David Watson

New paper out in NeuroImage, w/ @ra-neuro.bsky.social & Tim Andrews @yorkpsychology.bsky.social Statistically efficient neural encoding of natural object variability shapes the temporal dynamics of visual processing Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Code: osf.io/6w5ef

📣 Inclusive electroencephalography – a tutorial and media resource 📣 We're proud to announce publication of a tutorial to help make EEG research more inclusive, co-produced with Black and Hijabi students. doi.org/10.3758/s134... @thechbh.bsky.social @uob-sop.bsky.social @unibirmingham.bsky.social

Strikes start today at Nottingham. “These are not cash-strapped universities.” Dr Jo Grady on R4 this morning. 700 jobs. 48 courses. All to drive a surplus. Show your support. ✊

New paper from Dr. Tianjiao Zhang accepted in eNeuro: comparing semantic representations during passive movie watching to those measured during naturalistic navigation. Attention in different task contexts alters semantic representations to optimize task performance. gallantlab.org

#eNeuro | Scene Perception–Memory Pairing Extends to the Superior Parietal Cortex https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0155-26.2026

Nottingham staff will strike on 30 September and 1 October as University Council meets to decide the future of jobs and courses. Further strike action will run from 5 October to 11 December. Management can still stop this: rule out compulsory redundancies and protect teaching and research.

Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...

New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

👁️🧠🧪 Vision takes time. But how does visual information flow through the human brain? Our new PLOS Computational Biology paper uses population receptive field (pRF) modelling to bring the spatial precision of fMRI to MEG, revealing the temporal dynamics of visual areas. 📖 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

#JNeurosci: Using a data-driven analysis of fMRI responses to natural images, @levandyck.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social identified interpretable dimensions that explain activity in face-, body-, & scene-selective areas https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0038-26.2026

🚨 New publication in collab with Shayna Rosenbaum's lab: "Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments" Our test SeaHeroQuest shows a correlation between nav performance and mental imagery (VVIQ) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

"The study provides a unique insight into how the human brain separates the simple act of seeing a face from the emotional spark of recognition" Case report co-authored by researchers @yorkpsychology.bsky.social incl @dmwatson.bsky.social, published open access in Cortex doi.org/10.1016/j.co... 🔓 📄

Join us in wishing a massive happy 100th birthday to the man who has inspired millions of people around the world to care about nature and look after our planet - the incredible Sir David Attenborough! 🎉

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of the visual system in newborn infants is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

I'm in @theobserveruk.bsky.social today looking at why so many unis are in financial trouble and what the government needs to do to save HE. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!*** Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience. PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply). Deadline: 21st May. www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...

📣 Job alert: We are recruiting a Prof in Neuroscience with MRI expertise to join us at @unirdg-cinn.bsky.social and @unirdg-psych.bsky.social. See tinyurl.com/2kdjph8v for details. Contact me for info/chat. Please spread the word #neuroskyence #neurojobs

Optical Bench Equipment. A stash of old optical bench equipment has turned up in a cupboard at the Exeter psychology department. If it could possibly be of use to you, please contact Stephen Lea (s.e.g.lea@exeter.ac.uk) or Agnieszka Kaczmar (a.kaczmar2@exeter.ac.uk).

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology: Determinants of individual navigation ability with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

A thesis student is looking at parasocial attachment to generative AI in undergraduate and postgraduate students. The questionnaire will take about 10 minutes. Please pass the study link on to anyone who might be interested. exp.psy.gla.ac.uk/project?para...

Excited that this work with @serences.bsky.social and @timbrady.bsky.social is now out! Our Gabor-wavelet model better predicted voxel responses in scene regions than 3D models. Does this mean that scene areas aren’t “for” processing 3D scene structure? NO, we argue. 1/ dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Cold you say? The River Foss next to the Hall is frozen!

#JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Han and Epstein explored how people integrate different kinds of views to form mental maps of places, revealing two sets of brain regions involved in integrating views of landmarks into existing mental maps of a virtual city. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0187-25.2025

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! Strong evidence in silico and humans, out in PNAS Nexus: tinyurl.com/3kbu8xw4 With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

What makes visual stimuli memorable? Wilma Bainbridge, @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, Lore Goetschalckx, and I investigate the role of processing fluency for memorability in a new review paper in Nature Reviews Psychology. Check it out! rdcu.be/eSyjz

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

#JNeurosci: Lu et al. show that two brain regions—retrosplenial complex and superior parietal lobe—represent facing direction when people perform a naturalistic navigation task in a virtual-reality city. @russellepstein.bsky.social @gkaguirre.com @zhenganglu.bsky.social vist.ly/4chuk

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Kirsten L. Peterson, Michael W. Cole, et al: Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Excited to share a new article from @icevislab.bsky.social! In a sample of over 60 people, we found distinct neural differences underlying object and face recognition in dyslexia. These findings highlight crucial domain-general visual processes that may contribute to word reading challenges.

In our Trends in Cogn Sci paper we point to the connectivity crisis in task-based human EEG/MEG research: many connectivity metrics, too little replication. Time for community-wide benchmarking to build robust, generalisable measures across labs & tasks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...