Rebecca Saxe

Rebecca Saxe

@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Cognitive neuroscience at MIT. Open science. 🇨🇦 Saxelab.mit.edu

6K followers425 following716 posts

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

I have a question about the future of metrics for hiring and promoting faculty in science. Academic journal articles have been our currency for a long time, but are under extreme & mounting pressure. Is any dept or field already using a better metric *for hiring and promoting faculty*?

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Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Now I'm wondering if the pressure from AI, particularly in computational fields, is making a change to our practices necessary and inevitable -- and maybe someone has already cracked this.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Do you know of an academic department or field that has figured out how to value the contributions of an individual, for the purposes of hiring and promoting faculty, that is better than relying on journal articles?

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

I have a question about the future of metrics for hiring and promoting faculty in science. Academic journal articles have been our currency for a long time, but are under extreme & mounting pressure. Is any dept or field already using a better metric *for hiring and promoting faculty*?

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Arguments against journal articles as the currency of academic success have been around for a long time, in science reform. But now there's a new extreme pressure from NLP. More than ever, journal articles are slow, unlikely to read by humans, and easy to produce by AI.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

I have also watched many variants of alternatives to journal articles -- executable papers, workflow publishing, CREDIT systems, etc -- be born and die in science reform communities over the last decade. Nothing seemed to stick.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Hurrah for data sharing in development science. Because prior studies shared data, we could do a higher-powered test of the effect of age than any one study alone. In this case, the youngest infants have just as strong expectations about saliva sharing as the older ones! #opendata

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Rebecca Saxe reposted

Lisa DeBruine
@debruine.bsky.social

You can use this R function to download all of the files associated with an OSF project. Improvements are coming in the next version to include registrations. Should we add a function to download all your public and private projects? osf_file_download(“abcde”) www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/

scienceverse.orgCheck Research Outputs for Best PracticesA modular, extendable system for checking research outputs for best practices using text search, R code, and/or (optional) LLM queries.
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Rebecca Saxe reposted

Uri Simonsohn
@urisohn.bsky.social

Here is what i think the head-to-head comparison of ResearchBox vs Zenodo look like as OSF replacements. If I am missing an important attribute, let me know, will update accordingly.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

When we started scanning human infants 13 years ago, it seemed likely that functional responses in infant cortex would be qualitatively different from adults. Instead we keep finding similarities between infants and adults. Even for scene perception, despite the slow development of navigation.

Freddy Kamps@fkamps.bsky.social

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/...

pnas.orgThe cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNASSighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

One current debate about infants vs AI: how much visual experience do they each need to learn to see? Don’t miss the neat relevant evidence and calculation in @fkamps.bsky.social 's paper, and explained in 🧵 ⤵️.

Freddy Kamps@fkamps.bsky.social

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/...

pnas.orgThe cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNASSighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...
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Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

How much experience do young human infants have of optic flow? They can’t move themselves around the world, but they do get moved by others. We used Ecological Momentary Assessment (222 caregivers’ responses to 2657 total surveys) to calculate, for example:

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

By 5 months infants have experienced on average 522 hours of ego motion, 338 hours of that while facing-forwards, almost all of it passive. These calculations could be used to anchor comparisons to models of vision learning from video.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

One current debate about infants vs AI: how much visual experience do they each need to learn to see? Don’t miss the neat relevant evidence and calculation in @fkamps.bsky.social 's paper, and explained in 🧵 ⤵️.

Freddy Kamps@fkamps.bsky.social

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/...

pnas.orgThe cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNASSighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

For adults, a key source of visual information is optic flow — the pattern of change in visual information as the viewer moves around the world. But surprisingly little is known about the quantity and quality of infants’ experience of optic flow.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Even very impressive contemporary projects that measure infants’ visual experience using head-mounted cameras over-sample (for reasons of convenience and consent) older infants inside their own homes, and often sitting at a table. Like this one from @brialong.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2406.10447

arxiv.orgThe BabyView dataset: High-resolution egocentric videos of infants' and young children's everyday experiencesHuman children far exceed modern machine learning algorithms in their sample efficiency, achieving high performance in key domains with much less data than current models. This ''data gap'' is a key c...

Rebecca Saxe reposted

Freddy Kamps
@fkamps.bsky.social

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/...

pnas.orgThe cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNASSighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

Rebecca Saxe reposted

Alicia Chen
@aliciamchen.bsky.social

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

news.mit.eduWould you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationshipPeople generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

I'm staying at my friend's house. Will my friend expect to stay at my house, next time? What if I said, I'm staying at my parent's friend's house. Will my parent's friend expect to stay at my house next time? How relationships change expectations: see🧵on new paper by @aliciamchen.bsky.social

Alicia Chen@aliciamchen.bsky.social

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

news.mit.eduWould you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationshipPeople generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

A first glimpse of the monosynaptic connectivity to TPJ in humans!

Rui Xu@rui-xu.bsky.social

Across sites, we drew an initial sketch of inter-fROI connectivity diagram (more in the paper). Language fROIs connect with speech and TOM fROIs, which all connect, to some degree, with FFA, but not neighboring PPA. MD fROIs form a tight clique while sampling diversely. 11/n

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

So cool! New evidence of a mono-synaptic pathway from FFA to TPJ in human cortex from @rui-xu.bsky.social , @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and team. They stimulated a site in FFA, and evoked activity in (independently functionally localized) TPJ.

Rui Xu@rui-xu.bsky.social

From general principles to specific fROIs. Stimulating two FFA sites revealed direct connections to many other face regions (OFA/fSTS/PFC, …), lower-level object/place areas (LOC/OPA), temporal language areas, and TPJ (social cognition; a face-to-social-cognition pathway). 10/n

Rebecca Saxe reposted

Prof Rick Adams
@drrickadams.bsky.social

📢PhD job alert! A exciting PhD project that involves using MEG and biophysical modelling to try to predict effects of a glutamatergic treatment for psychosis... plus you can develop your own side project. Join our great team! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

ucl.ac.ukUCL – University College LondonUCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Job posting! MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences are hiring a Neuroscience Research Methodologist - responsible for open science practices and data management across all the areas of the department. See 🧵for link and details.

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Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Job posting! MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences are hiring a Neuroscience Research Methodologist - responsible for open science practices and data management across all the areas of the department. See 🧵for link and details.

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

This role will work directly with individual BCS labs to assess current data management practices, recommend solutions, and provide technical support for implementing data standards, FAIR-compliant workflows, and AI-assisted tools for data organization and curation.

Rebecca Saxe reposted

Willem van Schaik
@wvschaik.bsky.social

I have now read this piece and it is very good. Massive respect for @merenbey.bsky.social and Iva for their persistence and documenting this torturous process. Highly recommended reading for anyone who cares about reproducibility in science.

A. Murat Eren (Meren)@merenbey.bsky.social

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

merenlab.orgUnfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism StudyThe myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

Rebecca Saxe reposted

allen institute
@alleninstitute.org

Teach neuroscience to undergraduates? Check out our "Implementing Open Neuroscience Teaching Tools" workshop! Join us on July 19 at North Central College to get hands-on practice with inquiry-based activities using real #OpenScience resources. 🔗 https://bit.ly/46A5j15 🧠📈 #iteachbio

Rebecca Saxe reposted

Lillian Behm
@lillianbehm.bsky.social

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

onlinelibrary.wiley.comFunctional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning SessionsFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....
Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Today's paper: After more than a decade of efforts, with two independent labs taking complementary approaches, trying multiple experiments, teams of dozens of trainees, and hundreds of infant volunteers ...

Rebecca Saxe
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

In 2013, the heroic team led by @bmhdeen.bsky.social started trying to scan awake infants watching movies. At first we only managed to get on average ~10 min of usable data per infant. www.nature.com/articles/nco...

nature.comOrganization of high-level visual cortex in human infants - Nature CommunicationsAdult visual cortex is organized into regions that respond to categories such as faces and scenes, but it is unclear if this depends on experience. Here, authors measured brain activity in 4–6 month o...