Mike Arcaro

a peek through fall foliage to some people at the University of Pennsylvania, photo by Eric Sucar

Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship.

MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior.

Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase.

The President is building an army to attack his own country.

A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 engraving in the Pennsylvania Gazette, published in Philadelphia, in an effort to foster cooperation among the various colonies against the tyrant king of Britain, with the American colonies replaced by the nine universities selected for special collaboration opportunities

Courtesy of colleagues at Penn

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Someone in a frog costume facing down a line of police in riot gear

George Orwell’s Animal Crossing

Just Say No to Trump's Compact for Academic Extortion Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania was one of nine targets of the Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." Through it, Trump asks once again for universitie...

Members of the Penn community: please sign this actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

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.

Truth Social post in which Trump addresses Pam Bondi and says she needs to immediately prosecute his political enemies

Imagine if Richard Nixon had just tweeted out the Watergate scandal rather than putting it on secret tapes.

That’s what this is.

I won't quote-tweet our main character of the day, but if your complaint is that Charlie Kirk's words are being taken out of context, I'd encourage you to skim through the Media Matters tag for his name. They have hundreds of posts about Kirk and most have longer clips that give the full context.

These job ads have now been posted! 🎉

Social/Personality: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05020

Biological Basis of Behavior: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054

Please spread the word!

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Attacks on Muslims flood mainstream after Mamdani win Openly racist rhetoric has become normalized at the highest levels of American politics.

We should all be disgusted by the flood of anti-Muslim remarks spewed in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary — some blatant, others latent.

Shame on the members of Congress who have engaged in such bigotry and anyone who doesn’t challenge it.

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

theonion.com/this-war-wil...

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex?

Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut.

🧵 ↓ 1/n

In Philadelphia alone, a crowd of over 100,000 hit the streets despite the rain.

🎥 @indivisiblephl.bsky.social

#106 - Chiara Caldinelli, Jing-Jing Li, Garrett Chao, Mike Arcaro & Anne Collins. The role of the thalamus in dynamic decision-making

this is such a good representation of American Christianity

ADD YOUR NAME: Sign the Open Letter in Support of NIH Staff Join the courageous and committed National Institutes of Health (NIH) public servants by adding your name now.

Here is a link you can blast out to all of your networks to ask them to consider signing on in support of our NIH heroes.

actionnetwork.org/forms/add-na...

We are at 5000 folks who have signed on. But we can do better

Only for people who have ever been sick or knows someone who has been.

Important thing to beat people over the head with: Trump has turned American cities into warzones and for fucking what? Prices are way up, jobs will be way down, the dollar is worth less, and now the highway is blocked off by cops. Maybe the Great Mythical Immigrant wasn’t the problem after all.

Man imagine being such a combination of malicious and incompetent that the LAPD think it’s too much

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

FDA will limit Covid vaccines to people over 65 or at high risk of serious illness, leaders say The FDA announced it will limit access to Covid-19 vaccines going forward to people 65 and older and others at high risk of serious illness

GUYS. The comment period for this ends in THREE DAYS. PLEASE if you have even a little bit of time, submit a comment here: www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

Let them know EVERYONE should be able to get COVID vaccines. They BACK DOWN when WE PUSH BACK. www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/f...

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing?

We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

The best time for university presidents to get out in public & fight this authoritarianism collectively was two months ago. The next best time is now. Reactive unilateralism & quiet lawsuits is not working, & the public still doesn't grasp how existential the fascist assault on higher ed really is.

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow.

It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America.

All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

Q: VIETNAM wants tariffs dropped. So what does Trump get?

A: A golf course for his family, and Starlink access:

TLDR: The Trump family is looting 🇺🇸 foreign policy.

(Hey @NBCNews @Reuters — saying these negotiations are “separate” is deeply unserious) www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/t...

This is completely false. Even the largest university endowment cannot sustain large-scale scientific research.

In my 25 years at my school, the most monumental research fund drive raised $325M in *total*. Federal research here costs $200M per *every year*.

This is an extinction-level event.

Come check out my poster with @mikearcaro.bsky.social tomorrow afternoon in the pavilion where we describe the cortical and subcortical organization of the newborn visual system!

@vssmtg.bsky.social
#VSS2025