maria ruz
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mruz.bsky.social
maria ruz
@mruz.bsky.social
Prof in Cognitive Neuroscience at Univ of Granada in Spain. Director of the Mind, Brain & Behavior Research Center https://cimcyc.ugr.es/en
Reposted by maria ruz
I see this same pattern in psychology—there is a huge desire among early career scholars to do applied work

This is very important, but including basic science perspectives still improves the research quality
"Basic scientists consistently enhance scientific output quality, yet research and newly joining researchers have shifted toward applied orientations."

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.01530

#PhilSci #MetaSci #AcademicSky 🧪
November 8, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
"Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration"
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

(i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). 1/
Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration | Royal Society Open Science
Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication....
royalsocietypublishing.org
November 7, 2025 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose.

Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵
November 7, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation?

#Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!
IMAGINE-decoding-challenge
Predict which words participants were hearing, based upon brain activity recordings of visually seeing these items?
www.kaggle.com
October 24, 2025 at 6:55 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
Understanding the flexibility of working memory: Compositionality, generative processing, anchors and holistic representations
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#neuroscience
Understanding the flexibility of working memory: Compositionality, generative processing, anchors and holistic representations
The typical conception of working memory is a mechanism to temporarily hold multiple discrete objects in service of other cognitive tasks in an item-b…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 25, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
"This integration supports the conclusion that time may be the fundamental dimension along which the brain organizes its sensorium..."

Fantastic review by Pawan Sinha and colleagues (@lukasvogelsang.bsky.social @marinv.bsky.social)

doi.org/10.1146/annu...
The Temporal Scaffolding of Sensory Organization
How a developing nervous system discovers meaning in complex sensory inputs has typically been examined separately for each sensory modality. Even as studies have uncovered modality-specific strategie...
doi.org
October 2, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
Large Language Muddle | The Editors
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...
www.nplusonemag.com
September 29, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
The CIMCYC is recruiting a #postdoctoral researcher with experience in the field of the psychology of disinformation!

Job description, responsibilities, and desired experience and training at the link 👇

cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...
September 9, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
Neural Subspaces Encode Sequential Working Memory, but Neural Sequences Do Not https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.05.674385v1
September 6, 2025 at 7:15 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1
September 5, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.
September 5, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
The best piece I’ve read this year on Trump’s increasingly blatant lurch towards total power.

To quote Sinclair Lewis, if you think “it can’t happen here” you are just not paying attention.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode | Jonathan Freedland
Trump’s dictator-like behaviour is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. But now it’s time to call it what it is, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
www.theguardian.com
August 29, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.
August 28, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9
Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications
When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...
doi.org
August 25, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
(link fixed) New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain
It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. #neuroscience
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
OSF
doi.org
August 25, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Near-random connections support top-down feature-based attentional modulations in early sensory cortex
Author summary In everyday life, we focus on what matters—like finding our car keys on a messy desk—by sending signals from higher control brain areas to earlier sensory brain areas. These “top-down” ...
journals.plos.org
August 13, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky
Expression of Interest in Serving as a PsyArXiv Moderator
As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...
forms.gle
August 15, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
🧠New preprint!
We show that different priorities shape the neural coding of planned actions in working memory. Using EEG+RSA, we find that expected interference leads to anticipatory changes in representational geometry, beyond simple maintenance.

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🗂️ Data/code: osf.io/5fg7a
July 24, 2025 at 7:20 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Small contribution in this piece by @frosas.bsky.social and colleagues on how we need both types of research culture in neuroscience.
#neuroskyence
July 22, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc!
Join the FLARE project @cimcyc.bsky.social to study sudden perceptual learning using fMRI, RSA, and DNNs.
🧠 2 years, fully funded, flexible start
More info 👉 gonzalezgarcia.github.io/postdoc/

DMs or emails welcome! Please share!
Postdoc Position – FLARE Project
gonzalezgarcia.github.io
July 18, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
🧠💻 We (a bunch of colleagues at @cimcyc.bsky.social) just released a programming guide for psych & cog neuro students. Instead of a tutorial, this is a starting point: a collection of reflections, examples, and recommendations.

👉 Still growing, but ready to explore: wobc.github.io/programming_book/
Programming in psychological science
A practical introduction
wobc.github.io
July 16, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
📢 ”La Caixa” Foundation has just opened the call Postdoctoral Junior Leader fellowships - Incoming 2026, for researchers of any nationality who wish to continue their career in research centers of excellence in Spain or Portugal.

cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...
Postdoctoral Junior Leader fellowships Incoming at CIMCYC
”la Caixa” Foundation grants 20 postdoctoral fellowships for researchers of any nationality to carry out a research project in a STEM discipline at universities and research centres of accredited exce...
cimcyc.ugr.es
July 17, 2025 at 12:37 PM
Reposted by maria ruz
🏅 LA PÚBLICA, LA MEJOR.
July 3, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by maria ruz
Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro #psychscisky
N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task
Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...
dx.plos.org
June 26, 2025 at 7:41 PM