinforcement learning. This perspective emphasizes the role of the RewP in goal attainment and cognitive control as opposed to being a simple indicator of reward receipt.

Online Now: The Reward Positivity signals a goal prediction error

Super cool work! Do you think we are closer to a diagnosis that is not symptom based, or that we have a better understanding of symptoms?

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.”

In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes.

rdcu.be/eUPO8
funds @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence 🧵:

Very cool! @tommasoghi.bsky.social

This was fun!! Thanks so much for having me over :)

This Wednesday! I will be talking about curiosity in infants, children, adults (and artifcial neural networks)

Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions | PNAS Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Exploration Patterns in Spontaneous Self-Touch Actions in Infancy Infants frequently touch their own bodies from the earliest months of life, raising questions about whether these self-directed actions reflect active body exploration. We hypothesize that infants’ se...

We have a new conference paper out just now! How do infants explore their own body? We show that in the first weeks of life, infants' self-touch actions allow them to gain information about their own body. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function The authors review evidence that the primary function of the brain, supported by distributed neural systems, is the predictive regulation of physiology (i.e., allostasis). An example from Alzheimer’s ...

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#neuroscience

𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫
By Mars and Passingham
"Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition"
Going to the top of the reading list!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence

"If we believe in democratic order, let us put science and knowledge back at the heart of things, let us put scientific authority back at the heart of things, let us put culture, education and learning back at the heart of things..."

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

Why are we still sending our work to Wiley and other publishing companies so that they can profit from it? There's so many better options now, for example: psychopen.eu/journals/

Incredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So cool!

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

If only unions existed/had power

📣📣📣 Hi Everyone! I'm accepting PhD students for the Fall 2026 cycle! Our lab topics include the developmental origins and elaboration of moral cognition/prosocial behavior, persistence, and optimism. More info below!!

it's a hyper capitalist racket, and the fact that ***academia*** (full of all those gigantic galaxy brains) collectively still hasn't managed to burn it to the fucking ground says a lot about how deep these exploitative structures run

so ORGANIZE

this is a labour issue - collectively, you are NOT powerless

stop upholding systems that exploit you, chew you up and spit you out ... and that steal and lock away the knowledge you create from the rest of us out here

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.