Rebecca Saxe
@rebecca_saxe
Followers
9,980
Following
671
Media
103
Statuses
1,495
Cognitive Neuroscientist at MIT. 🇨🇦. She/her. Currently setting up @rebecca_saxe @mastodon .online
Joined September 2015
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Davido
• 173622 Tweets
WONWOO
• 108691 Tweets
からくりサーカス
• 99707 Tweets
ケンタッキー
• 94292 Tweets
ニンテンドーミュージアム
• 76378 Tweets
FAYEYOKO BTS 1ST FANMEET
• 73841 Tweets
BTS NUNEW 1ST CONCERT EP2
• 69944 Tweets
#swallows
• 60596 Tweets
フォーエバーヤング
• 42260 Tweets
青木選手
• 31290 Tweets
#しぐれういリアルライブ
• 23457 Tweets
青木さん
• 23100 Tweets
Alcaraz
• 19769 Tweets
Wizkid
• 18850 Tweets
サンライズジパング
• 15720 Tweets
Cassper
• 13913 Tweets
TORE
• 13298 Tweets
ダービー
• 11652 Tweets
#クイズフェスティバル
• 11534 Tweets
שנה טובה
• 10514 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
I aspire to use cognitive neuroscience to understand human thought and motivation, and to be humble, uncompromising, and constructive. Serious inquiry into human nature is not a luxury. No one should be excluded from it by their race, gender, or other accidents of birth.
5
38
304
My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend.
Here’s the story.
Thread. 1/14
6
339
923
“Am I welcome? At MIT, the answer, unequivocally, is yes.”
-MIT president Reif on suing ICE today
2
63
612
We are sharing an open dataset of >300 children, 3–12-years-old, including 64 (neurotypical) children assessed longitudinally and 68 autistic children, each answering >40 ToM questions ranging in difficulty.
10 years of
@hil_richardson
's and Saxelab's data! Please re-use.
Thrilled to share our new pre-print featuring an open dataset of children responses to a
#TheoryofMind
task!🧐 Ever thought about how kids figure out what you're thinking? Check out our open dataset here and our preprint
1
24
95
7
181
527
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
They have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding.
Fin.
11
26
405
So wild to have Netflix pushing me a picture of my own baby.
7
8
395
We posted a preprint today: “The need to connect: Acute social isolation causes neural craving responses similar to hunger.” Lead author
@livia_tomova
.
A thread on what we did, what we found, and the story behind it.
1/25
8
158
349
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
The minute he was born, lying on my chest still warm and goopy, I looked into his black eyes for the first time, and I knew: (i) I was deeply inexplicably in love with him, and (ii) as soon as possible, I wanted to scan his brain.
8/14
2
15
341
A nice thing at a wild time. I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
28
4
345
Last fall
@AshleyJ_Thomas
and I co-taught a graduate course called 'Tools for Robust Science' at MIT.
The syllabus and materials are now all freely available at
🧵 1/7
2
108
343
Lila Gleitman's highlights have been giving me a little spark of joy all day. I am also looking forward to reading the paper.
7
38
326
🧵A lot of current AI is obsessed with recognizing emotions from facial expressions — but that’s not how humans do it.
Humans make systematic, nuanced predictions of emotions people *will* experience, without ever seeing a face.
Paper👇w
@DaeHoulihan
4
76
320
Just found a cool paper from 2018. Do you think children in 2010 are MORE or LESS able than children in the 1960s or 1980s to delay gratification?
3
35
226
I posted my conceptual intro to fMRI, here:
About once a year I do a two-hour teaching session on fMRI for beginners, for new students. Bit of theory, then a demo of some analysis. Haven't done it this year (obvs) but occurred to me I could do it online and open it out to... well... everyone. Would anyone be interested?
164
67
2K
6
48
220
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
I had lots of time to think, and I thought: wouldn’t it be amazing to see an MRI of the two of us in here? A Mother and Child, one of the oldest images, made new.
10/14
6
47
213
I gave a TED talk 10 years ago yesterday. I tried to argue that understanding the mind and brain is hard, and we weren't close, and therein lay the thrill. Immediately after me was the talk
@edyong209
describes in this article:
4
57
197
It is hard to decrease harassment and honor harassers at the same time. Remove Sexual Harassers from National Academy of Sciences. I signed.
4
35
171
"I had a hard time believing Emile Bruneau was for real."
So many people said this. And yet he really was.
What he wanted most, when he knew he was dying, was for his story to be widely told. I'm glad it is in
@nytimes
.
3
64
172
I use twitter to deliberately hear voices of Black scientists, especially relatively early-stage scientists in disciplines related to mine. A thread on why I did this and how you can too. 1/n
4
54
171
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
In answer to all the controversies and tweeting this weekend: The activations are real fMRI results, of hemodynamic responses while looking at a movies of faces, compared to movies of scenes. They really are from that baby.
13/14
3
17
166
Green cards for ALL GRAD STUDENTS!
THIS! "Biden believes that foreign graduates of a U.S. doctoral programme should be given a green card with their degree and that 'losing these highly trained workers to foreign economies is a disservice to our own economic competitiveness'"
5
124
625
1
9
163
This short video captures what was so special about Emile Bruneau, my dear friend and colleague and mentee who died last week.
7
34
159
Stimulate the human brain at one electrode. Measure the response in another. Responses are fast (<50ms) when the two electrodes are in the same fMRI-defined functional network. Controlling for physical distance. Cool validation of the functional networks. 1/2
Inter-network vs. Intra-network signal flow examined with direct electrical perturbation of the human brain.
1
81
320
1
34
158
.
@edyong209
tracked gender bias, and partly for that reason, kept asking me until I agreed to be interviewed in an area where I actually am an expert. Some funders read his article, and contacted me. 1. 2. 3.
2
48
155
fMRI studies are not clinical trials unless they are actually clinical trials! NIH has finally revised the infamous "case 18" to align with common sense:
3
67
155
Strongly recommend this book. I have taught from it and have consulted it. Practical, concrete, and contemporary advice, that can be immediately applied in class and lab.
Do you want to do a psychology experiment while following best practices in open science? My collaborators and I have created Experimentology, a new open web textbook (to be published by MIT Press but free online forever).
Some highlights! 🧵
19
470
1K
2
25
149
I deeply value the role that universities can play in the lives of students, staff, faculty, neighbours and beyond. I hope to help MIT's School of Science live up to its ideals for science and for scientists.
Jackie Lees of
@kochinstitute
and
@rebecca_saxe
of
@mitbrainandcog
have been named associate deans
@ScienceMIT
! They will both contribute to the school’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice activities, as well as career-development programs:
38
6
83
6
5
145
Are we limited to understanding just the other people to whom we are similar? Or can we understand an experience we've never had? In a new paper, we investigated what congenitally blind people know about sight.
With:
@marina_bedny
@gelli_dog
1/2
3
45
147
Cognitive neuroscience is a well balanced field with many key female leaders. This is just ridiculous.
Just out in the New Yorker: An article about Men Reading Minds with fMRI!
The author mentions 9 male and 0 female neuroscience professors, a feat made possible by impressive contortions like attributing a study from Ev Fedorenko’s lab to one of its male middle authors.
19
285
1K
1
7
143
The Babies documentary (Season 2, Episode 7) has a segment featuring our baby scanning project. So proud of my team!
And a surprisingly intimate portrait of me as a mother. Strong feelings seeing this on screen.
6
6
136
New paper out today with Hilary Richardson, measuring brain responses during Theory of Mind in 125 children (including 29 diagnosed with Autism). Truly heroic data collection effort, lasting more than eight years!
2
51
129
I just learned that the Ontario coroner who did public inquests on women who died of illegal abortions until the law was changed was my grandfather, Morty Shulman.
The abortion law in Canada in the 1969 and more recently in Ireland were both changed because of empathy. In Canada, the coroner of Ontario was so damn sick of seeing dead women he held an inquest for every abortion death. Wanted the public to see the carnage. 1/
195
7K
36K
8
9
127
New pre-print posted: "Learning in Infancy is Active, Endogenously Motivated, and Depends on Prefrontal Cortices."
With
@_galraz_
1/8
3
41
122
Useful not just for “translating to business” but for combatting imposter syndrome by accurately identifying the skills and accomplishments of grad students.
1
11
121
In my career, and life, I have benefited a lot from my privilege. I recognize the pain of widespread structural, implicit and explicit racism that disproportionately targets and excludes people of colour. I don’t want credit for saying so. I just don’t want to be silent, either.
0
7
120
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
Anyway, kind of by coincidence and kind of not, the first fMRI study of infant brains, which I had been planning for 6 years, actually got going when… I had a baby.
7/14
2
3
118
MIT automatically granting one year extension of tenure clock.
4
9
115
For a course on mentorship, I just read "Elements of Mentoring" by Johnson & Ridley. I have been a mentor for over twenty years. And OMG there is so much room for me to improve!
3
6
116
We wrote a reply to Blumberg & Adolph’s recent TiCS article. We argue there is no neuroscientific evidence for cognitive discontinuity between infants and adults.
1
17
111
🌟 New paper👇What is Theory of Mind for? 🌟
For >40 years, scientists have studied how people predict other's actions given their beliefs and desires. We argue, “This is like saying a theory of cooking is for predicting what will come out of the kitchen.”
Excited to share a new review paper on *Planning with Theory of Mind* by
@rebecca_saxe
,
@fierycushman
and myself, now out in
@TrendsCognSci
!
A very brief 🧵:
1
83
315
1
13
109
I gave a talk at the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture called "What is theory of mind? Implications for Mind, Brain and Culture."
A potent mix of 20 years of fMRI data, some sketchy new ideas, and false-belief-bashing:
1
15
105
My wonderful lab manager and lab tech are going to grad school -- so I'm looking to hire two people.
Ideal candidate: interested in social cognition, rigorous and open science, and gaining research experience before committing to grad school.
Link 👇👇
The Saxe Lab at
@MIT
(PI:
@rebecca_saxe
) is hiring for ✨2✨ post-bac positions: a lab manager and a lab tech! I have been the lab manager for two years and it has been a wonderful experience (see why in 🧵).
*
Apply at: & !
2
68
122
4
53
104
Is there a word in some language for the joy of someone you don’t know replicating your results?
Some other highlights:
*Really nice replication of Theory-of-Mind network and Pain Matrix activation across the four datasets. Maps can be found
@VaultNeuro
3
1
4
5
8
107
Who would you let lick your ice cream?
In a new paper w
@AshleyJ_Thomas
, we find that Children, toddlers, and even babies know that only people in close, intimate relationships are comfortable exchanging saliva.
3
25
98
There are three things I really enjoyed about
@edyong209
’s new article about human origins.
1/4
2
41
98
This makes me feel better about humans. Data visualizations matter.
1
16
99
MIT is providing free moving boxes and will refund housing and meal plan costs for the rest of the spring. I’m relieved.
1
4
99
It's impossible to overstate how impressive
@heatherlkos
is. A whole new way to build a 32-channel coil! *** Eighty-six babies!!! ****
@CurrentBiology
@rebecca_saxe
@Nancy_Kanwisher
@m_the_cohen
For this study, we designed scanner safe headphones, a 32-channel head coil, & recruited 86 infants to participate in an fMRI study while they watched videos of faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. 2/
1
0
27
3
9
92
Watch
@Nancy_Kanwisher
talk about luck, feeling like a failure, mentorship, gratitude, and the future. I have been so lucky to have this incomparable person as my mentor:
0
14
93
Cambridge city is contracting with local restaurants to provide boxed meals for homeless people, replacing the food provided by short-staffed shelters. Keeps restaurants in business and people fed. Nice work
@MayorSiddiqui
0
11
90
@ashley2182
My response:
My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend.
Here’s the story.
Thread. 1/14
6
339
923
0
11
88
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
So, I spent many many many hours squashed inside an MRI machine with my infant, while we figured out how to collect these data.
This talk includes some videos:
9/14
4
9
85
I am excited about this new paper, out today with
@danielnettle
, on how people think about redistributing resources in society:
2
21
84
Hurrah for
@Nancy_Kanwisher
!
📣 A great bit of news this Monday morning:
@Nancy_Kanwisher
has just received the 2022
@theNASciences
Award in the Neurosciences for her pioneering work into the functional organization of the human brain!🎉
@mitbrainandcog
@ScienceMIT
@MIT_CBMM
5
24
182
1
2
80
The results show... the opposite! Children wait longer in each successive cohort.
2
6
79
Smaldino's preprint, "How to translate a verbal theory into a formal model," is so clear and thoughtful; should be required reading for
- scientists who want to make formal models of minds, brain or behaviour, &
- scientists who think they don't want to:
0
23
81
We published fMRI data from infants. Most data came from 4 babies. Here they are now.
4
1
82
Hoping this helps more mothers, and babies, see the fun of participating in scientific experiments.
4
31
76
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
It took us a year to figure out how to make it, so the child in this image is my second son.
Thank you
@bmhdeen
and Atsushi Takahashi!
11/14
1
1
73
@bmhdeen
Actually, we found that the large scale organization of visual responses was surprising similar in infants and adults; though there were hints of subtler differences.
Link:
4/14
1
8
69
So proud of DOCTOR Heather Lynn Kosakowski
@heatherlkos
who received her PhD from
@ScienceMIT
today.
4
2
71
Published today: Reduced Neural Selectivity for Mental States in Deaf Children with Delayed Exposure to Sign Language.
By
@hil_richardson
,
@jenniepyers
and team.
Check out the ASL abstract!
This project has been in the works for more than a decade. 1/18
3
26
72
This is a neat idea. I'm willing to try.
If you are on the job market in a field I know something about (dev, cog, neuro, or social psych) email me your favourite of your papers, and I'll tweet about it.
Are you on the job market? Email me with your MVP and I’ll tweet about it.
0
1
6
0
13
72
Huge congratulations to
@DaeHoulihan
for defending his beautiful thesis work today!
@mitbrainandcog
1
1
70
This looks like a great event on the neuroscience of language, April 8-9:
1
20
72
I had an H1-B. Now on a green card. Many of my trainees and colleagues have these visas. When the WH started talking about this, I just really really didn’t want to believe it.
Yes, tonight's proclamation from the WH is a blow to innovation and research but please remember that before any of that it is the devastation of many people's hopes, dreams, reunification with their loved ones, their LIVES.
2
99
440
2
6
69
There's a Snopes article about my image!
1
10
68
Here is a video of a May 2019 lecture on my fMRI studies of Theory of Mind.
3
30
66
MIT is asking undergrads to leave campus by Tuesday. I am feeling for the students. The scramble. The uncertainty. The loss of so much they worked for.
0
0
67
Our initial analyses of social brain networks in young children were exploratory. So Hilary has confirmed her results in independent data:
1
22
63
I am looking for my next lab manager. Apply to come work with my awesome team:
0
60
65
Which skunk is the most representative SKUNK? The stinkiest skunk in the world, or a skunk with average stickiness?
@efosterhanson
finds that 5-6 year old children say that the stinkiest skunk in the world is the ‘real skunk-y skunk’.
Pre-print:
1
12
63
This is lovely.
"I'd love a go of a baby. A good ten minutes of holding and squeezing and head smelling.." wrote
@emerthescreamer
in
@sundaybusiness
..reminding me of the Mri of
@rebecca_saxe
& her infant. Here's my
#abstractart
interpretation - getting that quickfix of a cuddle & baby scent.
3
3
46
1
2
64
What professors can learn from YouTubers. 10 lessons in five minutes. This is SO GREAT. Thank you
@todd_gureckis
. h/t
@weijima01
0
12
64
A few years ago, I was doing an fMRI study of infant brains. The scientific questions we were asking (with amazing grad student
@bmhdeen
) were about the organization of functional activity in infant brains when viewing meaningful visual images, like faces and natural scenes.
1
1
61
I recommend this article. Come for the schadenfreude. Stay for the critical evaluation of how almost all neuroscience increasingly functions.
I think I want to see the movie, but I’m not sure.
Really proud of my PhD student
@jenni4eyes
's review in
@sftporg
of
@In_Silico_Film
by
@noah_hutton
on the monstrous, utterly failed
#HumanBrainProject
.
With food for thought about corporate mindsets in academic science, and how to do better
#sci_twitter
6
63
241
1
6
60
I just read three non-fiction page-turners about awesome women. Enthusiastically recommend all three! And open to recommendations for what I should read next.
Titles in🧵👇
2
4
58
Mahzarin Banaji with a firecracker start to the TiPS conference!
>1000 scholars from all over the world have signed up to listen.
Hurrah for "lady nuisances" and great science.
@harvardWiPsych
1
6
56
Now published.
@_galraz_
and I argue that humans infants have distinct motives for engaging with their environment, associated with dissociable functions in prefrontal cortex.
I am proud of the ambition of this paper, and would love to hear others' responses to it.
New pre-print posted: "Learning in Infancy is Active, Endogenously Motivated, and Depends on Prefrontal Cortices."
With
@_galraz_
1/8
3
41
122
5
9
55
Pandemic parenting and working from home study:
The average time between interruptions by children was … Three and a half minutes.
I feel better knowing that. It helps explain away the feeling that I was losing my mind.
Two parents tracked how often they were interrupted by their children during their workday at home.
-Over the course of 3 hours, they were interrupted 45 times.
-The average length of an unbroken stretch of work time was about 3 and a half minutes.
9
31
131
0
5
56
I was born in Canada; my family immigrated from Ukraine. My husband was born in Colombia. We both got PhDs in the US.
#immigrantexcellence
1
15
53
Just out: the next step in our project scanning babies with fMRI while they watch movies.
First first-authored paper for
@heatherlkos
! 🎉
My 1st 1st-author paper is in
@CurrentBiology
! Selective Responses to Faces, Scenes, and Bodies in the Ventral Visual Pathway of Infants. w/my amazing advisors
@rebecca_saxe
&
@Nancy_Kanwisher
& collabs
@m_the_cohen
, A Takahashi, & B Keil 1/
10
89
346
2
5
54
My first big talk since pre-pandemic is next week.
Abstract: "I will argue that human infants have distinct social representations and motivations.
1/4
#BCCCD22
is next week; see the program at . Invited:
@rebecca_saxe
,
@fierycushman
, and a symposium on active learning. 4 more symposia and 8 talk sessions, >160 virtual presentations, no parallel sessions. You can still register for €40 (30 for students).
0
10
18
1
2
54
New paper out today with
@AshleyJ_Thomas
and Liz Spelke.
Infants watch how their parents interact with strangers, to infer their own relationships with those strangers.
This project was a pandemic silver lining.
1
8
53
All of the data for an old paper, "The Power of Being Heard: The Benefits of 'Perspective-Giving' in the Context of Intergroup Conflict”, are now available on OSF here:
Thread on the paper, the project, and the data.
1/12
4
15
54
Next Thursday, I'm going to try "story-telling" about being a scientist and a person and a mother.
1
6
52
Do you have a kid with questions about how scientists study the brain?
Ask a Scientist!
Me,
@heatherlkos
and Brandon Davis
Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 1:00 PM
0
29
51
@bmhdeen
Amazing grad student
@heatherlkos
is doing the next round of studies. She has scanned dozens more babies! Stay tuned for new science.
1
1
51
@RealBrainTC
(2) We recently collected fMRI data from human babies watching movies of dynamic faces and natural environments. Check out the paper: 10.1038/ncomms13995
@bmhdeen
#brainTC
1
20
50
For a new experiment, we want to do 'experience sampling' via text message.
Any recommendations for which company / app to use?
Any horror stories about companies / apps not to use?
16
15
50
@bmhdeen
@heatherlkos
At some point we thought: would it be cool to overlay the activation (from our actual science study on watching face movies) onto this picture? So, we did.
12/14
1
2
50
Preprint: Using brain connectivity to predict theory of mind in children. By
@eredcay
.
TFW you are reading a paper, and realise it uses your own (
@hil_richardson
's) publicly-shared data, to do something neat you would not have done yourself.🤓🌟
#OpenScience
A tale of two connectivities: intra- and inter-subject functional connectivity jointly enable better prediction of social abilities
#biorxiv_neursci
0
3
3
1
9
49
How should adults (e.g. teachers, parents) help children to persist in their efforts towards difficult goals? Julia Leonard
@SciAmericanGirl
finds that children try 5 times harder when an adult (i) tries hard herself, (ii) succeeds, and (iii) provides encouragement.
1
22
48
@edyong209
Without mentioning it, all the scientists he cites are women. You go, Ed!
#womeninscience
#womeninstem
#500WS
4/4
1
2
48
I didn't know that "women hires increased only after the Orchestra carpeted the ramp to the pit, masking the evaluators’ ability to determine gender from the sound of their shoes."
4
0
49
Lindsey Powell,
@heatherlkos
, and I wrote a paper suggesting that cortical responses to faces in faces reflect the social function of faces.
1
19
48