Adam Steel
Neuroscience. Memory, perception, action.
Assistant professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
the-steel-lab.github.io
@dartmouth + @Vassar + @UniofOxford alum. Views are mine. RTs, Likes, and flws ≠ endorsement
- I finally got around to setting up a lab website! Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io Just in time to start the new semester.
- Reposted by Adam Steel** Recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher! ** We are seeking a postdoc to help examine how brain networks might change within individuals across transitional times, such as adolescence & pregnancy! Please share widely and apply at the link! #NeuroJobs uva.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UVAJobs/job/...
- Reposted by Adam Steel7year old this morning: Mama can I look up where brain rot came from? Me: Oh, sure—I think it’s an internet thing but look it up… 7: It says here it’s from some author, Henry David Thoreau?! Me: ?!?!?! Dying laughing—but the OED also cites Walden for the first usage of the word…
- Reposted by Adam SteelOur new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.
- #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. doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0…
- Reposted by Adam SteelThis paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
- Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Adam Steel🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946
- Reposted by Adam SteelTo add further enticement to the coolness of VR and laser scanning microscopy -- Manuel is among the coolest scientists I know & a PhD working with him would be the coolest 😎
- *Fully funded PhD student positions available to discover what changes in 🧠 when we learn something new.* You think virtual reality + laser scanning microscopy are cool? You like 💻 and 🐭? Come join us! Apply either through www.udel.edu/academics/co... or www.udel.edu/academics/co...
- Reposted by Adam SteelColumbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428
- Reposted by Adam Steelok this breakdown of AI writing indicators is incredible. Huge shout-out to the Wikipedia community for this
- Reposted by Adam SteelNew work led by @mattmattoni.bsky.social “Overall, results suggest that BOLD activation to reward tasks, and likely other fMRI tasks, is more appropriate for within-person study than between-person study, highlighting a need for intensive longitudinal neuroimaging designs.”
- Precision Imaging for Intraindividual Investigation of the Reward Response biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Adam Steel
- Reposted by Adam SteelNow out in @natneuro.nature.com What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed? Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7 🧵1/18
- Reposted by Adam SteelExcited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! Come learn about a project combining many of my favorite interests - naturalistic neuroimaging, development, & manifold learning (of course). Catch me at poster C181 on Fri - “Intrinsic dimensionality of brain activity manifolds across tasks and development”
- Reposted by Adam SteelThe lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied. 👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky
- Reposted by Adam Steel🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation (ES) to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects By Cyr et al. *** Q: Can we use individualized network maps from precision fMRI to modulate a targeted network via intracranial ES? A: Yes! 🧵:
- Reposted by Adam SteelI’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab! We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells
- Reposted by Adam SteelNew profile! Dr. Sarah Heilbronner (@srheilbronner.bsky.social) uses cutting-edge neuroanatomical and neuroimaging techniques to decipher the wiring diagram of the primate brain. Follow the link below to learn more! www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202... #StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience
- Reposted by Adam SteelIn these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):
- Reposted by Adam Steel🚨Paper alert!🚨 TL;DR first: We used a pre-trained deep neural network to model fMRI data and to generate images predicted to elicit a large response for each many different parts of the brain. We aggregate these into an awesome interactive brain viewer: piecesofmind.psyc.unr.edu/activation_m...
- Reposted by Adam Steel🎺 #BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! This Friday, June 13th, the brain meeting speaker will be Adam Steel with a talk entitled “Mechanisms underlying perceptual and mnemonic interaction in the brain” This will be an online only meeting. All are welcome. Details here: www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event/mechan...
- Reposted by Adam SteelWhen you successfully anticipate future events, what happens to your ability to encode the present? 🤔 Successful prediction increases the likelihood of successful encoding. We speculate about how switching between distinct encoding & prediction states can produce this effect. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Adam SteelDespite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.
- Reposted by Adam Steel🚨 Practical URGENT tip for NSF grantees: Out of an abundance of caution, I would right now go into Research.gov and… 1. Download your NSF award letters. 2. Print PDF your annual reports. 3. Screenshot the status table for annual reports. NSF is planning maintenance tomorrow to Research.gov
- I'm very excited to speak at UBC next Thursday!
- Join us for our colloquium with Dr. Adam Steel, Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who will share insights on 'Mechanisms underlying perceptual and mnemonic interaction in the brain'. April 17 | 12:30 - 2:00 pm | Kenny Rm 4001 bit.ly/429cbRB
- Reposted by Adam SteelLikely hiring one postbac trainee for @fmri-today.bsky.social's Section on Functional Imaging Methods. Give the relatively later start time for the search, I'm not yet sure how quickly this search will happen. If you are interested, apply and reach out ASAP. fim.nimh.nih.gov
- Recruitment of postbacs & postdocs in the NIH IRP has resumed. I have no additional info beyond what is publicly stated on the website. www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...
- Reposted by Adam Steel
[This post could not be retrieved] - Reposted by Adam SteelI have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane. Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.
- Reposted by Adam SteelReflective piece by Eve Marder – "What happened to the pursuit of truth" rupress.org/jgp/article/...
- Reposted by Adam SteelNew paper out in @pnas.org with @laurendinicola.bsky.social, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Mark Eldaief and Randy Buckner! We revisited the functional specialization of the human hippocampal long axis across two independent datasets, with some surprising results. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Have you wondered where scene perception and memory intersect in the brain? Do you want to localize these areas? In a preprint, @carolinerobertson.bsky.social, Deepa Prasad, Brenda Garcia, and I detail this topography and release these parcels and our localizer. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- We combine three datasets (N=44 participants) to demonstrate the reliability of the place memory areas' location. Results did not depend on the localizer conditions used. Contrasting memory of scene vs faces, or scenes vs. familiar faces, bodies, objects, and famous faces yielded the same areas.
- In this larger cohort of participants, we replicate our original work, wherein we show that place memory activity is located anterior to scene perception.
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View full threadSee related work from our lab and others! www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.jneurosci.org/content/43/3... www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.jneurosci.org/content/44/2... www.jneurosci.org/content/42/9... academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...
- Reposted by Adam Steel(recycled from X) My favorite take on LLM intelligence is by Paul Cisek on the connectionists mailing list: "We are like a bunch of professional magicians (...) wondering: 'Maybe there really is magic? I think it’s not that machines have passed the Turing Test, but rather that we failed it." 🔥
- Reposted by Adam SteelWe strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics
- Finally deactivated my twitter account -- looking forward to enjoying #neuroskyence in its place
- Reposted by Adam SteelWhat kind of information gets prioritized for remembering by the brain? A thread on my first paper, now out in PNAS, working with 5-⭐️ advisor @meghanlmeyer. We find evidence that the DMPFC prioritizes social learning during rest.🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the psych department at the University of Illinois as an asst. professor! My lab will study perception and memory in the human brain using amazing resources of the Beckman Institute (inc 7T MRI)! I’ll be looking for grad students, so please reach out!
- Reposted by Adam Steel🚨 I'm looking for postdocs! More info and apply here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF08916 We are looking for: 1) individual differences in navigational (and other cognitive) abilities, multimodal imaging; 2) aging & the role of sex hormones; 3) spatial & non-spatial cognitive graphs
- Reposted by Adam Steel🪶 How did birds evolve wings? A partial wing is of no use for flying, but natural selection can't plan ahead and allow a species to gradually evolve toward wings that are actually useful for flying. 1/n
- Reposted by Adam SteelI wrote a j-club commentary on a recent article published in #Jneurosci by @neurosteel.bsky.social et al. I discuss the phenomenon of retrieval-related 'anterior shift' and I highlight the implications that this work has on studies examining neural reinstatement. www.jneurosci.org/content/44/1...
- New paper out in Nature Neuro, wherein we ask: How do perceptual and mnemonic brain networks share information? www.nature.com/articles/s41... Massive work with Ed Silson, Brenda Garcia, and @carolinerobertson.bsky.social
- New paper out in Nature Neuro, wherein we ask: How do perceptual and mnemonic brain networks share information? www.nature.com/articles/s41... Massive work with Ed Silson, Brenda Garcia, and @carolinerobertson.bsky.social
- Turns out, mnemonic brain areas implement the same neural coding principle as the visual system (retinotopy). Surprisingly, their retinotopic code is inverted: visual stimulation leads to spatially-specific deactivations. (see work from Thomas Knapen and @chrisklink.bsky.social )
- This opponent coding scheme flips during recall: memory areas are active, and perceptual areas are deactivated in a retinotopically-specific manner.
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View full threadThere is a lot of other exciting stuff in the paper (PRF size, visual field representations, familiar scene perception). Check it out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thank you to the reviewers for their fantastic suggestions! We’re looking forward to any questions and comments.
- Exciting work from Peter Angeli in @carolinerobertson.bsky.social lab! I've really enjoyed working with him and thinking more about the hippocampus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Exciting work from Peter Angeli in @carolinerobertson.bsky.social lab! I've really enjoyed working with him and thinking more about the hippocampus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
