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Well spotted! In order to test the hypothesis that LH =/= RH we decided to go with a fairly stringent cutoff reasoning that if we didn’t see differences in the extremes we wouldn’t see differences in “ambivalent” cases either, which our results support

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I love this paper! It looks like I'm going to have to expand the Discussion of the paper before we submit for publication :)

I just learned that "sinestral" comes from "sinus" meaning "pocket" since Roman togas had pockets on the left

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that's great to know! Thanks for the link

Activation maps overlap considerably between an all-RH sample and samples including 10% LH (representative of the population prevalence), with dice similarity > 0.8 for all samples with n≥30. Conclusion: you should be including left-handed folks in your fMRI studies (at least for memory). 6/n

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Finally, we asked what happens to the pattern of activation when we include LH participants in our samples of mostly RH. Conventional wisdom is this should add variability causing us to "lose significance". I.e., we should have more false negatives when including LH. We didn't see this. 5/n

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right-lateralized language (as determined with a language localizer task) and compared with everyone else. Right-lateralized LH participants had more activation in the right hemisphere for word retrieval. Notably, they did not have any less activation in the left hemisphere than RH. 4/n

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and scanned about 50 LH and 50 RH participants in word and face encoding and retrieval tasks. When comparing LH and RH groups against each other, we do not observe any significant differences in activation. The only time we could get group differences was when we isolated LH participants with 3/n

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Language processing happens in the left hemisphere for most folks but it's more frequently right-lateralized in LH. This is obviously a concern if you're doing an fMRI study on language, but why screen out LH's in a memory study? This was lead-author Loriana Goulding's question. She recruited 2/n

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Left Out: The Effect of Handedness on fMRI Activation in Memory Paradigms

In honor of International Left-Handers Day, we have an updated preprint on scanning left-handed participants in fMRI studies. Although they're 11% of the population, we routinely screen LH people out of fMRI studies due to concerns about functional lateralization 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

About 11% of the population is left-handed, a significant minority of the potential participant pool for functional MRI (fMRI) studies. However, convention in fMRI research dictates these potential pa...

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Nora Bradford @norabradford.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Hey neuroscientists, do you have a story about a time when journalism has improved your science? If so, I'd love to include it in my next op-ed. 🧠

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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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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 11/06/2026

I’ve received a request to review a tenure file. When I was chair of our P&T committee we offered a couple hundred dollars for these and I thought that was pretty standard but this request does not mention $. Is it gauche to ask if it’s paid?

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 11/06/2026

This was my experience as an assoc editor at Frontiers as well. The system sent out auto-invitations in my name to random reviewers.

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MindCORE at the University of Pennsylvania @pennmindcore.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

MindCORE DivE In 2026 October 9-11, 2026 Philadelphia DivE In brings undergrads interested in grad studies in mind sciences to Penn for mentoring. First-gen, low-income & those at schools with limited research resources strongly encouraged to apply by June 8: upenn.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

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Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute @mossresearch.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Our Institute, part of Jefferson Moss-Magee Rehabilitation and Thomas Jefferson University, is hiring for a tenure track faculty position! Applicants should have experience conducting research focused on human translational neuroscience & neurorehabilitation. ow.ly/yCBA50Z2eMl

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Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute @mossresearch.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Dr. Andrew Persichetti, Director of the Memory and Perception (MAP) Lab, studies how memory & perception systems support diverse cognitive functions using a combination of advanced methods, including fMRI, behavioral testing, and eye tracking. Learn more about his research: ow.ly/cTcc50YVvy4

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 07/05/2026

Philly folks! Im giving a presentation tomorrow afternoon on study skills at the Kingsessing library. It’s targeted to students with ADHD, but all my tips are cognitive psychology based and will be helpful for anyone. @pennmindcore.bsky.social

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 05/05/2026

Really cool study of hippocampal morphology changes across the lifespan. Analyses were based on publicly available MRI datasets, which included 2 from our lab hosted on openneuro.org. Really great to see our data continuing to be useful beyond our own publications.

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This was another project that took a few years to get out the door. Shout out to Ari Hedges-Muncy and Nate Muncy for formalizing the research question, Sam Chipman for data collection and analysis, and to Moe Mansour for picking it up and seeing it across the finish line.

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The one thing that we found to be associated with prestige was journal impact factor--higher prestige predicted higher impact factors. I have theories about why this might be (perhaps pressure to publish in high-IF journals at some institutions), but we'd need to do an intervention to say more.

A scatter plot depicting prestige score was a significant predictor of journal impact factor, with studies from higher prestige institutions more likely to be published in high impact factor journals.

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We also asked if journal review style (single- vs. double-anonymous) interacted with prestige to predict sample size. It does not. In other words, it doesn't matter if authors are anonymous to reviewers in terms of acceptable sample sizes.

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We thought that authors from higher prestige universities might get a break on the number of subjects needed to publish an fMRI study. In fact, the opposite is true--higher prestige is associated with larger sample sizes.

Scatter plot depicting a composite prestige score derived from first and last author institution ranking and h-index values positively predicted adjusted sample size in fMRI studies.

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Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute @mossresearch.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

New Preprint! Have you ever wondered if there's a relationship between the prestige of an author's institution and the sample size of their fMRI study? We did, so we did a systematic review of the memory fMRI literature and found the opposite of what we predicted www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Thanks to all who attended the AFNI Bootcamp in Philly! We enjoyed hosting the 3-day intensive course that brought together clinicians & scientists to learn to process raw MRI data from start to finish w/ expert guidance from the AFNI team of the Scientific & Statistical Computing Core in the NIMH.

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This whole project stemmed from a conversation with @brainscout.bsky.social several years ago. Sorry it took me so long to write it up!

As targets are forgotten over a week, this pattern becomes more pronounced. All this indicates that mnemonic discrimination performance depends on both the strength of the target memory and the similarity of the lure to the original target.

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lures successfully with high confidence, especially when the lures are not very similar to targets. However, when lures are highly similar, they false alarm (call them "old") with high confidence. Consequently, we see that low-confidence responses are _more_ accurate than high conf. for those items

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We found people forget! Which of course we were expecting (Ebbinghaus showed the forgetting curve in 1885). What's interesting is that as people forget the original targets, their responses to the similar lures change in interesting ways. When target memory is strong, people are able to discriminate

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We had participants complete the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) where they study everyday objects and then take a recognition memory test with exact repeats, similar lures, and novel items. Usually, we only wait a couple minutes between study and test phases, but here we included delays up to 1 wk

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 08/04/2026

Preprint day! Mnemonic discrimination is required to keep overlapping or similar experiences from interfering with each other in memory. We've done a lot of work on how this happens at short delays, but we've never examined this process at longer delays, like over a week osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Definitely reach out if you’re interested and want to know more. I promise I’m a good officemate :)

Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 03/04/2026

Honestly this is a boss move. I’m going to try it from now on

Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 18/03/2026

I “liked” this post but I do not like this post

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 17/03/2026

These findings suggests that individuals with T1D likely exert greater neural "effort" in executive functioning-related brain regions to achieve similar levels of inhibitory control when compared to peers without T1D. Gift link: rdcu.be/e8nxE 3/3

rdcu.be

Executive functioning-related neural processes in emerging adults with type 1 diabetes

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 17/03/2026

We found T1D S's demonstrated similar behavioral inhibition performance to controls but comparatively greater activation in several interconnected executive functioning-related brain regions. We did not find an association between hemoglobin HbAlc and executive function-related neural activation 2/3

rdcu.be

Executive functioning-related neural processes in emerging adults with type 1 diabetes

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 17/03/2026

New paper! Emerging adults with type 1 diabetes have been shown to have poorer executive control and working memory performance compared to controls. With Chad Jensen's lab we examined executive control in emerging adults with T1D using fMRI. 1/3

rdcu.be

Executive functioning-related neural processes in emerging adults with type 1 diabetes

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MindCORE at the University of Pennsylvania @pennmindcore.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Mind, Brain & Society WIP Thurs, March 19 3:30-5 PM (w/snacks & swag!) 200 Goddard, 3710 Hamilton Walk @upenn.edu To Do or Not to Do: How Goal Framing Shapes Behavioral Change Maya Enisman, PhD Postdoctoral Fellow, Annenberg Public Policy Center & Social Action Lab @appc.upenn.edu @asc.upenn.edu

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Brock Kirwan @brockkirwan.com · 06/03/2026

Congratulations! Well deserved