Erica Busch

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Congrats!! Such cool work

High-dimensional structure underlying individual differences in naturalistic visual experience Han and Bonner reveal that individual visual experience arises from high-dimensional neural geometry distributed across multiple representational scales. By characterizing the full dimensional spectru...

Human visual cortex representations may be much higher-dimensional than earlier work suggested, but are these higher dimensions of cortical activity actually relevant to behavior? Our new paper tackles this by studying how different people experience the same movies. 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread:

Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Excited to share our NEWEST PREPRINT led by @rochellekaper.bsky.social!!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

We ask: How do people learn multiple layers of environmental structure – w/o feedback – & how well do they *know* they’ve learned? Turns out, stimulus familiarity matters more than we thought! 🧵👇

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

WTI is hiring a Research Software Engineer.

Join our interdisciplinary community at Yale to collaborate with researchers on brain + behavioral data. Learn more at the link below + share this opportunity with your network!

🔗 wti.yale.edu/opportunities

#KnowTogether #ScienceAtYale

To add further enticement to the coolness of VR and laser scanning microscopy -- Manuel is among the coolest scientists I know & a PhD working with him would be the coolest 😎

We're @neuripsconf.bsky.social
HiPoNet: neurips.cc/virtual/2025...
HELM: Hyperbolic LLM openreview.net/forum?id=Rnb...
Talk: hyperboliclearning.github.io/events/neuri...
(Unireps/Neureps) Measure Before You Look openreview.net/forum?id=5Yn...
(FM4LS) CellSpliceNet: openreview.net/forum?id=gVA...

We have 3 papers at TAG-DS @NeurIPSConf!
DYMAG: Message Passing Using Dynamical-systems-based Waveforms (Oral) openreview.net/forum?id=WYi...

A Graph Laplacian Eigenvector Pretraining Method for GNNs (Spotlight) openreview.net/forum?id=r5c...

Reeb Graphs and Towers
openreview.net/forum?id=U8I...

3 people with a paper airplane

Two people helping airplane takeoff

Endlessly lucky to have friends who not only wait around for me to finish out the final poster session of SfN but also help engineer and fly a poster airplane … apologies to anyone inconvenienced by our chaos 🙃 @hhillman.bsky.social @zhoui.bsky.social

Happening soon! come chat with me about noninvasive BCI, neural manifolds, and human learning at W15 (or message me if you’re interested but have already left 🙃)

showing that neural manifold geometry shapes human BCI learning, we now consider the mechanisms underlying successful initial and perturbation learning.
If you won't be around Wed. PM but want to chat before then, message me!

Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...

Excited to be at #SfN25! Come catch my poster “Neural dimensionality expands over the course of brain-computer interface learning” wed PM (W15) if you’re interested in non-invasive BCIs, neural manifolds, human learning, etc. Building upon our recent work (doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.29.646109)

Presenting on contingency representations in PFC during WM on Saturday at SfN! Featuring fMRI and multi-area RNN modeling from my time with John Murray 🤓

And, recruiting a PhD student for Fall ‘26 in my new lab at U-Miami! Check us out here, and feel free to reach out: jam-lab.org (apps due 12/1)

(Video credit to
@sophieallen.bsky.social )

As usual, Junie is mildly laughing, mildly cringing at your jokes (volume up)

My lab at USC is recruiting!
1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829
2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/

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.

Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...

New manuscript from the lab!

"Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening"

Led by superstar grad student Anilu Chavez (not on Bluesky)!

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

Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

PCDL @ OSU

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org

Matrix directs trophoblast differentiation in a bioprinted organoid model of early placental development - Nature Communications The placenta plays vital roles in supporting fetal development. Here, Richards et al. develop a high-throughput bioprinted trophoblast organoid model to recapitulate the microenvironment of the e...

I made the world’s first bioprinted placenta organoids (mini placentas) and they’ve just been published in @natureportfolio.nature.com

We found that the matrix environment chosen for these organoids was critical to how they grew and developed 🤰

idp.nature.com/authorize?re...

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

does someone good at coding & analysis want to work remotely w/ us in the coming few months (before end of 2025), as a paid consultant? project will be on neurofeedback (fMRI, ECoG, calcium imaging). we'll work towards developing the experiments & analysis pipelines together. if so pls DM me ur CV🧠📈

Come find me (and this lovely bin of recyclable pens) later today at 181! @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...