Clare Press

New position, new social media account. After 5 fantastic years in Tuebingen, I moved to @yale.edu and the @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this summer - which means that I’ll be recruiting PhD students and postdocs. Please help me to spread the word and see current opportunities below 👇

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Post doc job alert 📢! Announcing a v exciting job on a Wellcome-funded project in my group at UCL, looking at auditory hallucinations... Advert here 👀: rb.gy/230w8l - deadline is end of Oct. Please apply! 1/5

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

New #job alert! Clinical research fellow / postdoc in #computationalpsychiatry at the @mpc-comppsych.bsky.social / @uclqsion.bsky.social and UCL psychiatry. We will aim to understand the computations engaged by serotonin in the treatment of depression. Please re-sky. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Next up in our Psychological Sciences Seminar Series:
🎤 Prof. Clare Press
🗓 Wed 8 Oct, 12:30–1:30 pm (note the earlier time)
📍 Room 612, Malet Street, + online via Teams
@clarepress.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social

Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings The United States has once again demonstrated its unique talent for scientific deduction by confidently declaring there may be a link between pregnant women taking paracetamol and children developi…

NEWS! Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings

Out for a while but forgot to post it. Using pupil size as a proxy for arousal, we show that the inverted-U shaped arousal–performance curve (Yerkes-Dodson law) is not fixed, but can shift globally depending on neuromodulatory state (atomoxetine): arousal recalibration www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Striatal dopamine signals errors in prediction across different informational domains Dopamine reflects prediction errors not only about reward but also about valueless stimuli, challenging many current theories.

somehow I missed this!

Dopamine represents a domain-general teaching signal:

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

Please come to see our lab presentations at #ICON2025, by the brilliant Kirsten Rittershofer and Quirin Gehmacher. Sorry I can't be there myself, it looks a brilliant meeting 🎉

Looking forward to #CCN2025! Please come to say hello and check out our lab's presentations 👇

@compcogneuro.bsky.social

🚨 We’re hiring: Associate Professor/Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

🧠 Lead pioneering imaging-informed cognitive neuroscience research
🌍 Open to international applicants | Visa sponsorship available
📍 Permanent, full-time, on-site
🔗 Apply now: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

@cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Looking forward to #CCN2025! Please come to say hello and check out our lab's presentations 👇

@compcogneuro.bsky.social

My favourite talk @assc28.bsky.social was just delivered by @matanmazor.bsky.social showing that dualists are warmer 💕 @ronyhirsch.bsky.social #assc28

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

EU should double, if not triple, the EIC budget, Zaharieva says The European Commission hopes to at least double the budget of the European Innovation Council (EIC), if not triple it, when the agency can only finance 4% of the projects it receives, research commis...

Research is NOT the same as innovation. Spend the money at least equally on bottom-up research by @erc.europa.eu. ERC grantees @ercgrantees.Baku.social are the most successful in the EIC, but there is no innovation without fundamental Bluesky research by the ERC
sciencebusiness.net/news/europea...

Less than a week left to apply for this PhD studentship in my lab at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social !

Deadline Sun 6th July

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?"

Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

And the tags!
@uclpals.bsky.social @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social @mrccbu.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
#neuroscience
#consci

And many congratulations to the brilliant @akalt.bsky.social on his first paper from PhD 🎉

Fixed and flexible perceptual rhythms Our sensory inputs are never identical across time and contain temporal structure. Cognitive scientists have recently been fascinated by how these sen…

We propose this as a testable starting point for a mechanism that can account for seemingly flexible and fixed rhythms, and determine optimal sampling, across sensory domains. We also address controversies with existing accounts.

Hope it proves useful!
tinyurl.com/fixedflexibl... [6/6]

Sampling rhythms reflect statistical learning of temporal properties of inputs, governed by both externally- and intrinsically-determined sensory dynamics. We process the sensory world according to the probability with which a weighted combination of sources predicts information at that time. [5/6]

We must crucially now ask how we optimally combine these rhythmic sources to determine perceptual and motor processing. To this end we propose a new account. [4/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

Importantly sensory rhythms in our environment will usually not coincide specifically with the rate of any fixed rhythm. We must therefore crucially now ask how we optimally combine these rhythmic sources to determine perceptual and motor processing. To this end we propose a new account. [4/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Delighted to see ‘A Trick of the Mind’ reviewed in @theguardian.com as Book of the Day! 🧠 🍎

Also in the print edition tomorrow 🗞️

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...