Simon Kern

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

👀 Spatial sequences might be replayed in parallel in the hippocampus. If true it might open a whole new interpretation in the MEG replay methodology results. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Closed-loop stimulation may improve memory through more than just boosting slow waves. Grimaldi et al. found that better retention tracked the balance of slow-oscillation vs delta coupling to spindles, along with ⬆️ parasympathetic activity—not simply stronger SO–spindle coupling. buff.ly/JyhmjGn

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day He passed in 2017. As Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “He is survived by his two children, two grandchildren, and the entire human race.” If you don't know his story, please take 3 minutes now to learn it. @gchalliance.bsky.social @docsforclimate.bsky.social

This is an absolutely great metaphor for explaining why experimentally figuring out what the brain is doing is hard. I may have to steal this.

I care about reproducibility, but I find it deeply problematic that the British ecological society is trying to extract free labour from academics (oh no, you get free membership for a year!) to work for them for 3 years on computational reproducibility checks. apply.workable.com/britishecolo...

This is wild. >1/2 of HC synapses disappear in artificial hibernation, come back in same/similar locations & memories intact. ~1/2 of engram synapses-between two memory-tagged cells-are clustered on dendrites, those preferentially spared. Not biggest synapses. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

we have an open position for a post-doc (100%) or PhD student (75%) at Bielefeld University - starting 1.11 or later (there is room for flexibility). jobs.uni-bielefeld.de/job/view/503...

📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...

Now in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Come and join our replication initiative in visual neuroscience! Low bar for entry, ideal for anyone from a Master’s student looking for a thesis to faculty who want to get back to the bench. 🤓 re-vision-initiative.org

***New preprint from the lab*** showing “Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits”. In sleep we show spiking sequences in V1 (sensory neocortex!) that represent information that has not been directly experienced www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @bndu.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social

Still ongoing! If you are or know a sleep researcher, please share ❤️

🚨 new lab preprint! Research from @gordonfeld.bsky.social during his DFG personal fellowship to my lab many moons ago: Global structure of new relational knowledge networks is represented in retrosplenial complex, and node-distance in hippocampus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to finally share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com: Hippocampal ripples initiate cortical dimensionality expansion for memory retrieval www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @s-michelmann.bsky.social and @doellerlab.bsky.social

Are you a sleep researcher? Then we're interested in your opinion on preregistrations! Help advance the field by filling out this short (5-minute) survey redcap.link/1zg4tezm (Any career stage, doesn't matter if you've preregistered before or not, we need you. Please share!)

This is one of my favourite things. Direct replication of MEG and fMRI findings in intracranial recordings and a demonstration that cortical representations update in the right direction around hippocampal ripples.

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...

“move from preprint to peer-reviewed publication leaves the central claims of most abstracts intact, indicating preprints are a reliable source…papers that were never posted as preprints were retracted at roughly twice the rate of those that were…” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If you're dying with anxiety because the status of your paper has not changed from "under review" for weeks, you may want to read the Future of Peer Review report from Silverchair that came out recently and replaced the outdated Publons report from 2018... #ScientificPublishing #PeerReview /

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are the traveling dynamics of sleep slow waves functionally involved in memory consolidation? A new paper from the lab led by @norarouast.bsky.social shows that auditory stimulation during sleep disturbs SWS and affects the traveling dynamics of SWs - which mediated impaired memory consolidation!

Big news! 🚀 The preprint for our #NODES Delphi study is out on PsyArXiv osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5bt6s_v1 What's this all about? 🧵

The extent of the IF obsession is evident from any and every Google search for a journal - even venues that don't warrant one. This literally makes or breaks journals - non-profits are hit particularly hard - and it stifles innovation and distorts science. 2/2

Meet our new Alliance Fellow Pablo Rojas! He will be working with the groups of @gordonfeld.bsky.social and Georgia Koppe www.linkedin.com/posts/health...

Interested in human replay and solid methods? Jointly with @skjerns.de we're releasing a benchmark dataset with known ground-truth neural sequences in MEG & fMRI, for developing & validating replay methods. First test: existing methods show similar effect sizes, but room to improve shorturl.at/6TgIr

Der Tankrabatt kostet in zwei Monaten übrigens knapp 25-mal so viel wie die von der Bundesregierung versprochene und jetzt gestoppte Erhöhung der Wohnkostenpauschale beim BAFöG.

Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Honored to be giving a keynote at Psychology and the Brain (PuG) this week in Heidelberg. Since starting the lab in 2019, we’ve had many wonderful collaborations across Germany, and I’m excited to share our work on the computational neuroscience of interoception. See you there! pug2026.org

Biopsych Community, we are ready and can‘t wait to welcome you to Heidelberg! #PUG2026

No they don't! Humans report being conscious half of the time when awoken from NREM sleep. The NREM/REM, conscious/unconscious dichotomy has been thoroughly debunked. It's time we stop oversimplifying the relationship between sleep and consciousness!

1/ Can AI help researchers check whether published social science results actually reproduce? In our new PNAS paper, we tested this directly in the AI Replication Games: 288 researchers, 103 teams, and real replication packages from quantitative social science.

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. 🧵

Can neural representations from different people be translated into a shared space without paired data? In our preprint, "Platonic Representations in the Human Brain: Unsupervised Recovery of Universal Geometry", with Rishi Jha and @fuentemilla.bsky.social, we test this using fMRI 🧵👇

An ordinal Language of Thought supports human memory for regular sequences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.14.725160v1

I also created a version of the 'guess the correlation' game. Students always enjoyed it, but the original website (with fun retro design) started to require a google account login. So I created my own version. Play it here: lakens.github.io/statistical_...

New paper showing insufficient evidence for neuroimaging features to define reproducible, biologically valid, & clinically meaningful schizophrenia subtypes. The subtypes identified to date likely reflect continuous variation within the disorder rather than discrete, biologically distinct entities.

How fast agentic AI has changed our work is head-spinning and there's been a lot of debate in our lab. So we drafted guidelines to help navigate this new reality. Sharing here in the hope it’s useful for others & curious to hear thoughts schucklab.gitlab.io/ai-policy.html #AcademicSky #compneurosky