iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

🧵 What is a public research university for? There's no single answer! It conducts research that helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It trains the next generation of leaders and innovators. Valerie Klein shows what happens when these things intersect.

Valerie Klein presents here research at UC Davis

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Our latest paper led by Taylor Guthrie with former undergrad RA Aussie Frost. We show that multivariate fMRI signals can decode the identity of specific individuals within the DMN and in the absence of visual features or other lower-level sensory information. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

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Amitai Shenhav @ashenhav.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

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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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Jordan Deakin @jordantdeakin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

📣 NEW PREPRINT ALERT! 📣 📝Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... When choosing between options with multiple attributes, what does the brain actually compare - individual attributes or integrated option values? We combined EEG + eye-tracking to find out... and found evidence for the latter 🧠

biorxiv.org

Fixation-evoked potentials reveal neural signatures of hierarchical value-integration during decision-making

Many decisions require maintaining beliefs across multiple levels of representation, from sampling and integrating information to forming action plans. To elucidate these processes and reveal the neur...

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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

How do keep a narrative active in our mind despite interruptions? The default mode network can maintain a representation of an interrupted story over a delay, even when the delay is filled with a demanding task. This representation is strikingly transformed from the initial experience!

biorxiv.org

Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity

How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We prop...

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Latest university guidance on phishing emails

A fictitious page from the real book Catch-22. Test says:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that an email from a suspicious account was not to be opened because it might be a phishing attack. But phishing attacks were often sent from legitimate accounts that had been compromised, so an email from a legitimate account could not be opened either, because it might be a phishing attack. Faculty would be crazy to open emails from suspicious accounts and sane if they didn’t, but if they were sane, they would have to avoid suspicious emails. If they avoided them, they might miss a legitimate message; but if they opened them, they might be phished. And if they received an email from someone they knew, they couldn’t safely open that either, because their account might have been compromised.

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Don’t miss Rachael Kee at #csf26! She’s presenting work laying out the theoretical foundation for high-throughput communication science. Then she demos Inoxity, an open-source iOS app she’s pioneered to measure temporally rich, multimodal, self-report, behavioral, biological, and digital trace data

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Come join @elisabaek.bsky.social & me on the SANS social media committee!

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Excited to share this new preprint from @lindseytepfer.bsky.social, @chujunlin.bsky.social, and me, in which we investigate the different ways our brains allow us to change our minds about people! "The neurocomputational mechanisms of naturalistic trait impression updating" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Schematics of scanner and online experimental designs. A) Scanner participants first completed individual difference surveys regarding their demographics, attitudes towards social groups, mood, and personality. In the MRI scanner, they then watched short autobiographical narrative videos. After the scan, they made ratings about the traits of the individuals in the videos they viewed. B) Online participants first made ratings about the traits of the individuals in the videos based on still frame images. They then made continuous ratings of the traits of these individuals over the course of the videos.

Analysis schematic. A) Spatiotemporal representational similarity analysis was used to relate patterns of brain activity over the course of SEND videos to i) continuous ratings of the traits of the individuals in those videos, ii) multimodal annotations (face, voice, and speech semantics), and iii) representations learned by neural networks to support computational operations (compression, multimodal fusion, temporal integration, and prediction). B) Intersubject representational similarity analysis was used to relate intersubject correlations in brain activity to individual differences in trait impression updating, demographics, social group attitudes, mood, and personality.

Computational operations of trait impression updating. The left column illustrates brain regions within which pattern similarity is uniquely associated with representations learned by neural networks trained to engage in the corresponding computational operation: compression, multimodal fusion, temporal integration, or prediction. The right column illustrates where these effects uniquely statistically mediate the association between brain activity and trait ratings. All results control for the raw annotations of face, voice quality, and speech semantics. Results are significant (p < .05) corrected for multiple comparisons across parcels via maximal statistic permutation testing.

Individual differences in trait impression updating. IS-RSA results reflecting where individual differences were associated with ISC while watching SEND videos. A) Reflects where idiosyncratic trait impression updating was correlated with ISC. B) Likewise illustrates where four categories of potentially explanatory individual differences – social group attitudes, participant demographics, participant personality (Big 5), and participant mood (PANAS) predict ISC during SEND video viewing. C) Shows where social group attitudes statistically mediate the association between idiosyncratic trait impressions and ISC. Results are significant (p < .05) corrected for multiple comparisons across parcels via maximal statistic permutation testing.

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The social sciences exist to help us understand ourselves and how we navigate the world. Hard-won, albeit imperfect (humans are complicated!!), insights offer evidence-based guidance. Amidst rapid change, it is time to double-down on our ability to understand www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | We Can’t Know Our A.I. Future if We Don’t Study It (Gift Article)

Just as A.I. is poised to change the world, we’re losing our best ways of studying what that change will look like.

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aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is hiring! Focus on social cognition, broadly construed. Come be my colleague :) I am not on the search committee but happy to talk about the campus, environment, careers, etc any time. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF10411

recruit.ap.uci.edu

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

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Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

For no real reason, I was looking up something about the ancestry of causal DAGs in path diagrams and came across this picture. I got to see it so you do to. HT to Sewall Wright who both set the course for a very useful analytical tool but also took the time to include cute drawings of guinea pigs

Sketch of Wright's path diagram showing the influence of heredity and environment on the inheritance of color of guinea pigs. Drawing is mostly a directed acyclic graph but includes four cute sideways drawings of guinea pigs.

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Eliza Bliss-Moreau @eblissmoreau.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

My dept/area is hiring! We're open to animal species/model and research area. UCD is an amazing place to do nonhuman animal work - major 🐒 center, a band new rodent vivarium in the Psych building, and capacity to house all sorts of other animals! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07812

recruit.ucdavis.edu

Assistant Professor of Psychology - Biological Bases of Behavior

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

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Rachael Kee @rachaelkee.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

🚨 New Book Chapter Alert 🚨 Have you ever been so immersed in something that everything else seemed to disappear? An athlete “in the zone.” 🏃‍♀️ A musician completely absorbed in a performance. 🎵 Or even a researcher who looks up from their work and realizes hours have passed. 🧠

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Katy Milkman @katymilkman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

A little news… here’s a preview of the new season of the #Choiceology podcast launching in two weeks 🎉 That’s right… we’ll be back in your feed with fresh episodes before you know it! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

podcasts.apple.com

Coming Soon: A New Season of Choiceology

Podcast Episode · Choiceology with Katy Milkman · S18 Trailer · 2m

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

🧵In a bookstore, what section do you head to? The one you know you'll love? The one you're not so sure about? Algorithms help us make this choice. But what algorithms are our brains running when we choose for ourselves? In a study published in @pnasnexus.org, we tested this doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

Interior of a narrow, arched-ceiling bookstore or library lined with tall shelves of books. Handwritten signatures and notes cover the ceiling, while a large wooden beam spans the room and an open doorway at the far end lets in bright daylight, with several people visible inside and outside.

Photo: parretl via Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/library-old-book-book-store-books-934285/

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Psyche Loui @psycheloui.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Why does live music hit different? Our new paper has a neural answer: EEG in a concert hall showed stronger brain-rhythm phase locking during live vs. recorded Bach violin — and that predicts higher pleasure & engagement. 1/2

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Forms of body motion synchrony. A) Motion quantity synchrony – synchrony in the amount of motion (orange) people engage in over time. This form of synchrony is agnostic to the direction of this movement, may be positive or negative, occurs at varying time lags, and is not specific to matched body parts across members of the dyad. B) Pseudo-synchrony – motion quantity synchrony between people who are not actually interacting. That is, members of different conversations engaging in similar amounts of motion at similar points in the conversation relative to its initiation. And C) directional synchrony – people moving the same body parts in the same direction (or along the same axis in the opposite direction) at the same time (or at some specific time lag).

Mechanisms of synchrony. A) Turn-taking, which causes increases in motion around the time of speaker role exchanges, as participants gesture to hand over or take over the floor. B) Conservation of motion in which one participant moves less when the other moves more, holding the total motion quantity relatively constant over time (note that the total amount of motion across the dyad is similar in the two panels, because one person reduces their motion to balance out the increase in the other’s motion). C) Entrainment, in which mutual following of the same conversational script leads to synchronized movement among people who are not directly interacting (i.e. pseudo-synchrony). Greeting gestures such as the handshakes depicted are one acute manifestation of this entrainment. D) Station-keeping, which maintains proxemic distance and eye level between members of the dyad. This mechanism accounts for directional synchrony, particularly between strangers who feel uncomfortable within each other’s personal space.

Motion quantity synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Friends displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 2.5 s) and B) this effect generalized across the majority of body part pairs (each line represents one pair). For example, one series of points might represent the synchrony between the amount of motion in one participant’s left hand and the other’s right foot. C) Strangers displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 1 s) and significant negative total motion quantity synchrony at longer time lags (2.5 – 16.6 s). D) Again, this effect generalized to most body part pairs.

Directional synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Among friends, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in only two body parts (nose and eye) and only in the vertical axis. B) Among strangers, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in a large number of body parts in the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes.

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Alice Schwarze @aliceschwarze.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Today marks a first in that I have found a mildly entertaining post on LinkedIn

Photo of a page in an Agatha Christie novel with em-dashes circled. The comment on the photo: "Not you too, Agatha Christie! Not you too"

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MꙬse Allain @mooseallain.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Going to see the Disney remake “Aphantasia”, which is the same as the 1940 “Fantasia”, but without any pictures.

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It's The Weekend 😌 @craigweekend.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under test-wise FDR correction in completely arbitrary data. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of the number of tests it is present in, and its mean effect size across these tests. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, number of tests with true (i.e., non-confound) effects, and sample size.

Inflated surface maps of meta-analytic z-statistics from Neurosynth for low-level confounds (top) and high-level cognitive tasks (bottom). Red reflects positive activations, blue reflects negative (de)activations, and darker colors indicate larger z-statistics. Maps are thresholded at |z| = 1 for visualization purposes.

The difference in integrated true positive rate between parcel-wise FDR and parcel-wise FWER (y-axis) is plotted as a function of confound effect size. Each point represents 1 out of 5000 studies simulated for each combination of task and confound. Smoothed loess lines are used to better show the overall trends.

Effect of FDR-based publication bias on observed confound effects sizes. Simulated meta-analytic confound effect sizes are visualized through violin plots for each combination of task effect and confound effect examined in the neural data simulations. Meta-analyses featuring publication bias (orange) substantially inflate these effect size estimates in all cases, relative to meta-analyses featuring no publication bias (blue). Moreover, this bias was present – and in most cases larger – in the subset of studies that were included in the meta-analysis specifically when the publication bias was based on FDR instead of FWER integrated true positive rates (green).

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Unsurprising but still big: MTurk is on its way out, killed by AI. Mechanical Turk was a mainstay of social & survey research through the 2010s, as it allowed you to quickly buy access to many representative humans. It was pretty good at it, until LLMs came along and everyone started using AI

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

Two images, one of a finger pressed a key, another of a hand on a chess piece

Screenshot of first page of paper, "Response duration tracks confidence"

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John Henderson @jmhenderson.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

New research article from my lab out in elife. This is the result of a fun new collaboration with Xiaomo Chen's lab. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

elifesciences.org

Meaning-based guidance of attention in rhesus monkeys during naturalistic scene viewing

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Nico @nicolasrestrepo.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This is such an important paper. A lot of key disagreements are not about desired outcomes, but rather about the strategies for securing those outcomes. And the rifts often come down to how much we are willing to risk in trying to secure those ends. Ketika and co explore this brilliantly!

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Ketika Garg @ketikagarg.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

🚨This preprint is now out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... We combine a dyadic foraging paradigm w/ computational modeling + ABM to study how people navigate differing preferences, share responsibility for shared outcomes & what that means for the group! more in 🧵⬇️ @fearbrain.bsky.social

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Ketika Garg @ketikagarg.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉 "Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

What have you read? What will you read next? Why? In a new paper in @pnasnexus.org, led by the brilliant @gongxuanjun.bsky.social, we show that people forage for books using the same mechanisms they forage for food. What will you read next? Start with this 🧵

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Erica Busch @elbusch.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

nature.com

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

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Media Neuroscience Lab @medianeuro.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

How does the brain orchestrate flow states? Two new publications in the journal NeuroImage, one in our upcoming special issue on the Neural Correlates of Risks and Benefits of Media Use (#1), and one in the regular issue (#2) dive into flow experiences using a complexity science lens ...

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

🚨1/7 New paper(s) alert! What is our brain doing when we feel flow? I've been trying to understand this question for more than 15 years now. I wish I had the answer, but in many ways, much of my research has clarified what the brain *isn't* doing during flow.

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Nico Dosenbach @ndosenbach.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

We've known that socioeconomics (SES) matters for the 🧠. New & 🤯 is that SES drowns out all other brain associations, incl. IQ. If you train an algorithm to predict IQ from brain data, it's still way better at predicting SES. Science Mag: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @smarek0502.bsky.social 👀🧵👇

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William J. Brady @williambrady.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

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Science News @scinews.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

At one point, a student joked that if I kept “editing” so much, I might as well submit the article under my own name and save us both time.

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warrior cop @wyattprivilege.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I GET LOGGED OUT. BUT I LOG IN AGAIN

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Rodrigo Braga @rodbraga.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Excellent explainer of the recent BOLD x metabolism controversy... worth a read! “Does the evidence presented by Epp et al. warrant a wholesale dismissal of BOLD-fMRI? The answer is: certainly not.”

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Too provocative a title, but the take home message is spot on: “Our brains are equipped with a suite of decision making algorithms. Different contexts call for different algorithms. Tech companies are adept at hijacking those algorithms for their benefit, not ours” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Your Decision Making Is All Wrong

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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

now that canvas is up again (but who knows for how long) we keep receiving emails from the uni telling us to back everything up on our computers are you f*#king kidding me various organizations/institutions fail so they can hold us responsible for making up for their errors i just can't

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Katie Corker @katiecorker.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Fascinating deep dive into the characteristics of papers and peer reviews at a journal, with a lookback pre-COVID and pre-chatGPT. Papers and reviews showing more signs of AI over time, but also lower writing quality. orgsci.substack.com/p/more-versu... orgsci.substack.com/p/more-versu...

orgsci.substack.com

More Versus Better, Part I

AI Is Overwhelming Academic Peer Review. What Next?

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Fascinating. Important. The stunning thing I’ve seen as an editor, reviewer, & educator, is the use of generative AI to accelerate low quality work. Rather than use these tools to do more ambitious scholarship, there is a race to the bottom. This post, the first in its series, documents exactly that

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/05/2026

People in the AI world seem to adore the System 1/2 dichotomy. I love this quote from Gerd Gigerenzer about the concept:

“What is system one and system two? It’s a list of dichotomies. Heuristic versus calculated rationality, unconscious versus conscious, error-prone versus always right, and so on. Usually, science starts with these vague dichotomies and works out a precise model. This is the only case I know where one progresses in the other direction. We have had, and still have, precise models of heuristics, like one over N. And at the same time, we have precise models for so-called rational decision making, which are quite different: Bayesian, Neyman-Pearson, and so on. What the system one, system two story does, it lumps all of these things into two black boxes, and it’s happy just saying it’s system one, it’s system two. It can predict nothing. It can explain after the fact almost everything. I do not consider this progress." - Gerd Gigerenzer

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Julius Klingelhoefer @klingelhoefer.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Interested in intensive longitudinal studies (ESM, EMA, ...)? We will host a GESIS seminar in September that will teach you how to conduct and analyze these studies. Check it out here ⬇️

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Yuan Chang Leong @ycleong.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Deeply honored that our paper was recognized with the #SANS2026 Award! SANS was an important part of this paper's journey! @jadynpark.bsky.social first presented this work at SANS2023, and again in SANS2025, and we benefited greatly from the feedback and discussion!

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SANS @sansmeeting.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

And that's a wrap! We hope you had a great conference! Join us for #SANS2027 in Montreal! With program co-chairs @p1sh.bsky.social and Nina Lauharatanahirun

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