Jonathan Tsay

New preprint! 🥳 How do we discover what to do when a movement goes wrong? Answer: hypothesis testing (HT) - testing and evaluating candidate motor solutions based on sensory evidence. HT explains how we explore, and when exploration gives way to an “aha!” moment.

Phantom limb pain affects most individuals with limb amputation & can be difficult to treat. In this preprint, Dr. Laurel Buxbaum & team report findings from an RCT showing that a virtual reality intervention reduced phantom leg pain in patients with lower-limb amputation. https://ow.ly/Kfka50ZZtti

Our paper showing privileged representational axes in brains and ANNS, by the amazing @meenakshikhosla.bsky.social, w/ @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and @itsneuronal.bsky.social, is finally out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Meenakshi's tweet thread here: x.com/meenakshik93... and in this thread....

Our review of Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception is out now in TICS – with @ivntmc.bsky.social and Máté Lengyel. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Surprise! Our new paper is now out: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... But can you be surprised by this news over and over again? Probably not! Unlike happiness (you might feel happy every time you reread your favorite paper), surprise often signals a NEW discovery. Do infants understand this?

Yet another neat paper from Tal!! The paper itself is short and sweet, but the data are quite thought-provoking. I was pleasantly surprised that we were able to extract stable signatures from such simple behaviors. (Makes me wonder what other idiosyncratic behaviors are hidden in plain sight!) 🔍

Doing my best to try to amplify the value of our international colleagues in our labs as quoted in this piece (opinions my own) #science 🧪 US government probe into postdoc visas worries scientists www.nature.com/articles/d41...

​​Flip 8 imaginary coins. Now roll 8 imaginary dice. Now pick 8 random spots on a screen. These tasks are all different, yet you might have a unique 'random fingerprint' that applies across them. See more in a new paper with @samiyousif.bsky.social, now in press @ Open Mind. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Proud to have this paper out today at Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com ! Heroic, creative work by Zekun Sun (w/ Zhiran Xie and me).

#WesternU neuroscientists Jörn Diedrichsen and Jody Culham are part of a Meta-funded international effort to develop an open source digital model for the human brain. They're studying the brain by combining carefully designed cognitive tasks with immersive video games. 🧠 🎮️

Sensorimotor adaptation recalibrates the mapping between motor commands and movement to compensate for unexpected errors induced by external or internal factors. This study describes implicit aiming as a distinct process operating in #sensorimotor #learning. 🧪 #NeuroSky plos.io/47YLIYM

Big step closer to identifying conscious perception in the brain, by Doris Tsao and collaborators. 15 times a second your neurons flicker between conscious and unconscious activity. Consciousness is found in time, not in space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Out now in Psych Science! With @hanzhang.bsky.social John Jonides and @tarazlee.bsky.social We show that apparent age-related deficits in inhibitory control (often measured by RT congruency effects) can be explained by age differences in processing speed journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Super excited that this work it out! If you care about inhibitory control or aging and cognition check out Jacob's explainer for details!

I’m honored to be part of the #PackardFellows class of 2026! With the help of funding from @packardfdn.bsky.social, I look forward to developing new ways to understand the architecture of the human mind and brain at @jhu.edu

Wordbank, my lab's open database of children's vocabulary development, has a new home. There's a new website, a new data release, and wordbankr is back on CRAN. A few details 🧵 wordbank.stanford.edu/

Why is Psych Science doing a bunch of special issues? We want to get more submissions on these topics! Authors may not submit papers on these topics because they don’t see many examples in our journal. Hopefully special issues can help! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Carnegie Mellon is hiring an Assistant Professor in NeuroAI 🧠🤖 Work across ML/AI, robotics, systems & cognitive neuroscience, and neurotech, with joint and courtesy appointments common at the Neuroscience Institute. Details + apply: apply.interfolio.com/189268 #NeuroAI #AcademicSky #FacultyJobs

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2026-10-16-list350.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

(1/2) I’m starting a NeuroAI and comp neuro lab at the University of Toronto! How do brains and AI learn from ongoing experience? How do they connect delayed outcomes to past actions, adapt to change, and retain what matters? Recruiting funded PhD students for Fall 2027. Links in the reply 👇

Stoked this is out!! “Go-before-you-know” reaching during fMRI shows a shift toward feedforward control with aging. rdcu.be/iJ1CsQeDMDxa I love our team, feel lucky to be part of it, and we are so grateful to the A+ reviewers who made it better. @commsbio.nature.com @uoregon.bsky.social

📷 CMU is hiring an Asst Prof in NeuroAI! Join a collaborative, cross-department community spanning ML/AI, robotics, neuro & neurotech Neuro Institute PhD in neuro, ML, robotics, CS, cogsci, EE or related. Apply: apply.interfolio.com/189268 #NeuroAI #AcademicJobs @cmu.edu

Hidden signals in sleep can predict future health www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our paper is out in Nature, congrats to Qiyu, An et al! By stimulating ~20 motor cortex neurons carefully selected based on their activity, we could induce learned population activity and, sometimes, the movement itself, depending on the brain's state. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Last week to apply!!

🚨Job alert!🚨 My lab is looking for a full time research assistant to help with a set of behavioral and imaging experiments in humans focused on understanding the neural basis of foraging. Interested? Submit an application. cmu.wd115.myworkdayjobs.com/CMU/job/Pitt...

The one-day satellite meeting for #NCMSev27 has just been announced and the program includes a lot of cool science that I'm sure will motivate many you to submit your research and propose interesting team sessions! More below 👇

The one-day satellite meeting for #NCMSev27 has just been announced and the program includes a lot of cool science that I'm sure will motivate many you to submit your research and propose interesting team sessions! More below 👇

Out today in Cognition (@cognitionjournal.bsky.social)! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint from David Skrill with @jfeather.bsky.social : tinyurl.com/2xm8rucz We synthesize stimuli that decorrelate neural predictions from competing encoding models, revealing a dramatic improvement in auditory cortical prediction accuracy from adversarial training.

A new paper from my PhD work! Attention reshapes how the cortex represents meaning. Does the same thing happen in the cerebellum?

Exciting Associate Professor opportunity in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, with access to state-of-the-art neuroimaging and stimulation at OHBA/OxCIN: MEG, OPM, 3T/7T MRI, TUS, TMS & more. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSQ831/a...

Registration now open -->> motor-conference.org/openconf.php

Our reward function compression work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉 In it, we present and empirically test a computational framework that formalizes the trade-offs between goal flexibility and learning efficiency. @annecollins.bsky.social @natureportfolio.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Really excited about this paper with @gaiamolinaro.bsky.social - check it out! We have a few other projects coming out soon, which further support the theory we put forward.

Penn State is recruiting a new Director of the Center for Movement Science and Technology, within the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences! (please repost!) psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

What does a spinal cord flexor/extensor half-center spiking network's activity look like in neural state space? It has a characteristic V-shaped trajectory and a very low-dimensional population dynamics (simulation below).

Happy to announce that I am searching for for a graduate student, starting Fall 2027. If you want to study the neural mechanisms of reaching and grasping, come join us in the rich environment of the Sensorimotor Superlab. For details: www.pruszynskilab.com/positions.html

NCM DCA Stephen Scott was an engineering student who preferred running. A dataset, a library, and no real plan. 2026 NCM Distinguished Career Awardee Stephen Scott on how he ended up here. youtu.be/MZ6ATgNOBtQ

Quite interesting study which shows you can reconstruct the semantics of experiences while totally bypassing what's known as the "language centers" of the brain using an LLM trained on brain scans. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Looking for a postdoc in comp neuro and human brain imaging? Interested in foraging? Join our international collaboration with Jon Rubin, @jyotikab.bsky.social, & @davidrobbe.bsky.social be.bsky.social to study the neural basis of foraging behavior! cmu.wd115.myworkdayjobs.com/CMU/job/Pitt...

📣 Save the date! RLDM 2027, the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making, is coming to Paris, July 6-9, 2027 🎉 Stay tuned for submission deadlines and more updates on our website rldm.org 👀

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

New preprint! Are attentional lapses the result of disengagement or simply response failure? Using EEG, we tested how attention fluctuations impact visual representations in the brain. (1/5) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵

New preprint from the lab. A long-overdue fMRI study on bimanual movement direction encoding: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @alighavampour.bsky.social, @andpru.bsky.social, @jjodx.eurosky.social

I'm excited about this work that an amazing undergrad, @ariazhang.bsky.social, did with me and @tomerullman.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Aria showed how a neural net can discover abstractions for intuitive physics and use its own reliability estimates to decide when to deploy them.

Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

New preprint! TLDR: We mapped the genetic architecture of neonatal vocalization in deer mice, and found candidate genes expressed in the cerebellum that could be contributing to the evolution of temporal structure in infant cries #Bioacoustics #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share a new discovery from @stanfordpntlab.bsky.social about the effects of neurostimulation on brain activity. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... With our colleagues at the University of Iowa, we explored how intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) changes neural excitability. A 🧵

📣 Check out our latest preprint with @kianobre.bsky.social, spearheaded by the incredible @dxywei.bsky.social! Across four experiments, we compare the behavioural and neural signatures of selecting real-world objects in perception and working memory. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...