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Jörn Alexander Quent

@jaquent.bsky.social
3.1K followers 1.3K following 892 posts

Currently working in #Shanghai | PhD from MRC-CBU/Cambridge Uni | Gates Cambridge | interested in neuroscience of memory | you can call me Alex

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Reposted by Jörn Alexander Quent
Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I’m in DC scheduled to give this talk today. But the organizers flagged slides in my deck that mention racism, structural gaslighting, New Jim Code and other themes that are off limits in the Land of the Free.
APA Women’s Leadership Institute event flyer with “keynote speaker” crossed out with a red X
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Chris Baldassano @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! We study how the brain perceives, remembers, and predicts naturalistic experiences like movies and games, using computational tools to analyze behavioral and neural data 🧠 App deadline is 12/2/26 - see our lab pubs on our website www.dpmlab.org/pubs.html
dpmlab.org
Columbia Dynamic Perception and Memory Lab
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Marieke van Vugt @mvugt.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Rising numbers of Asian and African PhD students choose to study in China (and I think that makes a lot of sense because China has been solidly investing in science and technology) www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Rising numbers of Asian and African PhD students choose to study in China
International students explain the advantages and challenges that come with pursuing a doctoral degree in China.
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Kristina Liefke @kristinaliefke.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I am looking for a postdoc (4 years, 100%) in experimental semantics/philosophy of language, with a focus on memory: jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/c88… Please reach out if you are interested!
jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
🫪
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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 06/10/2026
Our new open-source jsPsych tool makes it easy to collect continuous affect ratings during your own videos: 1D (e.g. anxiety) or 2D (valence × arousal). It runs in the browser with JATOS + Prolific: github.com/embodied-com...
The rating tool in 1D mode: a vertical bar from "Not at all" to "Extremely" overlaid on the film, asking "How tense or anxious do you feel right now?"
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Interesting new work dissecting navigational behaviour and differentiating it from episodic memory. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Shared and distinct cognitive processes across multiple virtual navigation tasks
Natural sciences; Biological sciences; Neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience
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Reposted by Jörn Alexander Quent
Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Neuroscience & mental health: 4.4% success rate for #MRC #UKRI grants assessed in Spring 2026 Years & years & years of wasted effort 👇
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It all started with seeing this #Sichuan mountain (Gongga Shan, #China) from the plane a few years back. Today I managed to hike up 4,256 m to get this stunning view. It was my first hike in a proper mountain and I don't think I will ever forget this.
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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Important work showing just how easily AI agents can pass online behavioral experiments! Safeguards need to keep up if we want to continue online testing!👇
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Greetings from Sichuan, China's beautiful mountain range.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Fantastic work and an interesting set of analyses.
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Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Interesting insights into spatial memory and hippocampal function in humans: Navigation strategies predict spatial memory and hippocampal recruitment Work Zita Patai (who I wish was still in my lab!) www.cell.com/cell-reports...
cell.com
Navigation strategies predict spatial memory and hippocampal recruitment
Patai, E.Z. et al. show via analyzing spontaneous navigation behavior that humans are idiosyncratic, flexibly adapt strategies to variable degrees to achieve learning, and that strategies do not refle...
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026
Hey, ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson here. I’m taking over the account to tell you about my new story. For months, I posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to test the company's "responsible gaming" safeguards. Spoiler alert: They made me a VIP — and I lost $10K. Here's how it all went down. 🧵
Selfie taken by ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson, a man wearing a backwards baseball cap and an orange T-shirt.
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Jay 🦋 @jay.bsky.team · 26/09/2026
happy mid-autumn festival! 🍂🌕
mooncake
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Community on 97th? Surely the order was just randomised.
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Edgardo Avilés-López @eavl.co · 25/09/2026
Three lines moving on Lissajous curves. The colors come from a complex logarithm, implemented in a shader with Ollin's complex number helpers. Each pixel adds up the angles from one end of each line to the other. S/N: 2026.012 #creativeCoding #generativeArt #dailySketch #ollin #complexNumbers
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Rik Henson @rhens.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
1/2 Was fun to work with @lihuaxia.bsky.social on this paper on bilingualism in special issue of @neurobiology-aging.bsky.social on brain resilience in aging and dementia, where we used the valuable #HABS-HD cohort
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University of Cambridge @cam.ac.uk · 25/09/2026
Cambridge University announces a new Cambridge Mind and Brain Institute focused on understanding and improving brain health across our lifespan, from early childhood through to old age. Find out more 👉 bit.ly/4hpgZsl @mrccbu.bsky.social
A large brick building with two stories and a conservatory is surrounded by greenery. Text reads, "Cambridge University announces a new Cambridge Mind and Brain institute."
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Rik Henson @rhens.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
So thankful to the University of Cambridge for enabling a new chapter in the long history of the APU/CBU (since MRC decided to close all its units…)
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Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The deadline for this new role is 2nd October, so you have a week left to apply!
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Randy Ellis @randalljellis.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Here’s my conversation with Chris Chambers on Metascience Matters. Chris was the first journal editor to offer registered reports, starting in 2013 at Cortex. youtu.be/PgZjgZlxsYw?...
youtu.be
Registered reports | Chris Chambers
YouTube video by Metascience Matters
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laserhedvig @laserhedvig.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Interdisciplinary research is great and necessary, and also has consistently lower funding success www.nature.com/articles/nat... #academiclabourmarket #academia #research
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Jarrod Watt @jaywatt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Imagine now… if a Chinese AI system like DeepSeek accessed Medicare as well as this. What level of urgency would we see? “NSW premier Chris Minns says OpenAI agents may have also accessed information held by the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2026
holy fucking shit - see Claude Code (Opus 5.5) rip through a survey eligility test I was really proud of... It requires tracing a route through designated points on a map with server-side Javascript applying eligibility criteria. (1.5 min video)
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Zurich Cognition Lab @cognition-zurich.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Open Postdoc (80%) in our Lab @uzh-ch.bsky.social (PI: Klaus Oberauer) Topics are: Working memory, long-term memory, attention; experiments, individual differences, computational modeling. Start Dec 2026 to Feb 2027, until June 2030. Apply by Oct 15; Questions to: k.oberauer@psychologie.uzh.ch
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Proud to share our latest preprint with my very special @mengya-zhang.bsky.social (🥰). Briefly, we studied how the degree to which CA1 responses are the same (reinstatement) or different (novelty response) supports memory, echoing a central tension in the field. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
We thus conclude that the hippocampus (esp. CA1) can express beneficial forms of consistency and differentiation at the same time via orthogonal signals.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
While novelty in CA1 provided an independent contribution to memory alongside reinstatement, novelty in CA3 did not. There, only item-specific, not context-specific, reinstatement predicted memory. Interestingly, the trial-to-trial novelty response & reinstatement were completely uncorrelated.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
In line with our other recent work using a completely independent in-house dataset (bsky.app/profile/jaqu...), we find that large parts of the hippocampus, including CA1 and CA3, also show a novelty response.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Given the elusiveness of hippocampal reinstatement, especially for simple recognition memory, we first focused on finding evidence that CA1 shows mnemonically relevant reinstatement, which it did, together with CA3, which was only true for reinstating the initial experience. Nothing else was robust.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
For this, we (me, @mengya-zhang.bsky.social, @neurodenizen.bsky.social) analysed the NSD (naturalscenesdataset.org), which is a large-scale precision neuroimaging dataset with tens of thousands of trials collected over several months providing an invaluable treasure trove.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Proud to share our latest preprint with my very special @mengya-zhang.bsky.social (🥰). Briefly, we studied how the degree to which CA1 responses are the same (reinstatement) or different (novelty response) supports memory, echoing a central tension in the field. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Interesting new pre-print on cellular pattern separation in humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Cellular code for mnemonic pattern separation in the human hippocampus is revealed by false memories
Theoretical models propose that pattern separation, a computation thought to be implemented by the hippocampus, allows us to differentiate between familiar and novel items. However, whether pattern se...
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Reposted by Jörn Alexander Quent
Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My latest work on how both hippocampal consistency and differentiation can support single-item recognition memory.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Agreed. It will probably be a cat and mouse game, which depends how strongly does someone that cheats want to avoid detection. I've seen people use RT auto-correlation across trials to detect cheating but this probably only works some time until an agents specifically implements it as well.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I am not sure if running online experiments will be viable much longer. I can still imagine recruiting local students to complete tasks online can work but the incentive to cheat on the big platforms is too large.
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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 22/09/2026
So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This but I would also add that the problem for many health issues is not a lack of a cure but the distribution of resources, which is a socioeconomic issue not be solved by AI. They mean curing all diseases for those who can afford it, anyway, but I don't even believe that tbh.
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Richard Baker @bakerart.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
Boathouse on the Cam, large pastel. I worked my way along the Cam doing pastels and watercolours of all the boathouses after I was commissioned to do one of them. #theCam #boathouse #rowing
Boathouse on the Cam in pastel. I think this one is Clare and Clare Hall
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My latest work on how both hippocampal consistency and differentiation can support single-item recognition memory.
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
CA1 reinstatement and novelty response independently support recognition memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
That being said, I do miss their sausages roles. This was unironically the first stop when I went to the UK the last time.
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
You're evil.
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Hayoung Song @hayoungsong.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Honored to be featured, thanks @franciscorr25.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social! It was exciting to share my vision for the lab (thesonglab.github.io) and reflect on the wisdom my mentors have passed on⭐️
thesonglab.github.io
Song Lab
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Imaging Neuroscience @imagingneurosci.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ian Goodall-Halliwell, Boris C. Bernhardt, et al: MICAFlow: Fast and robust MRI preprocessing bridging research neuroimaging and clinical practice doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Say the word and I will help you.
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
🚨 I have just signed this petition to keep the Cognitive Science program at Aarhus University (@au.dk) international. Please consider reading, boosting, and signing too. ✍️ The students will be grateful! This petition is on their initiative. 🙏 omnibus.au.dk/en/archive/s...
omnibus.au.dk
OPINION: AU wants international talent – but is closing the door on them at Cognitive Science
Students and alumni at Cognitive Science urge the Senior Management Team to reopen the decision to convert the Bachelor’s programme in Cognitive Science to Danish. Why should Arts be left without an E...
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Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I am very excited to share this. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Most of us agree that the HC is critical for associative memory but there is growing work showing it does much more (WM etc.). Recognition partly relies on a global matching, which based on influential models is not supported by HC.
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