maria ruz

Black-and-white historical photograph of Marie Skłodowska-Curie in a laboratory, holding a glass flask and observing an experiment. Overlaid text reads: “30 years of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)”, with the European Commission logo in the bottom left corner.

Europe’s future is built on knowledge.

For 30 years, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) has supported over 150,000 researchers, including 23 Nobel Prize winners.

This programme is built on curiosity, openness and excellence.

Happy birthday MSCA!

Neural replay is connected to latent cause inference and supports fast generalization https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693963v1

Bridging Fields in Psychology and Neuroscience with Multidisciplinary Collaboration Strengthening collaboration to encourage novel research connections between scientific areas is central to the CIMCYC - María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence strategy . To encourage this, the CIMCYC has ...

@cimcyc.bsky.social is hiring!

SIX postdoc positions are coming up to dive into collaborative projects bridging together psychological science.

Amazing opportunity to boost a postdoc career in a cutting-edge research center with outstanding human teams!
👇🏽
cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

Bridging Fields in Psychology and Neuroscience with Multidisciplinary Collaboration Strengthening collaboration to encourage novel research connections between scientific areas is central to the CIMCYC - María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence strategy . To encourage this, the CIMCYC has ...

Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for addressing complex scientific challenges, resulting in novel approaches, innovative methodologies and a more holistic understanding of complex phenomena.

🔹To encourage this, the CIMCYC has launched six novel multidisciplinary collaborative projects.

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited
for cognition?**
That goes to the top of the list!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Rapid computation of high-level visual surprise Health sciences

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference!

🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Summary 🧵 below 👇

Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

new paper in TICS officially out today. great learning from and writing with Anastasia, and super cool cover art from Prof. Pinar Yoldas.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

I see this same pattern in psychology—there is a huge desire among early career scholars to do applied work

This is very important, but including basic science perspectives still improves the research quality

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration | Royal Society Open Science Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication....

"Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration"
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

(i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). 1/

1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose.

Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵

How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation?

#Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!

Understanding the flexibility of working memory: Compositionality, generative processing, anchors and holistic representations The typical conception of working memory is a mechanism to temporarily hold multiple discrete objects in service of other cognitive tasks in an item-b…

Understanding the flexibility of working memory: Compositionality, generative processing, anchors and holistic representations
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#neuroscience

The Temporal Scaffolding of Sensory Organization How a developing nervous system discovers meaning in complex sensory inputs has typically been examined separately for each sensory modality. Even as studies have uncovered modality-specific strategie...

"This integration supports the conclusion that time may be the fundamental dimension along which the brain organizes its sensorium..."

Fantastic review by Pawan Sinha and colleagues (@lukasvogelsang.bsky.social @marinv.bsky.social)

doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

The CIMCYC is recruiting a #postdoctoral researcher with experience in the field of the psychology of disinformation!

Job description, responsibilities, and desired experience and training at the link 👇

cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

Neural Subspaces Encode Sequential Working Memory, but Neural Sequences Do Not https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.05.674385v1

🚀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

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode | Jonathan Freedland Trump’s dictator-like behaviour is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. But now it’s time to call it what it is, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

The best piece I’ve read this year on Trump’s increasingly blatant lurch towards total power.

To quote Sinclair Lewis, if you think “it can’t happen here” you are just not paying attention.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

(link fixed) New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain
It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. #neuroscience
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Near-random connections support top-down feature-based attentional modulations in early sensory cortex Author summary In everyday life, we focus on what matters—like finding our car keys on a messy desk—by sending signals from higher control brain areas to earlier sensory brain areas. These “top-down” ...

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Expression of Interest in Serving as a PsyArXiv Moderator As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

🧠New preprint!
We show that different priorities shape the neural coding of planned actions in working memory. Using EEG+RSA, we find that expected interference leads to anticipatory changes in representational geometry, beyond simple maintenance.

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🗂️ Data/code: osf.io/5fg7a

“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Small contribution in this piece by @frosas.bsky.social and colleagues on how we need both types of research culture in neuroscience.
#neuroskyence

🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc!
Join the FLARE project @cimcyc.bsky.social to study sudden perceptual learning using fMRI, RSA, and DNNs.
🧠 2 years, fully funded, flexible start
More info 👉 gonzalezgarcia.github.io/postdoc/

DMs or emails welcome! Please share!

🧠💻 We (a bunch of colleagues at @cimcyc.bsky.social) just released a programming guide for psych & cog neuro students. Instead of a tutorial, this is a starting point: a collection of reflections, examples, and recommendations.

👉 Still growing, but ready to explore: wobc.github.io/programming_book/