Erica Busch
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elbusch.bsky.social
Erica Busch
@elbusch.bsky.social
Computational cog neuro | PhD candidate @ Yale | NSFGRFP | Dartmouth ‘20
ericabusch.github.io
Reposted by Erica Busch
Excited to share our NEWEST PREPRINT led by @rochellekaper.bsky.social!!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

We ask: How do people learn multiple layers of environmental structure – w/o feedback – & how well do they *know* they’ve learned? Turns out, stimulus familiarity matters more than we thought! 🧵👇
OSF
osf.io
January 15, 2026 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Erica Busch
I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this
January 13, 2026 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A
Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization
Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...
rdcu.be
December 23, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
WTI is hiring a Research Software Engineer.

Join our interdisciplinary community at Yale to collaborate with researchers on brain + behavioral data. Learn more at the link below + share this opportunity with your network!

🔗 wti.yale.edu/opportunities

#KnowTogether #ScienceAtYale
December 15, 2025 at 4:04 PM
To add further enticement to the coolness of VR and laser scanning microscopy -- Manuel is among the coolest scientists I know & a PhD working with him would be the coolest 😎
*Fully funded PhD student positions available to discover what changes in 🧠 when we learn something new.*

You think virtual reality + laser scanning microscopy are cool? You like 💻 and 🐭? Come join us!

Apply either through
www.udel.edu/academics/co...
or
www.udel.edu/academics/co...
December 2, 2025 at 12:41 AM
Reposted by Erica Busch
November 30, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
We have 3 papers at TAG-DS @NeurIPSConf!
DYMAG: Message Passing Using Dynamical-systems-based Waveforms (Oral) openreview.net/forum?id=WYi...

A Graph Laplacian Eigenvector Pretraining Method for GNNs (Spotlight) openreview.net/forum?id=r5c...

Reeb Graphs and Towers
openreview.net/forum?id=U8I...
November 30, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Endlessly lucky to have friends who not only wait around for me to finish out the final poster session of SfN but also help engineer and fly a poster airplane … apologies to anyone inconvenienced by our chaos 🙃 @hhillman.bsky.social @zhoui.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 6:12 AM
Happening soon! come chat with me about noninvasive BCI, neural manifolds, and human learning at W15 (or message me if you’re interested but have already left 🙃)
Excited to be at #SfN25! Come catch my poster “Neural dimensionality expands over the course of brain-computer interface learning” wed PM (W15) if you’re interested in non-invasive BCIs, neural manifolds, human learning, etc. Building upon our recent work (doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.29.646109)
Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...
www.biorxiv.org
November 19, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Excited to be at #SfN25! Come catch my poster “Neural dimensionality expands over the course of brain-computer interface learning” wed PM (W15) if you’re interested in non-invasive BCIs, neural manifolds, human learning, etc. Building upon our recent work (doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.29.646109)
Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...
www.biorxiv.org
November 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
Presenting on contingency representations in PFC during WM on Saturday at SfN! Featuring fMRI and multi-area RNN modeling from my time with John Murray 🤓

And, recruiting a PhD student for Fall ‘26 in my new lab at U-Miami! Check us out here, and feel free to reach out: jam-lab.org (apps due 12/1)
November 14, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
My lab at USC is recruiting!
1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829
2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/
September 28, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.
October 1, 2025 at 10:39 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
New manuscript from the lab!

"Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening"

Led by superstar grad student Anilu Chavez (not on Bluesky)!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening
Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...
www.biorxiv.org
September 22, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain
The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...
www.biorxiv.org
September 16, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org
PCDL @ OSU
www.cogdevlab.org
September 15, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
I made the world’s first bioprinted placenta organoids (mini placentas) and they’ve just been published in @natureportfolio.nature.com

We found that the matrix environment chosen for these organoids was critical to how they grew and developed 🤰

idp.nature.com/authorize?re...
Matrix directs trophoblast differentiation in a bioprinted organoid model of early placental development - Nature Communications
The placenta plays vital roles in supporting fetal development. Here, Richards et al. develop a high-throughput bioprinted trophoblast organoid model to recapitulate the microenvironment of the e...
idp.nature.com
September 15, 2025 at 12:29 AM
Reposted by Erica Busch
How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events
Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...
www.biorxiv.org
September 5, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1
September 5, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
does someone good at coding & analysis want to work remotely w/ us in the coming few months (before end of 2025), as a paid consultant? project will be on neurofeedback (fMRI, ECoG, calcium imaging). we'll work towards developing the experiments & analysis pipelines together. if so pls DM me ur CV🧠📈
September 1, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention
The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...
www.biorxiv.org
August 12, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! Come learn about a project combining many of my favorite interests - naturalistic neuroimaging, development, & manifold learning (of course). Catch me at poster C181 on Fri - “Intrinsic dimensionality of brain activity manifolds across tasks and development”
August 12, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Erica Busch
How do brain networks tracking past trauma react to stress in the future? Thrilled to share new work from the lab led by rockstar postdoc @felhardi.bsky.social with wonderful collab @dylanggee.bsky.social
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
#psychscisky #neuroskyence
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
August 6, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Erica Busch
CIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost.
cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪
June 3, 2025 at 9:13 PM