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Anna Schapiro

@annaschapiro.bsky.social
3.5K followers 479 following 285 posts

Associate Prof at U Penn. Learning, memory, sleep, neural network modeling...

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Reposted by Anna Schapiro
Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Hope can feel in short supply these days. But I am truly hopeful for the future, in large part because of the community we've built through the Bethesda Declaration. Proud to share these reflections on hope: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.... May they bring you some hope.
ajph.aphapublications.org
Hope From the Front Lines: Reflections From the Bethesda Declaration Movement | Hope: A Public Health Blueprint for Action
American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)
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Gary Lupyan @glupyan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
End of an era for sure! I've collected tens of thousands of subjects through mTurk over the years and wouldn't have done a lot of my work if it didn't exist. Prolific pretends to have a handle on things, but it doesn't. I don't know what form online research takes in a post Turing-test world!
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Wow I just heard the news that Mechanical Turk is shutting down. Was there so little discussion on here about it because people haven't been using it anymore anyway? (Will Prolific not go the same way...?)
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Beautiful summary of the "mix of grief and excitement"
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Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Masa's paper is out in Hippocampus. The left-right alternation of hippocampal theta sequences at T-maze choice points, much loved as a 'planning' signal, falls straight out of MEC dynamics. Well done @masahironakano.bsky.social, fun project with @clopathlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/hipo.70131
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Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.
A schematic figure showing an evolving timeline of mental context during an interrupted narrative.
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Please join me in thanking the named plaintiffs in this lawsuit, including @arghavansallesmd.medsky.social @michaeldgreen.phd & @jddaw.bsky.social These brave scientists are taking on risk to protect science, scientists & beneficiaries of science (all of us). www.aclu.org/press-releas...
aclu.org
Researchers Challenge NIH Screening of Grants for Disfavored Viewpoints | American Civil Liberties Union
Class action lawsuit seeks to stop censorship and termination of federally funded scientific research
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steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
protectdemocracy.org/work/researc...
protectdemocracy.org
Researchers challenge NIH screening of grants for disfavored viewpoints - Protect Democracy
Today, researchers filed a class action lawsuit challenging the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) policy of blocking grants in order to censor views it disagrees with, on everything from DEI to ge...
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Lots of stories across Pennsylvania about NIH grant terminations at Pitt and Penn. This is why speaking out matters. Even Congress critters who generally support the administration get pressured into actually supporting their constituents. www.wesanews.org/health-scien...
wesanews.org
McCormick, Fetterman question termination of more than 100 health research grants
Pennsylvania’s senators are demanding information about more than 150 health research grants canceled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this summer.
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Lab member updates! Sad but so excited for both of them that @paigesev.bsky.social is heading off to do her PhD with @maureenritchey.bsky.social at UCLA!! And SO thrilled to welcome @daniel-carstensen.bsky.social here as PhD student & @sydneybergstrom.bsky.social as RA!! schapirolab.org/people.html
schapirolab.org
PEOPLE | SchapiroLab
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.
nature.com
Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades
The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.
All of the NSF’s directorates are awarding fewer new grants, but the hardest hit is the social, behavioural and economic sciences (SBE) directorate, which the White House proposed eliminating in its 2027 budget request to Congress. SBE has so far awarded 84 new grants this year, about 11% of its average, mainly in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience and decision-making. Much of its portfolio, such as sociology, archaeology, political science, economics and geography, has received zero new awards. “I don’t think they’ve realized yet that there’s no awards,” one NSF staff member says of researchers in those fields. “That’s going to be clear soon.”
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Also if you're at #CCN2026 come chat with me about Minds, Machines, and Brains @mmb-journal.bsky.social A new journal we are launching with @mitpress.bsky.social with my co-EICs Kendrick Kay & Ellie Pavlick, and the rest of the wonderful editorial board: direct.mit.edu/mmb/pages/ed...
direct.mit.edu
Editorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press
Editorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press Editorial Information All inquiries should be directed to mindsmachinesandbrains@gmail.com Co-Editors in Chief Leyla Isik ...
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Samuel Lippl @sflippl.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Really excited about this project! If you want to chat about repulsion and representational changes in hippocampus, come by our poster at #CCN2026 tomorrow at 9:30!
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Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Yay, the field needs this! Excited to serve as an associate editor!
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Here's where to find the Penn Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience next week! See you in NYC!
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
If you have an academic in your life, please be gentle with them this weekend because they're probably freaking the fuck out.
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Eleanor Holton @eleanor-holton.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!
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Elliot Murphy @elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/f...
retractionwatch.com
Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges
iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…
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Kari Hoffman @karihoffman.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess
nature.com
Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques - Nature Neuroscience
In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...
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duncanlabuoft.bsky.social @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Please spread the word: We’re recruiting a postdoc! 📣 We study how shifting brain & attentional states shape memory and how people experience their worlds. fMRI/iEEG + a fun, supportive lab community + space to pursue your own ideas. 📅 Apply by Aug 15 tinyurl.com/fx5k7teb
tinyurl.com
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Andrew Lampinen @lampinen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
What should we make of recent language model advancements in mathematics? In my new post, I reflect on long-standing cognitive debates about symbols and neural networks in light of this progress. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/symbols-ne...
infinitefaculty.substack.com
Symbols, neural networks, and mathematical intelligence
Some reflections on connectionism and the basis of higher-level cognition
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Taylor Webb @taylorwwebb.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!
docs.google.com
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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!
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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
We have now reached the "AI models escaping their test environments to conduct autonomous cyberattacks" part of the story
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Moufan Li @moufanli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies - Nature Machine Intelligence
Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...
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aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).
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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
My fMRI study from the Mack Lab (@drmack.bsky.social) is now published on JNeuro! Here, we look into how hippocampal subfields flexibly update category knowledge representations in the face of novel exceptions. Check out the article here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU....
doi.org
Distinct Hippocampal Subfield Representational Shifts Underlie Category Exception Learning
When we encounter an exception to our prior category knowledge, such as a leaf-like butterfly that perceptually diverges from the butterflies we commonly see, we must update our knowledge to reconcile...
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
"NSF employees are now concerned that the $1 billion of withheld funds will not be released. If they are not, the combination of withheld funds and clawbacks would result in funding cuts of more than 30% for most directorates compared with their planned spending for 2025"
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Martin Dresler @dresler.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Why do we forget our dreams? Dreams are the kind of experiences that in principle should stick well in memory: emotional and often bizarre. If we would encounter typical dream content during wakefulness, we would likely never forget it. Yet, we forget most dreams soon after awakening. (1/3)
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Peter Kok @peterkok.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦
royalsocietypublishing.org
Dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions
Abstract. The hippocampus is involved in learning predictive associations, responding to prediction errors as well as representing predictions of future in
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Dhairyya Singh @dhairyyasingh.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Out today! Our (w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social) review of the alignment between the C-HORSE model and the hippocampal structure learning literature. We find strong congruence with the model's key principles and propose several avenues for future investigation!
royalsocietypublishing.org
Evidence for complementary learning systems within the hippocampus
Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Very excited to share our new review on C-HORSE, our model of the hippocampus! We think there is very encouraging alignment between C-HORSE proposals and the extant empirical literature, though we also note plenty of areas for further model development. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Evidence for complementary learning systems within the hippocampus
Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Keep those comments on the OMB proposed rule coming! www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...
insidehighered.com
Comments Flood OMB Proposal on Political Control of Grants
The White House Office of Management and Budget has so far received 90,000 public comments on its plans as scientific and other groups rally against them.
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Peter Kok @peterkok.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social
royalsocietypublishing.org
Volume 381 Issue 1954 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society
Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.
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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. New work w/ @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social – part of the theme issue on hippocampal predictions!
royalsocietypublishing.org
The hippocampus rapidly integrates sequence representations during novel multistep predictions
Abstract. Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the
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Jennie Coughlin @jenniecoughlin.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
The dean of Yale Law School and some members of its faculty are trying to stop a settlement between the university and the Trump administration, warning that an agreement could jeopardize Yale’s independence, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.
nytimes.com
Yale Law School Fights to Stop Trump Deal
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Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
We're finally getting the tools to study replay in humans. But why bother? What can we learn from it that we don't know from rodent recordings? Our thoughts are now out in a new TICS Forum Great fun writing this w @smfleming.bsky.social + @maritpetzka.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
authors.elsevier.com
What can we learn from studying replay in humans?
Noninvasive methods are making it possible to study neural replay in humans. Although focused on alignment with rodent findings, human research often …
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Last month was another record for bioRxiv submissions. The pandemic surge and lag now clearly in the past and the growth continues. Thanks as ever to all the authors, readers affiliates, funders and amazing internal openRxiv team who make this happen!
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
2nd this motion. If you are a young/junior person, you are probably unaware of how very obvious and very cringe your LLM-assisted email is. Makes a bad impression. I would much rather see a naive-sounding and unprofessionally written email in your own voice!
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
A *super* exciting new paper from @lizsiefert.bsky.social!! Human hippocampal ripple rates track very closely with several indicators of low arousal, during both sleep and wake. This is probably the most compelling data I have ever been associated with.
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Liz Siefert @lizsiefert.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Arousal state modulates human hippocampal ripples
Hippocampal ripples are transient, high-frequency oscillations linked to memory replay and consolidation. Ripples are well-characterized in rodents to occur during periods of behavioral inactivity (i....
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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵
nature.com
Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants
Mandatory reviews by top health officials and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo.
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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
"Program managers would normally rush to inform potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. 'This information is highly confidential...Please do not communicate anything to PIs.'” www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say
Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year
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Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Check out @jonathannicholas.bsky.social 's new preprint measuring eye movements to infer individual memory retrievals during decision making, plus a cool RNN modelof that process. Can't express how excited I am about this new technique!
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languagemit.bsky.social @languagemit.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi
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elizabethginexi.bsky.social @elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
For the past 18 months, the Trump administration’s approach to federal grants has followed a familiar pattern: announce a cancellation, face a lawsuit, sometimes lose. That is precisely what OMB’s proposed rewrite of 2 CFR Part 200 is designed to end. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-omb-ru...
elizabethginexi.substack.com
The OMB Rule That Makes the Funding Cuts Legal
For the past eighteen months, the Trump administration’s approach to federal grants has followed a familiar pattern: announce a cancellation, face a lawsuit, sometimes lose.
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Anna Schapiro @annaschapiro.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Striking convergence across the U.S. political spectrum on concerns about AI and what reasonable laws and policies would look like. Politicians take note!!
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