Tom Hartley

Impact and inclusivity in the Presidents’ Award | BPS The winner of the 2025 British Psychological Society’s Research Board Presidents’ Award has been announced.

Congratulations to Professor Beth Jefferies on the @bpsofficial.bsky.social President's Award.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

A Meta-analytic Review of the Effectiveness of Spacing and Retrieval Practice for Mathematics Learning - Educational Psychology Review Spaced retrieval practice harnesses two well-studied phenomena: the spacing effect, where spacing out practice over several sessions leads to a gain in retention compared to massed practice in one ses...

Happy publication day to first author @ewanmurray.bsky.social! A lot of hard work by Ewan went into this, so it is great to see if fully published.

A Meta-analytic Review of the Effectiveness of Spacing and Retrieval Practice for Mathematics Learning

#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence

a visual illusion: what appears to be some strangely shaped pink pieces of cloth are actually the background on which several forks are laying

these are forks

Still from Life of Brian. Followers of a new messiah argue about whether to follow the shoes or the gourd - items that were just dropped by a guy who was in fact not a messiah, just a very naughty boy. They are desperate for something, anything, to believe in, to banish uncertainty.

Scientists when someone comes up with an arbitrary but actionable binary classification of a continuous variable:

🐙 This Octopus shifts from deep to active rest while "dreaming" for #MicroscopyMonday. REM‑like sleep (color bursts and twitches) filmed in real time by Horst Obenhaus @octoscience.bsky.social‬, currently a 2025 Whitman Fellow at @mblscience.bsky.social. #NESM

#Octopus #Neuro #SleepScience #MBL

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) .@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database

This thread is incredible.

I don't think so. They are just deviating from the joke pattern. Letter names and in the case of right can be misinterpreted as a comment? In a scenario where someone is spelling out a word e.g. over the phone?

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

I wonder how this is going now as music, with streaming, is becoming decoupled from its particular moment in time? Cc @catherineloveday.bsky.social

Going pretty well so far!

Right, and I guess that plateau effect can be a bit frustrating and helps motivate you to develop in other areas? There's a natural appetite for personal development, but it doesn't always align with career structures.

I always envy my fantasy of the artisan getting better and better at doing one thing, rather than expanding responsibilities and leading/managing. Of course a bit of both might work.

Being able to carry on doing the same fulfilling job is underrated IMO.

You're the kind of teacher I needed (but didn't have for Physics)

An Adventure in the Nth Dimension On the mystery of a ball that fills a box, but vanishes in the vastness of higher dimensions

www.americanscientist.org/article/an-a...

Yes. High dimensional spaces get very strange.

From @drrobertchapman.bsky.social.

It is perfectly possible for everyone to be neurodivergent.

What counts as "normal" is shrinking, and the disabling effects of being different are growing, and there are many, many ways in which we differ.

Apart from anything else single word journal names are not great for search! See also programming languages with one letter names :-/

Gareth Malone

Sorry Ken McCallum

I assert that MI5 head Ken McCallum looks a lot like TV Choir leader Gareth Malone.

John Lennon?

I don't think we can identify functions and so we can't isolate, in Marr's terms, what an entity is "for" (whether it's an enzyme, a tooth, a feather, a toe, a neuron, a population of neurons, a brain region, a cognitive subsystem etc.) So the computational level of analysis seems problematic?

I don't think there's much harm in labelling things as long as the labels don't become (implicitly) containers for theoretical bounds. It's fine to call an enzyme an enzyme and note that it is involved in catalysing a reaction, but that doesn't mean it evolved solely for that one "function".

What you can do is talk about what an entity does (independent of purpose or assumptions about unitary/discrete function). E.g., enzyme A catalyses reaction X. But that pathway (or others involving A) may be involved in multiple adaptive/maladaptive outcomes. Same for neurons, brain area, teeth etc.

I have some sympathy for all three positions, but I think the first is accurate when you are trying to be principled, the other two are OK if one acknowledges they are sometimes-useful tools/approximations. But people are bad at this and tend to regard functions as far fundamental, unitary/discrete.

I don't think things have an objective function in biology (other than being adaptive in ancestors) and (partly because of this) I don't think implementation can be isolated from other levels.

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So annoying! And not the only instance of unwanted autocorrect.

I'm wondering how much time I spend uncapitalising the first letter of an email form field which is mystifyingly set to be capitalised. I'm guessing that it might amount to, what, at least 30 seconds per year – 30 long, painful seconds – and it's 30 seconds too long

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