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Marc Coutanche

@marccoutanche.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1K following 287 posts

Neuroscientist, Cognitive Scientist. Examining memory, learning, new fMRI methods, ⬆️ funding for science. Personal account.

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Reposted by Marc Coutanche
Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
New paper! Great work from Hendrik Heinbockel & Lars Schwabe that they were kind enough to involve me in: Targeted stimulation of face-selective visual cortex at retrieval boosts associative face memory in healthy young adults #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪
academic.oup.com
Targeted stimulation of face-selective visual cortex at retrieval boosts associative face memory in healthy young adults
Abstract. Episodic memory retrieval relies on encoding-pattern reinstatement (EPR), the reactivation of neural representations formed during encoding. Alth
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
For a second I thought you were telling us that you've started a second PhD!
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Reposted by Marc Coutanche
Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈 @davidimiller.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
NSF gave 90% fewer new grants this year in the social & behavioral sciences Spokesperson quote is even more batshit crazy: NSF "has been actively engaging in prudent planning & taking steps to implement the President’s agenda for FY 2027" Yo, that first requires a little thing called...Congress
science.org
‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research
Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year
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Chris Baker @cibaker.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
A new method for translating functional brain responses between species - Spatiotemporal Hyperalignment projects shared information into a common representational space Led by @kbraunlich.bsky.social Marianne Duyck with @bevilconway.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Translating functional brain activity between humans and monkeys
Comparing brain responses across species is essential for identifying models of human cognition and testing theories of brain evolution, but differences in brain size, measurement techniques, and sign...
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:
science.org
‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research
Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).
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Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Thanks to Rice News for featuring my recent paper! We developed an intervention & useful tool to help people understand their protection against COVID-19 and encourage vaccination. @ricesocsci.bsky.social @riceihri.bsky.social Story: tinyurl.com/ricenewsimmest Full paper: doi.org/10.1093/pnas...
tinyurl.com
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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Please stop telling high school students to cold email university professors. Really, just stop. If you are a high school student looking for research opportunities, search and apply to the myriad of formal training programs that cater specifically to your education level.
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ari ☀️ @khoudary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
how does memory support perceptual decisions made under uncertainty? this question has scaffolded my entire PhD, and I'm so excited to share part of it in this ✨new preprint ✨ w/ @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social! link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Memory retrieval explains dynamic effects of expectations on perceptual decisions
Expectations—prior knowledge of environmental statistics—support adaptive behavior by reducing uncertainty during inference. However, the questions of where expectations come from and how that ought t...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"Unfortunately because of all the foundations I consider, it is not possible to give you any more feedback"
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Aren't they created through SciENcv? Do you mean they've changed the fields, etc?
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It's becoming clear that running online studies needs yet another set of skills (on top of java, Qualtrics, etc.) - being up-to-date on the latest GPT capabilities and how to detect their use. It's an arms race so this extra skill set shouldn't be underestimated.
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Reposted by Marc Coutanche
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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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I used to love this time of year, hearing from students applying to work in my lab. No more. Every day a fresh batch of nearly identical emails with nonsensical remixes of the text on my lab website. It makes me so sad.
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Context Lab @contextlab.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
In our latest study, led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social, we build a geometric framework to ask how our memories change with the passage of time ⏰ Title: Delayed recountings preserve but simplify the semantic geometry of earlier recountings Preprint: osf.io/mhxtd_v1 Code/data: github.com/ContextLab/m... 🧵
osf.io
OSF
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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
How do we prevent memories from competing to guide attention? More distinct hippocampal representations for competing memories are linked to precise preparatory coding in visual cortex & more accurate eye movements to target locations. Thrilled to share this work by the incomparable Serra Favila!
nature.com
Hippocampal mechanisms underlying the resolution of competition in memory and perception - Nature Communications
Memory and perception both require selecting behaviorally relevant information. Here, the authors show that more distinct hippocampal memories are linked to precise anticipatory signals in visual cort...
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Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT/Mturk) will be shut down as of September 30th. This marks the end of an era. It laid the foundation to the now ubiquitous use of online studies in the psychological and social sciences. It also became too unreliable in recent years. Still, I'm going to miss it.
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Tony Cunningham @tonycunningham.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Interesting evidence that sleep-dependent memory processing may begin before we even fall asleep: Denis et al. found that theta activity during learning predicted later slow oscillation–spindle coupling during sleep, which in turn predicted better memory. doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
Theta oscillations tag episodic memories for sleep-dependent consolidation
Why some experiences are retained while others fade remains a central question in memory research. This study shows that theta-band activity during learning marks memories for sleep-dependent consolid...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Yes - I moved to Rice this summer. Super excited to be here!
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Project Hail Mary is also an excellent book by Andy Weir if you enjoy sci-fi
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
We are recruiting an Assistant Professor in Cog Neuro/Cog Psych to join us at Rice! Please spread the word! apply.interfolio.com/192080
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Steven Scholte @neurosteven.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Now out in Current Biology! Object decoding and DNN–brain alignment dissociate: more object information ≠ more alignment. What neural networks share with the brain is mid-level image statistics. Free 50-day access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Paul Taylor @afni-pt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Have you ever felt like something was missing from your #fmri results? Have you been worried about potential reproducibility issues? Well, this new @natmethods.nature.com article with 40+ coauthors shows how the simple change to transparent thresholding helps both. Go Figure! rdcu.be/B4tikBETdQZa
A comparison of old and new thresholding approaches for fMRI data. The newer, transparent thresholding allows for interpreting context, more complete modeling, a reduction of biases and an increase in meaningful content. This all leads to more accurate interpretations and improved reproducibility evaluations.
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I clearly need to up my sign-off game. Where to put "May God have mercy on your soul"?
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Wow, this particularly surprises me! I would have predicted that the meaning humans are bringing with the symbols would have separated them out
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Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I have been meaning to write a post about a preprint that I'm pretty excited about: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In neuroscience we often assume that we can learn something general about “the brain” using different species. But is this true? Do monkeys even see the world the way we do?
On the left, an image of a rhesus macaque looking towards its left, and on the right, an AI-generated zoomed-out rendering of a human in the same pose. Both are looking.
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Jesse Rissman @rissman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Our paper on context-dependent learning is now out in iScience! 👀 👇 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks
biological sciences; psychology; cognitive neuroscience; computational bioinformatics; neural networks
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
On the off chance you're relying on OSF to store your data; put copies of it somewhere safe ASAP. I like to think they've got the runway to keep storing things like they suggest, but it wouldn't be the first time something like this went dark on the internet. www.cos.io/osf-changes
cos.io
OSF Changes | Center for Open Science
We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...
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Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
i feel seen
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Takeaway: Memory traces carry a history of their own retrieval. How we semantically access a concept can leave an “echo” that shapes its later neural representation. 9/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
The type of semantic access also changed the structure of recognition representations: Category-level access → subsequent memories becoming more similar in early visual cortex. Item-level access → subsequent memories becoming more differentiated in the visual word form area. 8/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Hippocampal decoding also tracked overall engagement in left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC): On trials with greater left vlPFC activity, hippocampal classifier confidence was higher, linking controlled semantic retrieval with how strongly prior access history was represented. 7/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Importantly, behavioral memory performance was matched across access conditions - recognition accuracy and RTs didn't differ. So prior semantic access changed HOW the memories were represented in the brain, rather than just how well they were being remembered. 6/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
We saw similar effects in our regions of interest: for remembered items, prior access history was decodable in early visual cortex, ventral temporal cortex, and the hippocampus. Within the hippocampus, decoding ability was stronger in the anterior than posterior portion. 5/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Could we tell how a memory had previously been accessed just from brain activity during later recognition? Yes. Whole-brain decoding identified bilateral occipital cortex, extending into right fusiform gyrus, where item/category/theme access history could be classified above chance. 4/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Design: participants learned novel word–image pairs, then re-accessed each pair via a question at one of 3 semantic levels: • Item: specific features • Category: taxonomic membership • Theme: broader context Later, participants completed a recognition test in the scanner. 3/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Episodic memories change every time we retrieve them. Retrieval usually engages semantic knowledge, and the same concept can be accessed in different ways: “Dory" is a specific fish, a Blue Tang, and a might be a pet. We tested whether this shapes later memory representations. 2/9
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
🧠🧵 New paper accepted at @jocn.bsky.social! Led by @amyqixx.bsky.social We found that memory traces carry an "echo" of how they were last accessed: the way you retrieve a concept leaves a measurable signature in the brain the next time you recognize it. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN... 1/9
doi.org
Memory Traces Reflect How They Were Last Accessed
Abstract. Episodic memories are known to change with each act of retrieval. We hypothesize that accessing semantic knowledge in different ways during episodic retrieval—from unique perceptual features...
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Over the next several months, we will phase out some popular OSF features. These changes do not affect current public content, which remains safe and accessible. We have prepared support material to help users adapt. I am very sorry for the disruption to your work. Please read this post for details.
cos.io
OSF Changes | Center for Open Science
We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...
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Dirk Gütlin @gutlin.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Representation researchers: I think you definitely should check out this thought-provoking review by: @initself.bsky.social @rowansommers.bsky.social @adriendoerig.bsky.social @timkietzmann.bsky.social The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42570893/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality - PubMed
Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on univer...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
It does look like the new Hillman construction
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Annick Tanguay @annicktanguay.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
TL;DR THREAD – Properties of personal semantics ⏳ (link.springer.com/article/10.3...) The backstory. In previous work, we observed a gradient of hippocampal activity 🍤 : general semantic knowledge < personal semantic knowledge < episodic memory 📈 (elifesciences.org/articles/83645)
link.springer.com
The properties of personal semantics - Memory & Cognition
Recent cognitive neuroscience research has uncovered some similarities and some differences between general semantic memory (GS; e.g., knowledge about family in general) and personal semantic memory (...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
static.klipy.com
Total Recall See You At The Party
ALT: Total Recall See You At The Party
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 06/08/2026
I understand that funding bodies want to go all in on AI as the shiny new innovation thing. But if all the grants start going to AI at the expense of everything else then the research sector is going to end up looking like a farm with dozens of threshers hacking away in a field with no wheat.
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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
this would be a huge blow to US biomedical science. the K99/R00 program has historically played a key role in recruiting top international post-docs to stay in the US to start their own labs.
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Lu-Chun Yeh @luchunyeh.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
🚨Out now in J Neurosci! 🧠 Using fMRI and EEG, we mapped where and when contextual knowledge of real-world objects emerges within the visual system - even when those objects are viewed in isolation. @dkaiserlab.bsky.social @peelen.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...
jneurosci.org
Spatiotemporal Representations of Contextual Associations for Real-World Objects
In the real world, objects always appear in context. Many objects are reliably associated with a certain scene context (e.g., pots appear in kitchens) and other objects that appear in the same context...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I loved this about the UPenn squirrels - it wouldn't take much for them to come close to you
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Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Check out the new preprint from the amazing @adamjcurtis.bsky.social! Memory Benefits for Schematically Incongruent Sequences Depend on the Type of Violation #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪
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UBC Psychology @psych.ubc.ca · 29/07/2026
A study by Dr. @danipalombo.bsky.social, Dr. Connor Kerns, and Dr. Veronica Dudarev explored how memory can be impacted by what we pay attention to and whether a situation involved social cues. Via @VCHResearch.bsky.social Read more: www.vchri.ca/stories/2026...
vchri.ca
The influence of social situations on memory
Most days, we encounter people and things that we either do or do not like. But why are some events and details more memorable than others? A study led by Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute ...
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Marc Coutanche @marccoutanche.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Fantastic! Reminds me of a pin I have
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