Philipp Musfeld
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philippmusfeld.bsky.social
Philipp Musfeld
@philippmusfeld.bsky.social
2.2K followers 190 following 82 posts
Postdoctoral researcher in the Cognition Lab at University of Zurich. Interested in working memory, long-term memory, computational modeling, theory development and open science.
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Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
yonghoonchung.bsky.social
New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/
OSF
osf.io
February 9, 2026 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
keisukefukuda.bsky.social
This was such a joy!!! In this work, the brilliant @fridaprintzlau.bsky.social demonstrates the core features of VWM representations, namely its dynamicity and flexibility. TLDR: VWM dynamically shifts its representational geometry during maintenance depending on its task demand! What an ART!
fridaprintzlau.bsky.social Frida Printzlau @fridaprintzlau.bsky.social · 24d
🎉 New preprint 🎉 with Olya Bulatova, @drmack.bsky.social & @keisukefukuda.bsky.social! We decode shapes in working memory from EEG and show that representations are task-dependent, flexibly integrating information about category and task during the memory delay
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 26d
Task goals dynamically reconfigure neural working memory representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.19.700420v1
February 5, 2026 at 12:17 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
richarddmorey.bsky.social
New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x
The decline effect (Protzko & Schooler, 2017) is an observed phenomenon where effect sizes in experiments apparently diminish in size from the first paper demonstrating the effect to later replications. This has been taken as a symptom of an unhealthy scientific ecosystem, possibly caused by the "winner's curse" (selection on significance and regression to the mean), publication bias or opportunistic analyses. I show that decline effects can arise as an artifact from a much simpler source: the original article determining the sign of the effect in a meta-analysis. Moreover, such artifactual decline effects will show correlations with some of the same experimental properties that one would expect from biases from poor behavior, such as the sample size of the original study.
February 2, 2026 at 2:56 PM
philippmusfeld.bsky.social
🚨New paper altert🚨

As a synthesis of my PhD research, we revisited the prevailing assumption about the mechanisms underlying repetition learning, and re-evaluated these assumption in light of recent findings.

Now out in Perspectives on Psychological Science:
doi.org/10.1177/1745...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
doi.org
February 3, 2026 at 6:01 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
cognition-zurich.bsky.social
"Repetitions lead to better memory." Sure - but how? Our new paper led by former lab member @philippmusfeld.bsky.social shines new light on this question, and challenges some longstanding assumptions. Now published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916251408052“
February 3, 2026 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
kirsten-adam.bsky.social
The ADAM lab is hiring a Research Specialist to join us! This role involves conducting human subjects research (EEG experiments on attention + working memory) and assisting with the execution and administration of ongoing projects.

Job posting: emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
Research Specialist
The Attention, Distractions, and Memory (ADAM) Lab at Rice University is recruiting a full-time Research Specialist (Research Specialist I). The ADAM Lab (PI: Kirsten Adam) conducts cognitive neurosci...
emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com
January 2, 2026 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
williamngiam.github.io
Make it your New Year resolution to add a #workingmemory dataset to OpenWMData so that we can curate our field's precious data, start testing theories and benchmarking models across datasets, conduct secondary analyses and meta-research using the data itself, and help me feel like I'm, like, alive.
OpenWMData
A collection of publicly available working memory datasets
williamngiam.github.io
January 2, 2026 at 4:37 AM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
ruben.the100.ci
Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model. Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate. Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains. Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.
December 18, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
erengunseli.bsky.social
Our new preprint is out!

Using a continuous-report paradigm, we show that divided attention reliably disrupts long-term memory retrieval by reducing accessibility—not precision.

Two experiments + mixture modeling + TCC.

Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
December 9, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
timricker.bsky.social
New paper out on value-based prioritization in visual WM. We used hDDM to account for speed/accuracy tradeoffs and isolate memory benefits from perceptual/motor benefits. We see perceptual/motor contributions suggesting that prioritization benefits are not purely mnemonic.
Link: rdcu.be/eTUIm
Reward-based prioritization in working memory is distinct from recency and due to a resource trade-off
rdcu.be
December 9, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
cognition-zurich.bsky.social
Big news from the lab today: @joschadutli.bsky.social has officially defended his PhD! 🎉
We’re grateful to @aidanhorner.bsky.social for serving as external examiner and as Joscha’s supervisors we @leabartsch.bsky.social and @koberauer.bsky.social are incredibly proud—congrats, Joscha!
December 10, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
leabartsch.bsky.social
It was great having you @aidanhorner.bsky.social ! Thank you for serving as the external examiner on the defense committee of my (former!!) phd student @joschadutli.bsky.social !

Big congrats to Dr. Dutli!!
December 10, 2025 at 6:33 AM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
leabartsch.bsky.social
Is WM a gateway to LTM? In this registered report we find that higher WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding - suggesting WM capacity is not a bottleneck for forming LTM traces. @as-souza.bsky.social @edamizrak.bsky.social @cognition-zurich.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... [1/3]
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
December 9, 2025 at 7:46 AM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
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 Philipp Musfeld
williamngiam.github.io
Thank you to everyone who came to the symposium! I'm also grateful to the people who have chatted to me about my talk on building a formal cognitive model that fits for the latent representation to then link to neural representation similarity.

My talk slides: williamngiam.github.io/talks/2025_A...
November 27, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
jcgntn.bsky.social
New content: Souza, A. S. (2025). Refreshing Multi-Feature Objects in Visual Working Memory. Journal of Cognition, 8(1): 49, pp. 1–19. DOI: doi.org/10.5334/joc....
#psychscisky
Refreshing Multi-Feature Objects in Visual Working Memory | Journal of Cognition
doi.org
November 25, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
joschadutli.bsky.social
In our new paper in Psychology and Aging,
@koberauer.bsky.social, @leabartsch.bsky.social, and I investigated age differences in the Hebb repetition effect, and show that chunk formation is largely preserved in old age. Check it out here:

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
November 21, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
psychonomicsociety.bsky.social
PS is excited to announce the launch of "Individual Differences in Cognition” (IDIC), an open-access journal on research in cognitive psychology, science, and neuroscience. Co-Editors-in-Chief are Andrew R.A. Conway & Michael J. Kane. Manuscripts accepted this spring. More information coming soon!
Andrew R. A. Conway Michael J. Kane
November 22, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
kordinglab.bsky.social
I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com
November 20, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
singmann.bsky.social
Belated but hopefully still exciting #rstats news: bridgesampling version 1.2-1 has just arrived on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=brid...
We now finally provide cmdstanr support (!) plus Monte Carlo Standard Error (MCSE), both thx to Giorgio Micaletto and @avehtari.bsky.social!
bridgesampling: Bridge Sampling for Marginal Likelihoods and Bayes Factors
Provides functions for estimating marginal likelihoods, Bayes factors, posterior model probabilities, and normalizing constants in general, via different versions of bridge sampling (Meng & Wong, ...
cran.r-project.org
November 19, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
timricker.bsky.social
3 Presentations from my lab at Psychonomics this week!

Friday (Nov.21), 3:30-5:30 Working Memory I
Does Reward-Based Prioritization Function
through the Same Mechanisms in Verbal and
Visual Working Memory?
TIMOTHY J. RICKER, University of South Dakota,
JOSHUA SANDRY, Montclair State University
November 17, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
venpopov.bsky.social
The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Nov 11
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 9:24 AM
philippmusfeld.bsky.social
This is alarming. It’s not only about the struggle an individual researcher has when all his public records suddenly disappear. It’s about trust in a reliable open archival system that we need to continue the rise of open and transparent science. Highly recommended read!
venpopov.bsky.social Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · Nov 6
A recent redesign of OSF by @cos.io led to widespread access failures. What began as a few broken download links became for me a total disappearance of eight years of DOI-registered work. What happened, how was it resolved, and what it reveals about trust and infrastructure in open science
Open Science needs reliable infrastructure – Ven Popov
After OSF’s October 2025 redesign, I discovered that eight years of DOI-linked preprints and materials were silently hidden by an automated spam flag. What happened, how it was resolved, and what it r...
venpopov.com
November 6, 2025 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
venpopov.bsky.social
A recent redesign of OSF by @cos.io led to widespread access failures. What began as a few broken download links became for me a total disappearance of eight years of DOI-registered work. What happened, how was it resolved, and what it reveals about trust and infrastructure in open science
Open Science needs reliable infrastructure – Ven Popov
After OSF’s October 2025 redesign, I discovered that eight years of DOI-linked preprints and materials were silently hidden by an automated spam flag. What happened, how it was resolved, and what it r...
venpopov.com
November 6, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Philipp Musfeld
martinhebart.bsky.social
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.
November 4, 2025 at 1:57 PM