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Michael Pascale

@mpascale.psyc.dev
603 followers 1.5K following 55 posts

PhD Student, Boston University Brain Behavior Cognition | he/they 🏳️‍🌈 Human Curiosity, Exploration, & Information Seeking: Why do we seek out knowledge and when do we avoid it? Formerly @MGHPsychiatry & @UMassLowell www.psyc.dev

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Reposted by Michael Pascale
Dimitri Coelho Mollo @dcm.social.sunet.se.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026
Very cool forthcoming hybrid talk series in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: modellingthemind.com I'm happy to be one of the speakers for this one! #philcogsci #philmind #philAI
modellingthemind.com
Modelling the Mind
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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Granule cells may allow the brain to simultaneously generalize across tasks—avoiding the need to learn each new challenge from scratch—while still capturing what makes each situation distinct. #neuroskyence By Holly Barker www.thetransmitter.org/cerebellum/c...
thetransmitter.org
Cerebellum discerns similar actions by reorienting activity
The findings provide a new perspective on how granule cells in the cerebellum help to generalize across tasks.
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The Organization for Human Brain Mapping @ohbmofficial.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🌎 Science is stronger when we share. This #InternationalDayForUniversalAccessToInformation, we celebrate Open Science and a global community making research more accessible, transparent, and collaborative. 🧠🤝 #OpenScience #BrainMapping #OHBM
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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Boston/Cambridge folks! I'm headed your way next week (9/30 and 10/1 at Northeastern, Harvard, and @harvardbookstore.bsky.social. Please join me! For more info about each event, including registration links, go to my website: www.danah.org/data-are-mad...
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Tom Possidente (He/Him) @tom-poss.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Are there hard boundaries or soft gradients of function between sensory and #working-memory activation in frontal cortex? We show evidence for meso-scale (~1cm) cortical gradients in several frontal ROIs in this bioRxiv preprint. Thread 1/6 #neuroscience #neuroskyence doi.org/10.64898/202...
Process diagram for individual subject ROI gradient vs. boundary model comparison. A) Individual subject p-value map of all visual conditions (WM and SMC) against fixation. The black outline represents the
probabilistic search space for the preSMA ROI while the white outline represents the p<.01 ROI inside the search space for this subject. B) The ROI from A is flattened and the difference of the unsmoothed T-statistics for the WM against SMC and SMC against fixation contrasts are projected. The X-axis is aligned with the axis of greatest change. Gray horizontal gridlines form slices that are 2.2mm in height. C) Data from a single slice is collapsed into 1D, then gradient and boundary models are fit to the data. This is repeated for each slice.
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Neuroskeptic @neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Here's a question for academic psychologists - have you ever applied something you read in a psychology journal in your everyday life?
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The Women In Science Archive @wisarchive.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Neuroscientist Brenda Milner turns an incredible 108 years old today! In the 1950s she uncovered the role the hippocampus plays in consolidating memories, and in the 1970s she published her seminal studies of speech lateralization. Wishing her all the best today! tinyurl.com/3am8syhf #WomenInSTEM
tinyurl.com
Building a Kingdom in the Brain’s Unfashionable District: Brenda Milner’s Century of Neuropsychology
There are scales and metrics you use to evaluate the lives of most neuropsychologists, and then there are those you have to invent in order to speak with any degree of justice about people like Brenda...
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gbhnews @gbhnews.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Louisa Gag was devoted to making city streets safer for everyone. Her death this week, as she rode her bicycle on those streets, is reminding many that more progress is necessary to prevent tragedies. bit.ly/4vZpPmP
bit.ly
‘We know that these are preventable’: Friends mourn bike advocate Louisa Gag, killed by driver
Gag, who worked as a transportation planner for the city of Boston, was killed by the driver of a truck on Thursday while riding her bicycle on Tremont Street.
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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Pride was born as a riot, and has always been an act of defiance. During my life, I survived an internment camp. I came out at 68. I've watched rights get won and now watch them being rolled back. Yet I'm still here, still proud, and still holding Brad's hand.
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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I just submitted a comment on the proposed new OMB rule, which is very dangerous fo rUS science. I urge you to consider doing the same. You can do so very easily at this web page: fight2win.standupforscience.net/campaign/164... A short comment is fine but write in your own words. More info follows..
fight2win.standupforscience.net
Stand up for Science
Stand up for Science
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Powerful piece from two former NIH staffers www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...
insidehighered.com
The 3-Pronged Attack on Scientific Communication (opinion)
At the NIH, political appointees exercise extensive control over scientific communication, and research on health communication is under siege.
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Michael Pascale @mpascale.psyc.dev · 17/06/2026
I really do think that we need to expunge the blanket claim that science is apolitical to make progress. Science the process? Perhaps you could argue; Science the people, the goals, sociology of? The whole point is to uplift people via knowledge. That we ought to invest in uplifting is political.
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Rachit Dubey @rachitdubey.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Why does this happen? Two candidate mechanisms: 1) AI resets your reference point for how long things "should" take. Unaided work suddenly feels harder than it actually is, -- a kind of hedonic adaptation. 2) AI removes the productive struggle through which you learn what you're capable of.
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
A report for university chancellors and presidents concerned about the state of academic scholarship: Statistical thinking is postmodern.
argmin.net
The Objective Pursuit of Knowledge
Why statistical thinking is postmodern.
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Dirk Gütlin @gutlin.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Making time for a dynamic attentional priority map Sage E.P. Boettcher ∙ Gwenllian C. Williams ∙ Jeremy M. Wolfe ∙ Nir Shalev www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
cell.com
Making time for a dynamic attentional priority map
Attentional priority is typically conceived as a static spatial map, despite attention operating in a continuously changing world. We propose a dynamic priority map and outline the core demands and ke...
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Sandra @lilysch.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Someone should get up and read out loud what Dave Eggers said on NPR in response.
"This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them to express themselves. But I say like you are one of one unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There's only one of you. ...There's never been you in Ever, and there never will be another one of you. So to give your voice to a machine, to say 'speak for me, I'm going to be silent and I'm going to tell a machine to express myself or to tell my narrative, is such a crime against yourself.
"It's so dystopian, beyond anything 1 could do in a dystopian novel— and I did a lot; I never saw this coming-would be an entire generation tempted and too many of them acquiescing to the the silencing of their own voice in favor of a bland unthinking machine to voice their souls.
"But if you can tell them, 'even your roughest drafts, even your most disjointed seeming thoughts are going to be valid; and your voice is essential; the human chorus is incomplete without your voice; and I'm going to listen to whatever you say, even the rough drafts, whatever; I want those; I want to see it all," then we can make sure that that they're heard and that they feel like there are humans out there that want to hear that voice and not the machine processed voice.
..Good lord, we're at a really scary time, you know, but every adult has to be that person. Every teacher, every parent has to be the one saying, 'Do not do this." Your voice is the only thing that you have naturally. It's the one thing that nobody can replace. So let's hear your truth. Even if it's raw, even if it's unpolished, even if it doesn't come in the five paragraph essay or whatever. Like, let's let's have it straight from you."
— David Eggers, on NPR's Wildcard with Rachel Martin
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Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Did you know you can search for R packages by what they do, as opposed to just their names? Look! 👉🏼 rwarehouse.netlify.app @kylieainslie.bsky.social made The Warehouse for just this purpose. Send it to a new R programmer today ❤️ because it's the resource we all wish we'd had at some point #rstats
Screenshot of a website with "The Warehouse" at the top. The user has typed "add interactivity to a ggplot" into the search bar at the top of the website and results below include plotly and ggiraph
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 22/04/2026
Good news everyone 🥳 Our (w @vincentab.bsky.social) primer on models as prediction machines (with the marginaleffects package) is finally officially published!> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients Into Clear Quantities - Julia M. Rohrer, Vincent Arel-Bundock, 2026
Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear model...
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Le Ca-ghoul @lecagle.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Zotero is my emergency contact
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Progression without progress
Progress in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance scientific discovery has made it increasingly realistic to envision automated “end-to-end science” (ETES) systems: integrated pipelines t...
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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Reviewing a paper, and it is so nice that the Metacheck R package we made allows me to download all OSF Files by just typing: metacheck::osf_file_download("2w123") (not the actual repo). All files are downloaded, maintaining the folder structure, without any hassle.
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Ekaterina (Katja) Pronizius @epronizius.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Today was my AHA moment. Did u know that R Markdown can cite all packages for u when you knit the document? And it only requires two lines of code. Silly me - I was citing every package manually. Thank you @mklingelhoeferj.bsky.social for teaching me so many cool things today! @improvingpsych.org
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ᴅʀ. ᴍᴏᴡɪɴᴄᴋᴇʟ'ꜱ @drmowinckels.io · 09/05/2026
Hi @helenajambor.bsky.social ! I'm helping curate an opt-in awesome list of R-Ladies community blogs, and I came across yours via the R-Ladies directory. I've drafted a PR adding it: github.com/rladies/awes... Have a quick look and just reply here with a "yes" or "no thanks" Thanks!
github.com
GitHub - rladies/awesome-rladies-creations: Curated list of RLadies+ community blogs, YouTube channels, and R packages
Curated list of RLadies+ community blogs, YouTube channels, and R packages - rladies/awesome-rladies-creations
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Second, as @timothysnyder.bsky.social noted, we need to think about the risk on both sides. Refusing to comply comes with risk of retaliation. But complying comes with the risk of losing the fight if all go heads down AND the risk of undermining the institution’s integrity & mission.
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Michael Pascale @mpascale.psyc.dev · 24/04/2026
"I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape" Orwell 1946
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Michael Pascale @mpascale.psyc.dev · 23/04/2026
”given the Cartesian legacy of the cognitive sciences, computers are looked at with veneration as soon as they produce well-formed output (Weizenbaum, 1976)”
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Rachel Happe @rhappe.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
The good people of Massachusetts - mostly retirees - have been protesting at the ICE facility in Burlington every week for the past year, by the hundreds. #resist #iceout
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botvinick.bsky.social @botvinick.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
The research is freaking cool. But please, please, journalists and influencers, absorb this sentence: "Functional emotions...do not imply that LLMs have any subjective experience of emotions." We're moving into unfamiliar territory, and it's so important that we think clearly about it.
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Among the atrocities and contradictions, SBE is the NSF directorate that funds the brain and mind research relevant to NSF’s new AI-focused priorities. Make it make sense appears to be expecting too much (sigh).
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Anne Stone @acstone.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Once again it is time to contract your representatives: The FY27 budget request for NSF (see nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...) would get rid of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. In FY 2027, NSF will close-out this directorate. Continuing grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics will operate independently of the directorates and continue to be supported through the R&RA appropriation.
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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
“men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”
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todd gureckis @toddgureckis.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Slack is bad for thinking todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/19/s...
todd.gureckislab.org
Slack is bad for thinking | Todd Gureckis
Explores the thesis that Slack is actually bad for thinking about research and long-form email is better
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Isabella Velásquez @ivelasq3.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
I'm beyond excited for tomorrow's Data Science Lab with @davisvaughan.bsky.social! dplyr 1.2.0 is now out. There are many new functions in this release, and you will see them in action, live. You won't want to `filter_out()` this info 😉 Join us, we can't `replace_*` you 🧡 pos.it/dslab
Hello, dplyr 1.2.0! Join us with Davis Vaughan to explore new functions! Tuesday, Feb 24 at 12pm ET pos.it/dslab
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Attention Science Communicators! We are conducting a survey on the landscape of science communication & need your help gathering experiences. Please send this to #SciComm ppl you know. We want to get as thorough a sense of the state of the field as we can. umiami.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
A block of text that says "Scientists at the University of Miami are carrying out a research study on trends in the field of science communication. 

For this survey we are defining science communication as work that is done: 

• by a technical subject area expert in some field related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, 
• outside of classroom settings 
• aimed at the public 

If you are 18 years of age or older and work or recently worked in this field (full-time, part-time, or as a side project), please click the link below to complete a short survey. If you are interested in learning more about this research study, please e-mail us at Julia.wester@miami.edu. In the body of your email please provide your full name, and if you would prefer to be contacted by phone, your phone number and the best time to reach you. Contacting us for more information does not commit you to participating, and should you decide to participate you may terminate your participation at any time."
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racheldenison.bsky.social @racheldenison.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Excited to share our new preprint! A massive (~400k trials) multi-site effort to test "subjective inflation," the influential but under-tested idea that subjective experience in the unattended periphery can be inflated beyond what objective performance would suggest www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Anne Lutz Fernandez @lutzfernandez.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
"Where is the enthusiasm for how AI and other emerging technologies can support our education system?" Um, I don't know, everywhere? In the federal government, regional education associations, huge school districts, the largest teachers union, every damn company that sells to schools?
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
It’s PhD admission season in the US and elsewhere. Is anyone collecting and sharing info about what admissions letters are saying this year, especially in the neuro/psych/bio space? Last year there were some (unfortunate) changes at some Unis, eg www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/03/08/u....
sandiegouniontribune.com
UCSD, facing federal cuts, will no longer guarantee funding for incoming grad students
The school warns admitted first-year students that their support packages are contingent on state and federal funding.
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Kameron Hurley @kameronhurley.com · 15/02/2026
My mom sent me a link to this bookshop website that curates interesting and unusual books. Great looking selection, here. societyforunusualbooks.com
societyforunusualbooks.com
Society for Unusual Books | Online Bookstore | New and Preloved Books
The Society is a bookstore specializing in fantasy, horror, romance, sci-fi, nonfiction, and other genres. We place particular emphasis on small press and independently published titles. We also curat...
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Matthew Connelly @mattspast.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Just Out: My @nytimes.com op ed on how AI companies are eating higher education. As educators, we have a duty to defend — and advance — human intelligence. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
“Remote proctoring is not ed tech. It’s academic surveillance software designed to monitor and control student behaviour during exams.”
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Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist @princess-vimentin.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
A good read by @niniandthebrain.bsky.social Research quietly progresses through self-correction, problem solving. This process came into the glaring spotlight in 2020 in real time. I observed how science was misunderstood. Misinformation was rampant. 🧪 techingitapart.substack.com/p/we-have-a-...
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Nazih Fares | Wishlist The Arab League of Misfits @nazihfares.com · 05/02/2026
I'd like to add that like in all industries, when we stop understanding how our tools work, we become entirely dependent on the corporate entities that own the mold. We are trading the ability to build and repair for the convenience of being permanent tenants in someone else's infrastructure/subs.
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
As these teens describe, AI can diminish human relationships; devalue art; threaten the environment; lead to laziness; give unreliable results; pose privacy concerns; and be misused. So, please, stop with the narratives of inevitability and let's embrace a pedagogy and politics of refusal.
wsj.com
7 Reasons Teens Say No to AI
Some young people only turn to artificial-intelligence chatbots as a last resort, citing concerns about relationships, creativity, the environment and more.
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ohnosarah.bsky.social @ohnosarah.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Protest at the Massachusetts state house. peaceful and energetic. The crowd is in the street. Eyeballing it from my vantage point I'd guess around 1000 people - but tough to say exactly.
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Boston.com (Unofficial) @bostoncombot.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Photos from Boston’s ‘ICE Out Everywhere’ protest #news www.boston.com/news/local-news/2026…
boston.com
Photos from Boston’s ‘ICE Out Everywhere’ protest
Boston.com
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Human Artistry Campaign @humanartistry.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
We're not anti-tech, we're anti-theft. If the future of “innovation” depends on stealing creators’ work without asking or paying, that’s not progress - it's stealing, and we shouldn’t accept it. #StealingIsntInnovation www.stealingisntinnovation.com/
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Human Artistry Campaign @humanartistry.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Stealing art is one thing, but stealing a generation’s confidence in their own abilities is unbelievable
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