Tom Possidente (He/Him)

My lab at Boston University has open positions for a postdoc and PhD students. We study visual perception, attention, and decision making with a focus on temporal dynamics. Check out our recent work here sites.bu.edu/denisonlab/ and email me if you're interested in learning more

Amazing work led by Jingnan! Pooling in task and rest data can give us a lot of discovery potential like discovering hard to find networks in the thalamus (bulk of my postdoc work with Randy). Task data can be used to define networks and activations from left out runs can be investigated. Cool work!

Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain Human brain organization shares a common underlying structure, though recent studies have shown that features of this organization also differ significantly across individual adults. Understanding the...

1/11 Very excited to say that our preprint, Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain, is up on biorxiv!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you @vaibhavtripathi.bsky.social for being an excellent first co-author!

2/2 - We also found that the larger the increase in connectivity between auditory and other WM networks, the better a person performed in the auditory WM task. But the same was not true for changes in connectivity with the visual network during the visual WM task.

TL;DR 1/2 - It's complicated! Although other explanations are possible, we suggest that auditory WM requires a larger degree of connectivity reorganization than visual WM because frontal auditory regions are not as well-connected to supramodal WM regions at rest.

Dynamic task-based reorganization of sensory-biased and supramodal working memory networks in the human cerebral cortex Sensory working memory is supported by a distributed set of brain regions. Visual working memory and auditory working memory recruit different networks, which include posterior sensory cortices and mu...

My 1st first (co)author paper is up on BioRxiv!

How does functional connectivity in the human cortex differ during visual and auditory working memory (WM) tasks? Do those changes correlate with behavior? We take a stab at some answers:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

Finally published:
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

Does anyone have a good go-to white matter tract atlas? I would love something analogous to Neurosynth but where you can input coordinates and get out white matter connectivity profiles/papers/etc.

Best I could find quickly so far is: dmri.mgh.harvard.edu/tract-atlas/

@mpascale.psyc.dev

‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels “There is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research,” one Ph.D. student says

Absolutely insane www.science.org/content/arti...

The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project: an open dataset for studying brain-behavior relationships in psychiatry - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project: an open dataset for studying brain-behavior relationships in psychiatry

🚨 Dataset & Manuscript alert! 🚨 The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project (TCP) manuscript is now available @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Data! 🎉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵1👇

"We introduce PECANS (Preferred Evaluation of Cognitive And Neuropsychological Studies)" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40447861/ I love scientific acronyms

"Institution-led investigations (into academic misconduct) are fundamentally conflicted" - we need independent expert investigations for significant misconduct allegations pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40401705/

Grad Resources Encouraging and equipping graduate students for impact.

I just learned that there's a national graduate student crisis line - gradresources.org. Might be worth spreading the word as I'm pretty sure exactly *checks notes* zero grad students are doing well emotionally right now.

Excited to share this new preprint from the lab introducing a highly general spatiotemporal normalization modeling framework that handles continuous dynamic visual input. Beautiful work by Angus Chapman @afchapman.bsky.social Science continues!!

Connectome‐based predictive modeling of brain pathology and cognition in autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease INTRODUCTION Autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease (ADAD) through genetic mutations can result in near complete expression of the disease. Tracking AD pathology development in an ADAD cohort of Pre...

Excited to share our paper on the Connectome based predictive modeling in individuals with Autosomal Dominant AD with amazing collaborators @ytquiroz.bsky.social, David Somers, @joshfoxfuller.bsky.social and team!

alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

a black and white image of the inside of a human brain ALT: a black and white image of the inside of a human brain

Are short-term memories just noisier versions of what we perceive? Are they fundamentally different? We (Chaipat Chunharas, @mjwolff.bsky.social, @meikehettwer.bsky.social and myself) delved into this in a paper out now in #elife: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre.... For a quick summary, a 🧵 below:

If, like me, you (a) oppose research funding cuts to US institutions and (b) are Jewish, please consider signing this open letter: forms.gle/prnRbq69a6YN...

If you are a neuroscientist, please use SFN's site to write to your reps about the importance of funding for science (they have letters ready to go, you can just use theirs or write/edit as you see fit): www.sfn.org/advocacy/adv...

Group-to-individual generalizability and individual-level inferences in cognitive neuroscience Much of cognitive neuroscience research is focused on group-averages and interindividual brain-behavior associations. However, many theories core to t…

👉 "We ... consider two requirements of group-to-individual generalizability ... and suggest that most processes in cognitive neuroscience do not meet these assumptions. Consequently, interindividual findings are inappropriate for intraindividual inferences"

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

"Don’t hide the good stuff: Scientific advancement in task-based fMRI is slowed by not showing event-related BOLD (erBOLD) changes alongside anatomical patterns" (new[ish] on @jocnforum.bsky.social ] doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

Join researchers across the country in fighting restrictions on the NIH Please click the link to complete this form.

Academic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately.
There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event.
Join us!
form.jotform.com/250226137228...

Default mode network functional connectivity as a transdiagnostic biomarker of cognitive function The default mode network (DMN) is intricately linked with processes such as self-referential thinking, episodic memory recall, goal-directed cognition…

So glad this review paper on the possible use of Default Mode Network functional connectivity as a transdiagnostic biomarker was published in Biological Psychiatry: CNNI.

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