Anna Schapiro

Opportunity: Penn MindCORE Fellowship! MindCORE seeks postdoctoral researchers for our Research Fellowship. Housed in Arts & Sciences at Penn, MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence and behavior. Deadline December 1, 2026. mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

Please comment on "Request for Information (RFI) on Proposed Changes to Reporting Outcomes from NIH Peer Review" by Tuesday (October 13th, 2026). rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3... Here is my comment: 1/6

Comments due Tuesday! rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3... Here is mine.

New blog post! I wrote about why I think it's useful to use metaphorical (and anthropomorphic) terms to describe AI. I start by describing the role of metaphor in language and cognition, and how metaphors can help us to efficiently understand relational structure and make predictions 1/2

My inbox is being flooded with fully AI-generated emails from prospective students. I tried to work out why I can't bring myself to read them, and ended up with some thoughts and advice for writing cold emails in the age of AI. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...

Hope can feel in short supply these days. But I am truly hopeful for the future, in large part because of the community we've built through the Bethesda Declaration. Proud to share these reflections on hope: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.... May they bring you some hope.

End of an era for sure! I've collected tens of thousands of subjects through mTurk over the years and wouldn't have done a lot of my work if it didn't exist. Prolific pretends to have a handle on things, but it doesn't. I don't know what form online research takes in a post Turing-test world!

Wow I just heard the news that Mechanical Turk is shutting down. Was there so little discussion on here about it because people haven't been using it anymore anyway? (Will Prolific not go the same way...?)

Beautiful summary of the "mix of grief and excitement"

Masa's paper is out in Hippocampus. The left-right alternation of hippocampal theta sequences at T-maze choice points, much loved as a 'planning' signal, falls straight out of MEC dynamics. Well done @masahironakano.bsky.social, fun project with @clopathlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/hipo.70131

1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.

Please join me in thanking the named plaintiffs in this lawsuit, including @arghavansallesmd.medsky.social @michaeldgreen.phd & @jddaw.bsky.social These brave scientists are taking on risk to protect science, scientists & beneficiaries of science (all of us). www.aclu.org/press-releas...

protectdemocracy.org/work/researc...

Lots of stories across Pennsylvania about NIH grant terminations at Pitt and Penn. This is why speaking out matters. Even Congress critters who generally support the administration get pressured into actually supporting their constituents. www.wesanews.org/health-scien...

Lab member updates! Sad but so excited for both of them that @paigesev.bsky.social is heading off to do her PhD with @maureenritchey.bsky.social at UCLA!! And SO thrilled to welcome @daniel-carstensen.bsky.social here as PhD student & @sydneybergstrom.bsky.social as RA!! schapirolab.org/people.html

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

Also if you're at #CCN2026 come chat with me about Minds, Machines, and Brains @mmb-journal.bsky.social A new journal we are launching with @mitpress.bsky.social with my co-EICs Kendrick Kay & Ellie Pavlick, and the rest of the wonderful editorial board: direct.mit.edu/mmb/pages/ed...

Really excited about this project! If you want to chat about repulsion and representational changes in hippocampus, come by our poster at #CCN2026 tomorrow at 9:30!

Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.

Yay, the field needs this! Excited to serve as an associate editor!

Here's where to find the Penn Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience next week! See you in NYC!

If you have an academic in your life, please be gentle with them this weekend because they're probably freaking the fuck out.

So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/f...

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

Please spread the word: We’re recruiting a postdoc! 📣 We study how shifting brain & attentional states shape memory and how people experience their worlds. fMRI/iEEG + a fun, supportive lab community + space to pursue your own ideas. 📅 Apply by Aug 15 tinyurl.com/fx5k7teb

What should we make of recent language model advancements in mathematics? In my new post, I reflect on long-standing cognitive debates about symbols and neural networks in light of this progress. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/symbols-ne...

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!

We have now reached the "AI models escaping their test environments to conduct autonomous cyberattacks" part of the story

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

My fMRI study from the Mack Lab (@drmack.bsky.social) is now published on JNeuro! Here, we look into how hippocampal subfields flexibly update category knowledge representations in the face of novel exceptions. Check out the article here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU....

"NSF employees are now concerned that the $1 billion of withheld funds will not be released. If they are not, the combination of withheld funds and clawbacks would result in funding cuts of more than 30% for most directorates compared with their planned spending for 2025"

Why do we forget our dreams? Dreams are the kind of experiences that in principle should stick well in memory: emotional and often bizarre. If we would encounter typical dream content during wakefulness, we would likely never forget it. Yet, we forget most dreams soon after awakening. (1/3)

And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦

Out today! Our (w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social) review of the alignment between the C-HORSE model and the hippocampal structure learning literature. We find strong congruence with the model's key principles and propose several avenues for future investigation!

Keep those comments on the OMB proposed rule coming! www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

The dean of Yale Law School and some members of its faculty are trying to stop a settlement between the university and the Trump administration, warning that an agreement could jeopardize Yale’s independence, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.

We're finally getting the tools to study replay in humans. But why bother? What can we learn from it that we don't know from rodent recordings? Our thoughts are now out in a new TICS Forum Great fun writing this w @smfleming.bsky.social + @maritpetzka.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Last month was another record for bioRxiv submissions. The pandemic surge and lag now clearly in the past and the growth continues. Thanks as ever to all the authors, readers affiliates, funders and amazing internal openRxiv team who make this happen!

PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!

A *super* exciting new paper from @lizsiefert.bsky.social!! Human hippocampal ripple rates track very closely with several indicators of low arousal, during both sleep and wake. This is probably the most compelling data I have ever been associated with.