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Rebecca Saxe

@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
6K followers 425 following 716 posts

Cognitive neuroscience at MIT. Open science. 🇨🇦 Saxelab.mit.edu

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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Do you know of an academic department or field that has figured out how to value the contributions of an individual, for the purposes of hiring and promoting faculty, that is better than relying on journal articles?
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Now I'm wondering if the pressure from AI, particularly in computational fields, is making a change to our practices necessary and inevitable -- and maybe someone has already cracked this.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I have also watched many variants of alternatives to journal articles -- executable papers, workflow publishing, CREDIT systems, etc -- be born and die in science reform communities over the last decade. Nothing seemed to stick.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Arguments against journal articles as the currency of academic success have been around for a long time, in science reform. But now there's a new extreme pressure from NLP. More than ever, journal articles are slow, unlikely to read by humans, and easy to produce by AI.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I have a question about the future of metrics for hiring and promoting faculty in science. Academic journal articles have been our currency for a long time, but are under extreme & mounting pressure. Is any dept or field already using a better metric *for hiring and promoting faculty*?
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Hurrah for data sharing in development science. Because prior studies shared data, we could do a higher-powered test of the effect of age than any one study alone. In this case, the youngest infants have just as strong expectations about saliva sharing as the older ones! #opendata
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Brandon Woo @brandonwoo.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
New paper with Liz Spelke, @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that when 4- to 6-month-old infants observe two individuals share saliva, they infer that those individuals have a close relationship. Free access link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1niQg_Oow0...
A conceptual schematic illustrating the logic of the studies. (A) Infants observe a central actor who shares saliva with one actor and does not share saliva with another actor. (B) From such observations, infants may infer and represent whether the actors are connected and how thick each connection is. (C) These representations support infants' expectations of who will respond to the central actor's distress.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
What an incredibly moving and joy-filled 20-year reunion of Saxe-lab past and present. I feel so lucky to have these people be my scientific family.
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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
You can use this R function to download all of the files associated with an OSF project. Improvements are coming in the next version to include registrations. Should we add a function to download all your public and private projects? osf_file_download(“abcde”) www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/
scienceverse.org
Check Research Outputs for Best Practices
A modular, extendable system for checking research outputs for best practices using text search, R code, and/or (optional) LLM queries.
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Uri Simonsohn @urisohn.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Here is what i think the head-to-head comparison of ResearchBox vs Zenodo look like as OSF replacements. If I am missing an important attribute, let me know, will update accordingly.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 11/08/2026
Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...
bettercode-book.org
12  Sharing Research Objects – Better Code, Better Science
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Totally agree! And neural change - it must happen. We need better ways to measure it.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
When we started scanning human infants 13 years ago, it seemed likely that functional responses in infant cortex would be qualitatively different from adults. Instead we keep finding similarities between infants and adults. Even for scene perception, despite the slow development of navigation.
Image of brain activation when infants look at movies of visual scenes, showing activation in three cortical regions: OPA, PPA and MPA.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
By 5 months infants have experienced on average 522 hours of ego motion, 338 hours of that while facing-forwards, almost all of it passive. These calculations could be used to anchor comparisons to models of vision learning from video.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
How much experience do young human infants have of optic flow? They can’t move themselves around the world, but they do get moved by others. We used Ecological Momentary Assessment (222 caregivers’ responses to 2657 total surveys) to calculate, for example:
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Even very impressive contemporary projects that measure infants’ visual experience using head-mounted cameras over-sample (for reasons of convenience and consent) older infants inside their own homes, and often sitting at a table. Like this one from @brialong.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2406.10447
arxiv.org
The BabyView dataset: High-resolution egocentric videos of infants' and young children's everyday experiences
Human children far exceed modern machine learning algorithms in their sample efficiency, achieving high performance in key domains with much less data than current models. This ''data gap'' is a key c...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
For adults, a key source of visual information is optic flow — the pattern of change in visual information as the viewer moves around the world. But surprisingly little is known about the quantity and quality of infants’ experience of optic flow.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
One current debate about infants vs AI: how much visual experience do they each need to learn to see? Don’t miss the neat relevant evidence and calculation in @fkamps.bsky.social 's paper, and explained in 🧵 ⤵️.
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Freddy Kamps @fkamps.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNAS
Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...
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Alicia Chen @aliciamchen.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...
news.mit.edu
Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship
People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
The OMB has proposed rules that would, among other things, have political appointees override peer review and allow sudden grant termination. This morning I wrote a comment on this proposal in my own words. It only took a few minutes. You can do the same: www.regulations.gov/document/OMB...
regulations.gov
Regulations.gov
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I'm staying at my friend's house. Will my friend expect to stay at my house, next time? What if I said, I'm staying at my parent's friend's house. Will my parent's friend expect to stay at my house next time? How relationships change expectations: see🧵on new paper by @aliciamchen.bsky.social
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
A first glimpse of the monosynaptic connectivity to TPJ in humans!
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
So cool! New evidence of a mono-synaptic pathway from FFA to TPJ in human cortex from @rui-xu.bsky.social , @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and team. They stimulated a site in FFA, and evoked activity in (independently functionally localized) TPJ.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Neuroscientists interested in rigor, methodology, and open practices, check out this job opportunity to work on a COS-MIT collaboration to improve the research culture in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program at MIT. careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...
careers.peopleclick.com
Neuroscience Research Methodologist
MIT - Neuroscience Research Methodologist - Cambridge MA 02139
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Note this paper includes a nice re-use of data my lab collected for other reasons. Yay for data sharing and reuse.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age - Nature Communications
In this study, the authors show that by age 4, children exhibit adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization of the language network, while response magnitude and functional connectivity continue to dev...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Congratulations to @olaozpal.bsky.social & big team on new paper: large sample of children reveals the early origins of left-lateralization in language processing. Nice profile in MIT news: news.mit.edu/2026/languag...
news.mit.edu
Language development in the brain
The brain’s capacity to use and understand language expands rapidly in the first years of life. But by age 4, language processing is already handled by the left side of the brain, as in adults, accord...
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Prof Rick Adams @drrickadams.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
📢PhD job alert! A exciting PhD project that involves using MEG and biophysical modelling to try to predict effects of a glutamatergic treatment for psychosis... plus you can develop your own side project. Join our great team! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
ucl.ac.uk
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
#OpenScience #Reproducibility #OpenNeuroscience #OpenData
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
This job is part of the RC2 funded initiative "Sustainable Transformation for Research Rigor"
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
This role will work directly with individual BCS labs to assess current data management practices, recommend solutions, and provide technical support for implementing data standards, FAIR-compliant workflows, and AI-assisted tools for data organization and curation.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...
careers.peopleclick.com
Neuroscience Research Methodologist
MIT - Neuroscience Research Methodologist - Cambridge MA 02139
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Job posting! MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences are hiring a Neuroscience Research Methodologist - responsible for open science practices and data management across all the areas of the department. See 🧵for link and details.
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
And here is the resolution: drive.google.com/file/d/1KLbj...
drive.google.com
Resolution on Scientific Publishing and MIT Libraries.pdf
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
So impressed by the MIT graduate student council's resolution on open scholarship. If you're a graduate student and want a voice in the future of science scholarship, this is an example. See profile by the MIT Libraries: libraries.mit.edu/news/reshapi...
libraries.mit.edu
Reshaping Scholarly Communications | News
In March 2026, MIT’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) passed a Resolution on Scientific Publishing and MIT Libraries, a wide-ranging document that calls upon the MIT community, as well as federal fundin...
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
A now annual Mother's Day tradition: celebrating this image and the poignant words of @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social about the complexity of identity and culture — and to the experience of motherhood. Thank you for it, Rebecca. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...
As for me, I saw a very old image made new. The Mother and Child is a powerful symbol of love and innocence, beauty and fertility. Although these maternal values, and the women who embody them, may be venerated, they are usually viewed in opposition to other values: inquiry and intellect, progress and power. But I am a neuroscientist, and I worked to create this image; and I am also the mother in it, curled up inside the tube with my infant son.
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Willem van Schaik @wvschaik.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
I have now read this piece and it is very good. Massive respect for @merenbey.bsky.social and Iva for their persistence and documenting this torturous process. Highly recommended reading for anyone who cares about reproducibility in science.
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allen institute @alleninstitute.org · 14/04/2026
Teach neuroscience to undergraduates? Check out our "Implementing Open Neuroscience Teaching Tools" workshop! Join us on July 19 at North Central College to get hands-on practice with inquiry-based activities using real #OpenScience resources. 🔗 bit.ly/46A5j15 🧠📈 #iteachbio
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Today I taught science communication, and miscommunication, to graduate students at MIT. In the process I stumbled on this great blog post from 2019 about the misinformation related to my Mother and Child Image. Thanks! whoever wrote this. www.feeduk.org/blog/mri-ima...
feeduk.org
Sunday scrolling: the MRI image that misled many mums — feed
It all begins with an idea.
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Jessica Polka @jessicapolka.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Love this framing for open science from @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social: to discover the truth, you must be open to scrutiny from all quarters. Celebrating 25 years of @mitocw.bsky.social
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
Tonight at 7pm: Nancy Kanwisher will be on On Point!! Talking about the brain. @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @npr.org
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
And @preprint.bsky.social and Camille Osumah!
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Lillian Behm @lillianbehm.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Lots of other neat insights, pretty figures, and amazing data wrangling in the paper by @lillianbehm.bsky.social ‬! & thanks to Saxelab contributors @hilaryrichardson.bsky.social @kosakowski.bsky.social @fkamps.bsky.social @halieolson.bsky.social @emilychen.bsky.social @bmhdeen.bsky.social
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
We get on average 10 min of usable data per infant. 😂
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Today's paper: After more than a decade of efforts, with two independent labs taking complementary approaches, trying multiple experiments, teams of dozens of trainees, and hundreds of infant volunteers ...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
In 2013, the heroic team led by @bmhdeen.bsky.social started trying to scan awake infants watching movies. At first we only managed to get on average ~10 min of usable data per infant. www.nature.com/articles/nco...
nature.com
Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants - Nature Communications
Adult visual cortex is organized into regions that respond to categories such as faces and scenes, but it is unclear if this depends on experience. Here, authors measured brain activity in 4–6 month o...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...
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Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
If you are at MIT today come to the Open Data prize celebration at 3pm in the Nexus! libraries.mit.edu/opendata/ope...
libraries.mit.edu
MIT Prize for Open Data | Open Data @ MIT
To highlight the value of open data at MIT, and to encourage the next generation of researchers, the MIT School of Science and the MIT Libraries present the MIT Prize for Open Data. Congratulations to...
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