Brónagh McCoy
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bronaghm.bsky.social
Brónagh McCoy
@bronaghm.bsky.social
120 followers 280 following 10 posts
AuDHDer researcher @ IoPPN, King's College London. Cognitive neuroscience, computational psychiatry, data science. Attention, learning, autism research. Scientist by day, luddite by night.
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Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
eolai.bsky.social
Here, have a #painting. "Savage Rowan" came out of a challenge from an artist friend of mine where we both painted the same scene. This was mine and it eventually went to a good home in Galway. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtYear
Landscape format in painterly acrylics on canvas. A tree with a short grey trunk with a dark outline splits and twists into a thick network of branches of blues culminating in a bush-like appearance at its top of orange and blue and red. Behind is a very pale body of water with horizontal traces of yellow and very feint touches of green and blue. A headland of pale green and grey is along the left side. Sky is a pale cloudy mix of pinks and yellows with a lot of white. Tree is growing from small patch of rough lime grass at water's edge, with grey rocks and orange to right and blue and green reeds to left and along bottom edge. Signed top left in blue, Liam Daly
December 29, 2025 at 7:14 PM
bronaghm.bsky.social
Where are the engineers, materials scientists, physicists who care about artificial lighting and noise reduction or dampening in different environments? Is anything being explored in terms of friendlier solutions that are sustainable and inexpensive? (1/2)
December 23, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
blindboyboatclub.bsky.social
New podcast. An investigation of the emotion of shame as it applies over the festive period open.spotify.com/episode/0rW5...
A Mental Health plan for Christmas
open.spotify.com
December 17, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
December 19, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
tomrhysmarshall.bsky.social
Passionate about women's mental health?

Interested in brain stimulation?

Excited by cutting edge neurotech?

Come do a PhD with me!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

(thread)
a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign
ALT: a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign
media.tenor.com
December 4, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
bronaghm.bsky.social
Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2)
www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...
Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forensic & Neurodevelopmental Sciences | King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk
December 11, 2025 at 10:24 AM
bronaghm.bsky.social
Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2)
www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...
Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forensic & Neurodevelopmental Sciences | King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk
December 11, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
eolai.bsky.social
A #painting from a series I did of a bay in the west of Ireland. "Bertraghboy Bay 5" came out of a day cycling in Connemara where I was on a high from the incessant beauty of it all as every bay and mountain came into view. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtAdventCalendar
Landscape format mat board painted in loose very heavily textured acrylics creating broken effects all over. A blue bay comes in from the left. In the foreground is clumpy green grass with specks of blue, yellow, white and red, and black rocks. On far side of bay is a ridge of low hills, in pale olive and lilac with, low down, a cluster of turquoise trees holding a scattering of white cottages - little more than dots or tiny triangles of their gable ends. Nearer than them, on the right side an orange hill slopes down to lines of black and orange rocks in the water. Behind the hills are two pyramidal rounded peaked mountains in pale blue. Sky is paler blue with white blurry clouds. Signed top left in red, Liam Daly
December 10, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
charleswlogan.bsky.social
Teach like a Luddite! In which I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to argue for a Luddite praxis in education grounded in three elements: embracing strategic playfulness; developing localized tactics; and building networks of resistance. Read the article at Kappan:
Teach like a Luddite - Kappan Online
Embracing new technologies that don’t advance teaching and learning is a mistake. Educators must ask questions — and resist when necessary.
kappanonline.org
December 9, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
fergus.oolong.co.uk
An excellent letter from @cjcrompton.bsky.social on the profound challenge that the double empathy problem poses to how autism is described and researched.
juliehulme-psyc.bsky.social Professor Julie Hulme @juliehulme-psyc.bsky.social · Nov 30
This letter to the British Journal of Psychiatry tells us everything we need to know about current thinking in #autism research. Concise, accessible & powerful. Read it if you think autism = social deficits! #DoubleEmpathyProblem www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Autism diagnosis and the double empathy problem | The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge Core
Autism diagnosis and the double empathy problem
www.cambridge.org
November 30, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
williamngiam.github.io
Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!
OpenWMData
A collection of publicly available working memory datasets
williamngiam.github.io
December 1, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
isabellefk.bsky.social
This is also a #neuro-affirming & integrative approach that suits autistic and other neurodivergent YP.

@thewoodbug.bsky.social is fab on this topic!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

#monotropism
Autism, intense interests and support in school: from wasted efforts to shared understandings
Having intense or “special” interests and a tendency to focus in depth to the exclusion of other inputs, is associated with autistic cognition, sometimes framed as “monotropism”. Despite some drawb...
www.tandfonline.com
December 2, 2025 at 6:55 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
suereviews.bsky.social
New editorial with @sarah595.bsky.social and @heasutherland.com

We use our experiences working in UK special education and social care settings to explore some of the challenges of including autistic people with complex support needs in research. With recommendations!
December 2, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
jacksonwryan.com
On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪

Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...
Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town
Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?
nobreakthroughs.substack.com
November 28, 2025 at 5:25 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
tknapen.bsky.social
New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
November 26, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
stepalminteri.bsky.social
🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
November 26, 2025 at 11:38 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
dsquintana.bsky.social
There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts.

Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...
This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.
November 24, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
thedailytism.com
A complete and utter cockwomble has reportedly appointed themselves as an expert in your personal circumstances, deciding in their infinite wisdom that your autism is “only mild”.
“You’ve only got mild autism” says mild twat
A complete and utter cockwomble has reportedly appointed themselves as an expert in your personal circumstances, deciding in their infinite wisdom that your autism is “only mild”. Local fucktrumpet…
thedailytism.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
dondersinst.bsky.social
Donders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠

Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Scientific Director Donders Institute | Radboud University
Do you want to work as a Scientific Director Donders Institute at the Donders Institute? Check our vacancy!
www.ru.nl
November 26, 2025 at 8:26 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
wiringthebrain.bsky.social
New paper with @statsepi.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social in which we show there's really no evidence for a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism
Claims that the gut microbiome causally contributes to autism regularly appear in the scientific literature and popular press. Mitchell et al. critically examine influential studies underpinning these...
www.cell.com
November 13, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
beckyneuro.bsky.social
First up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.
The relationship between anxious traits and learning about changes in stochasticity and volatility
Author summary Adapting to changes in our environment is a daily endeavour. To do so, humans and animals alike make use of feedback to guide future actions. Uncertainty in the environment can arise fr...
journals.plos.org
November 13, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
goldenneurons.bsky.social
Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7
Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience
Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.
www.nature.com
November 11, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
paperbackparadise.bsky.social
Back cover synopsis reads: Humans Dan and Sarah went to Planet Crab to see what was there. There they found huge crabs! It made them happy to see. They wanted to know how crabs become so powerful and the answer is familiar: Crabitalism - the new & exciting economic system. Human lives are ground to death and digested for the good of a select group of giant crabs! Everyone is running and smiling. The crabs are getting bigger! It is good to make powerful crabs more powerful. Humans Dan and Sarah want to tell their planet about Crabitalism now! Review blurb reads: Boy oh boy, i am a human doctor and lawyer and I must say this new and exciting economic system is something. United States should adopt immedi-ately! Humans will love. Dr. Lawyer Nxlyn Moklyx Crabitalism facts: • Humans love to serve powerful crabs - Giant and powerful crabs make planets better • Human suffering small price for giant crabs - Everyone smiles at crabs
September 20, 2024 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
freekvanede.bsky.social
Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...
Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search
Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.
doi.org
November 10, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
naziajassim.bsky.social
This work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉

Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6

Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 1:26 PM