John Pearson

Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/11/s...

In contrast, those papers making big claims especially those that are outward facing need a much more serious version of it.

The point is that most papers we all write are incremental -- based on well established methods and ideas -- and have an audience of subfield experts. These are judged by expert colleagues when they read the work. These don't, in my view, need traditional peer review.

These ratings are almost zero information and widely ignored.

Search Jobs - University Affairs

Great news! We are looking for an NHP neuroscientist as the assistant professor level. We have no preconceived ideas -- looking for the most exciting research going. If you have any questions, please reach out. universityaffairs.ca/search-jobs/...

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Super happy for having been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant to continue our basic neuroscience work on the neural basis for motor control and motor learning. What a great way to set things up here at Champalimaud! 🎉

🚨 Job Alert for postdocs research technicians, and PhD students in 🧵

Not obviously wrong, but only one other paper on arxiv for the first two authors. And the last author presumably at an American uni who’s impossible to google? Just seems weird.

Sort of? But what’s the play? Why try to generate a paper and not get credit?

Neuro-Vesicles: Neuromodulation Should Be a Dynamical System, Not a Tensor Decoration We introduce Neuro-Vesicles, a framework that augments conventional neural networks with a missing computational layer: a dynamical population of mobile, discrete vesicles that live alongside the netw...

This paper on arXiv came across my desk thanks to Scholar Inbox, but I cannot find any trace of the authors on the internet (?!). I am not sure what the goal of making up fake authors would be.

arxiv.org/abs/2512.06966

Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p...
#MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

Plot showing metabolic rate and brain size vs. body mass. Warm-blooded animals expend an order of magnitude more energy and have brain sizes an order of magnitude larger

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Flipbook of zebrafish embryogenesis. Taken from December 1996 issue of @dev-journal.bsky.social. Still images from movie by Rolf Karlstrom and Don Kane. Flipping credit to @amjeve.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday #ZebrafishFunFacts 🧪

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS
@ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research.

bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

Agreed. Like grad admissions, I suspect there are some valid predictors but SNR is very low.

Again, for ML conferences, this would be a (relatively) reasonable experiment to run. Human predictions of whatever outcome you like already there in bulk.

Composing trajectories for rapid inference of navigational goals Animals efficiently learn to navigate their environment. In the laboratory, naive mice explore their environment via highly structured trajectories and can learn to localize new spatial targets in as ...

I am very much in favor, we just put out a recent preprint thinking about learning to navigate from the perspective of generative models of trajectories www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My skepticism aside, I would be very curious to see a controlled experiment in which some grants were also LLM-reviewed and how those scores track with later outcomes. In fact, this feels a lot more like a NeurIPS experiment.

Not a hill I want to die on, but I actually believe ANNs are superior feature integrators. Humans are much better at selecting informative features but are quite suboptimal at integrating across many of them (attention/WM bottleneck?); which is exactly what is needed for a grant review.

I agree that even simple methods like taking an average are better at integrating features than most humans, but I’m not convinced this is what grantmakers and reviewers should be doing.

But in at least one case, this is explicitly *not* what is being asked for in grant review: back when NIH used more subscores, the impact score was not supposed to be some weighted average of the individual components (and the data show this is not what reviewers did).

Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain 2026 The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain is an intensive, project-based residential course with a focus on the neurobiology of sensory processing, coding, and neural population dynamics.

Applications are open for our Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain in the San Juan Islands!

🧠💻 Perfect for PhD students and postdocs interested in developing their computational neuroscience skillsets.

More info: https://alleninstitute.org/events/summer-workshop-on-the-dynamic-brain-2026/

🎯

That means you’re indifferent between the two options? 😉

The future is not in the training set.

every time i see that water tower i remember the animaniacs are trapped in there by david zaslav. Yet every story leaves it out

The future is not in the training set.

Singing mice speak volumes | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory All mice squeak, but only some sing. Scotinomys teguina, aka Alston’s singing mice, hail from the cloud forests of Costa Rica. More than 2,000 miles north, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) neurosc...

Ever see a mouse stand on its hind legs and belt out a song?@xmikezheng20.bsky.social, @cliffscience.bsky.social, and @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social track this behavior in Alston’s singing mice. See what it might say about the origins of communication. cshl.edu/singing-mice-speak-volumes/

We are hiring on the IBM Core AI team. Feel free to DM me. 🙂 Job posting form - forms.gle/zZ2FHDg5sPVq...

Our group builds the technology that makes agentic AI reliable, observable, and governable at enterprise scale, with open research and tooling for evaluating agents and improving them.

What it sounds like to have kids in 2025.