Elizabeth Jiwon Im

Investigating action topography in visual cortex and deep artificial neural networks High-level visual cortex contains category-selective areas embedded within larger-scale topographic maps like animacy and real-world size. Here, we propose action as a key organizing factor shaping vi...

New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread:

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

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Lazarus et al. (2025): A simple act with a lasting impact: Holding babies skin-to-skin in the NICU helped support their development and reduced differences linked to family income. Early touch can be a powerful way to promote equity from the very start #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability Ventral Occipital Temporal Cortex (VOTC) is home to a mosaic of categorically-selective functional regions that respond to visual stimuli. Within left VOTC lies the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) - a te...

next preprint is out - ever wonder why findings about VWFA differ so much? @jyeatman.bsky.social @mayayablonski.bsky.social , Mia Fuentes-Jimenez, Hannah Stone, and I might have the answer...

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

continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

Attractor dynamics of working memory explain a concurrent evolution of stimulus-specific and decision-consistent biases in visual estimation People exhibit biases when perceiving features of the world, shaped by both external stimuli and prior decisions. By tracking behavioral, neural, and mechanistic markers of stimulus- and decision-rela...

Excited to share that our paper is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social (dlvr.it/TM9zJ8).

Our perception isn't a perfect mirror of the world. It's often biased by our expectations and beliefs. How do these biases unfold over time, and what shapes their trajectory? A summary thread. (1/13)

We tried very hard to study language and communication during strategic games like prisoner's dilemma. Veronica Boyce did many experiments chasing what could have been an interesting result but in the end wasn't very strong. Now she's written a nice postmortem: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New paper! We know models learn distinct in-context learning strategies, but *why*? Why generalize instead of memorize to lower loss? And why is generalization transient?

Our work explains this & *predicts Transformer behavior throughout training* without its weights! 🧵

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Intersection of spatial and numerical cognition in the developing brain Abstract. Early mathematical development is thought to depend on visuospatial processing, yet neural evidence for this relationship in young children has b

So excited to see this paper with @ckaicher.bsky.social and @cantlonlab.bsky.social finally out!

Domain Interactions | CogSci 2025 Organizers

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition"
sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year!

I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

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New Preprint (also my first time posting on BlueSky haha)!!!
How do individual differences in habituation shape dishabituation magnitude?
Work with Qiong Cao, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Congrats Natalia!!

Shown is an example image that participants viewed either in EEG, fMRI, and a behavioral annotation task. There is also a schematic of a regression procedure for jointly predicting fMRI responses from stimulus features and EEG activity.

I am excited to share our recent preprint and the last paper of my PhD! Here, @imelizabeth.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, Mick Bonner, and I investigate the spatiotemporal hierarchy of social interactions in the lateral visual stream using EEG-fMRI.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

#CogSci #EEG

my first time joining @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social as a co-host! It was super cool to talk with Kendrick. Go listen to it 🤩

Sayaka Murata’s Alien Eye The author of “Convenience Store Woman” has gained a cult following by seeing the ordinary world as science fiction.

Elif Batuman profiles Sayaka Murata, the best-selling author of “Convenience Store Woman,” who has gained a cult following by seeing the ordinary world as science fiction.

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Left: White matter connections of a face area measured with diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) in the same baby over 6 months illustrate both the innate and developing aspects of connections in the human brain. Right: A subset of connections of the face area colored by origin in the visual field (center: red; mid periphery: green; far periphery: blue) show striking orderly organization present in infancy. Image credit: Grill-Spector Lab, Stanford University.

Emily Kubota. Emily Kubota recently completed her doctoral research in the Grill-Spector lab in the Stanford Department of Psychology and previously participated in Wu Tsai Neuro’s Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology graduate training program.

Kalanit Grill-Spector. Kalanit Grill-Spector is the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor in the Department of Psychology in H&S, and a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute affiliate at Stanford University. In 2018, Grill-Spector, radiologist Jennifer McNab, computational neuroscientist Dan Yamins and colleagues launched the NeuroDevelopment Initiative, supported by Wu Tsai Neuro's Big Ideas in Neuroscience program. The initiative aimed to create a paradigm shift in developmental neuroscience by innovating new approaches to studying the earliest stages of human brain development.

How do infant brains develop to recognize faces, words & objects? New research by Emily Kubota @emilykubota.bsky.social & Kalanit Grill-Spector @stanfordvpnl.bsky.social reveals key brain pathways are present from birth but also evolve with experience.

🔗 neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/bridgin...

White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth Nature Human Behaviour - Kubota et al. find that white matter connections of ventral temporal cortex are innately organized by cytoarchitecture, category and eccentricity from birth, and also...

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

Bridging Nature and Nurture: Study reveals brain's flexible foundation from By studying never-before-seen details of brain connectivity in human infants, researchers at the Wu Tsai

Check out Nicolas Weiler’s article for Stanford Neurosciences on how our work is bridging nature and nurture!

AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways

My new piece in @theguardian.com

Techno-optimism is human pessimism.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Are we paying too much for biomedical research? Trump's attack on NIH

Please share Dick Aslin's excellent blog on indirect costs:
dickaslin.substack.com/p/are-we-pay...

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us!

careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc...
and
careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky

1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open Access
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz...

looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠

We're launching Devstart, a website to help anyone getting started with developmental science methods and programming. Here's the website with the first tutorials: tommasoghilardi.github.io/DevStart/
Please share widely! 1/4

Our review exploring the development of visual object recognition is officially out in Nature Reviews Psych!

Here we draw on cognitive, computational, and neuroscience literatures to examine how humans develop robust object recognition abilities starting in infancy

screenshot of title and authors of paper + map with 18 colorful box callouts showing where datasets came from

GOOD MORNING BLUESKY!
Very excited about this new paper:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300671120

Key Q: what predicts how much young kids (👶)talk?

How much 🗣 kids heard predicted how much 👶talked, but other factors, e.g. mom’s education, didn’t. #PsychSci #DevPsy 🗣💬

INCOMING SUMMARY🧵ALERT 1/14