Simon W Davis

** We have up to TWO funded PhD positions available in our lab!! Apply below to find new ways to enhance memory👇 Pls retweet **

Deadline: 2nd December

1. Cross-species closed-loopTMR: tinyurl.com/bddu4tp6

2. TUS and TMR in humans:
tinyurl.com/jjws5ctj

Happy to chat to interested applicants.

Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization.

DeSantis gave it a right-wing overhaul in 2023. Since then, ~40% of the faculty has resigned. It spends more than 10x per student what the other schools do & ranking fell from 76th to 135th.

www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

And THE Consuming Shadow is 51% off! More fun than a roll of packing tape!

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

Job alert: We at the University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, are seeking two tenure track Assistant Professors in open areas, incl. cognitive / cognitive neuroscience. It’s a great place here! Apply by Oct 12 via jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta....

Why Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum Has Permanently Removed Its Once-Popular ‘Lion Attacking a Dromedary’ Diorama | Pittsburgh Magazine The removal is the result of a new museum policy governing the display of artifacts with human remains.

It's a Pittsburgh deep cut 🙂

www.pittsburghmagazine.com/why-pittsbur...

Watch out for the lions

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Congratulations Jan!

Thanks for the responses to the FOQUSAphasia survey. Manaswita Dutta and I will work hard to make these a reality! Stay tuned, and also check our updated website: www.foqusaphasia.com

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age.

Link in post below 👇

lol. Emil Bove intervened. The guy that Senate Republicans just confirmed for a lifetime position on the federal bench.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

Trustees approve New College Foundation's finances - WSLR+Fogartyville Despite questions about transparency and threat of lawsuit, the board gives unanimous go-ahead.

"the college administration revealed FOR THE FIRST TIME that, in the current financial year, the Foundation paid $865,000 for “executive salaries”—3x as much as for scholarships and more than 1/3 of the total support it provided to New College."

Hell yeah. Money. For us!

wslr.org/trustees-app...

Trump imposes $100K fee on H-1B visas in new immigration action | CNN Politics President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Friday to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas — in an effort to curb what the administration says is overuse of the program.

www.cnn.com/2025/09/19/p...

The graphical lasso functional connectivity approach that performed best in the paper can be implemented using the Activity Flow Toolbox: colelab.github.io/ActflowToolb...
And also using the paper's code release: github.com/ColeLab/Reli... [12/n]

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Join us for a virtual information session about our #PhD program in #SLHS #CSD #COMD! All faculty are accepting new students. Email Graduate Coordinator Susan (spalmiot [at] iu.edu) to get the link for the session. It'll be 12-1PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, September 24th.

New funding opportunity from the BRAIN Initiative! Applications due Oct 28!

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...

GitHub - jmumford/randomise-prep: Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. - jmumford/randomise-prep

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

Interested in hippocampal dynamics and their interactions with cortical rhythms?

Our physically constrained model of cortico-hippocampal interactions - complete with fast geometrically informed numerical simulation (available at embedded github repo)

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

Come by tomorrow morning to hear about verbal working memory!

1. ...Director may utilize such peer review procedures (including consultation with appropriate scientific experts) as the Director determines to be appropriate to obtain assessments of scientific and technical merit...in lieu of the peer review and advisory council review procedures
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2/

YouTube video by MIT Technology Review We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

This video explores how much energy AI uses, from a single query all the way up to a huge network of data centers:
youtu.be/v3Q_uC5P1hE

Indiana University’s Post-Tenure Review Guidelines Are Both Embarrassing and Disturbing Saturday, September 6, 2025 This past Thursday, at 8:01 pm, I received an email message from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington.  It began with the…

IU's new post-tenure review guidelines are a blatant attack on tenure. As professor and AAUP member Jeffrey Isaac points out, the policy is not just poorly designed, but a tool to turn faculty into contract employees, threatening anyone who dissents. jeffreycisaacdesign.wordpress.com/2025/09/06/i...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1