Francesco Poli
Rubicon research fellow at the University of Cambridge. Drinking massive amounts of tea and doing some research in between. Learning, information-seeking, cognitive and brain development. Comp modelling ethusiast. He/him. 🍉
francescpoli.github.io
- Reposted by Francesco Poli1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliNew preprint by @semihaktepe.bsky.social 🎉 We compare ANOVA/SDT/GLMM for binary judgments in 20 datasets of the truth effect. #lme4 Main conclusion: "GLMMs are a theoretically sound and practically robust method and thus superior for analyzing binary judgments in social and cognitive psychology.”
- Analyzing Binary Judgments: A Comparison of ANOVA, Signal Detection Theory, and Generalized Linear Mixed Models in the Context of the Illusory Truth Effect: osf.io/xn397
- Reposted by Francesco PoliOnline Now: The Reward Positivity signals a goal prediction error
- Reposted by Francesco PolifMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:
- This was fun!! Thanks so much for having me over :)
- @francescopoli.bsky.social joins to talk about the brain, the mind, and the individual differences in curiosity. We talk about adaptivity, how our experiences shape our relationship to information, dealing with uncertainty, and the importance of a good learning environment. youtu.be/eVUE-fwRyqg
- This Wednesday! I will be talking about curiosity in infants, children, adults (and artifcial neural networks)
- Reposted by Francesco PoliGreat piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- We have a new conference paper out just now! How do infants explore their own body? We show that in the first weeks of life, infants' self-touch actions allow them to gain information about their own body. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliIt’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #neuroscience
- Reposted by Francesco Poli[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Francesco Poli𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫 By Mars and Passingham "Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition" Going to the top of the reading list! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroskyence
- Reposted by Francesco Poli"If we believe in democratic order, let us put science and knowledge back at the heart of things, let us put scientific authority back at the heart of things, let us put culture, education and learning back at the heart of things..."
- Reposted by Francesco PoliMacron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."
- President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up! We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.” defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...
- Why are we still sending our work to Wiley and other publishing companies so that they can profit from it? There's so many better options now, for example: psychopen.eu/journals/
- Reposted by Francesco PoliIncredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- So cool!
- I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliHow does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv
- Reposted by Francesco Poli📣📣📣 Hi Everyone! I'm accepting PhD students for the Fall 2026 cycle! Our lab topics include the developmental origins and elaboration of moral cognition/prosocial behavior, persistence, and optimism. More info below!!
- Reposted by Francesco Poliit's a hyper capitalist racket, and the fact that ***academia*** (full of all those gigantic galaxy brains) collectively still hasn't managed to burn it to the fucking ground says a lot about how deep these exploitative structures run
- Reposted by Francesco Poliso ORGANIZE this is a labour issue - collectively, you are NOT powerless stop upholding systems that exploit you, chew you up and spit you out ... and that steal and lock away the knowledge you create from the rest of us out here
- Reposted by Francesco PoliJust a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.
- @fluxsociety.bsky.social is there a lost and found at #Flux2025? I lost my coat and jumper during today's poster session. Thanks!
- Reposted by Francesco Poli@sofiascatolin.bsky.social 💡 Parent-Child Functional Neural Similarity and Its Association With Child Mental Well-Being 📅 Saturday | Posters III 🕙 10:15–11:45AM | Goldsmith Hall 🎤 Flash talk: Saturday | 9:10–9:15AM | Hyde Suite 1&2 ✨ As the Beatles sang: in the end, it’s all about the love we share
- Reposted by Francesco PoliInteresting on how publishers respond when concerns are raised 👇 My own experience: Springer, 3 journals, No action Elsevier, 3, No action CUP, 1, No action Brill, 1, No action Emerald, 1, No action Frontiers, 1, No action Qeios, No action Cell Press, 1, Editorial note Royal Society, 1, Retraction
- Huge variability documented in how publishers respond when informed about a problematic body of work by a research group. www.jclinepi.com/article/S089... #publishers #retractions
- Reposted by Francesco PoliThis RedNote post shocked me today. An anonymous user says they are going to upload 60 papers to arXiv soon and are looking for “citation partners” to boost citation counts together by citing each other. Something is seriously wrong in the system of evaluating researchers by citation counts.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliHow is science fighting back against attacks in the US? The project @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social encourages researchers to publish in local newspapers in their hometowns. The goal: remind people of the value of science 👇 www.wissenschaftskommunikation.de/one-goal-is-... #scicomm #wisskomm
- Reposted by Francesco PoliGreat and detailed blog post on compositionality, written by Eric Elmoznino: ericelmoznino.github.io/blog/2025/08... #compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience
- Reposted by Francesco PoliI mean, Trump has got everyone kissing his arse *by being an enemy*. How do we imagine that kissing his arse will stop him being an enemy, when being an enemy is working so damn well for him? Are we stupid? Are we even stupider than Donald Trump? Maybe we are.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliMy first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .
- Reposted by Francesco PoliWow: tenure letter writers’ publication records (h-index) are better predictors of tenure decisions than candidates’ own publication record.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliIntroducing five concepts from dynamical systems to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms, have a read! @perez-carrasco.bsky.social @roederlab.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social This effort started in a morphogenesis meeting @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social in 2023. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...
- At 18:30 UK time, I will be presenting my work on learning and exploration across development at the @cogscisociety.bsky.social Glushko Dissertation Prize Session! #CogSci participants can join at this link: underline.io/events/489/s...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliThis is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪
- I decided not to go to cogsci in person due to the current political situation in the US. If you're still interested in our work on developmental change in cognitive effort, you can find a video summary here: underline.io/events/489/p...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliThis is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliNEW POLL from @DataProgress and @imeupolicy of NYC Democratic primary voters: • 78% say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza • 79% support restricting weapons to Israel www.imeupolicyproject.org/polls/zohran...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliEverything Gaolang Gong touches is magic. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliKapitalismus (Symbolbild)
- Am I the only one who likes Science journals way more than Nature ones? And who finds some Nature practices quite predatory?
- Reposted by Francesco PoliMy own university has a "strategic goal" to increase research "outputs" by 10% annually (7 year doubling time). Your university is almost surely working towards the same. University rankings are now the main driver of this damaging institutional behavior. Publication is an out-of-control arms race.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliGood morning folks. If you’re around #OCNS2025, maybe come by today for a chat about optimal communication in brain networks? ✨
- Reposted by Francesco PoliGot the most beautiful experimental paradigm in your head but don't know how to implement it? Head over to the DevStart tutorial on how to build one with @psychopy.org ;) tinyurl.com/devstartfirs...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliThrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
- I will never understand why we have to pay £1,000 annually for NHS, and also pay for NHS with our taxes. I'm not aware of any other country that has set up this kind of scam.
- Democrats invested $20 millions to study young men and how to reach them. Meanwhile:
- Reposted by Francesco PoliChildren are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social
- Reposted by Francesco PoliEight-month-old infants demonstrate the ability to flexibly adapt their learning strategies in response to changing environments, suggesting early cognitive flexibility. doi.org/g9rc8x
- Out now in Science Advances! We find that infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament. This has be so much fun to work on and ended up being my favourite personal paper! So excited it's out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Thanks to all collaborators @tommasoghi.bsky.social, Jana Bersee, @neuroecologylab.bsky.social & @sabinehunnius.bsky.social at @dondersinst.bsky.social
- Looking forward to visiting Iméra in Marseille this Friday, where I'll be giving a talk about how infants explore the world (and themselves) as part of this workshop: www.imera.fr/en/agenda/cu...
- Reposted by Francesco Poli🚨 BREAKING UPDATE Labour has FINALLY accepted defeat in our legal challenge of anti-protest powers We won this case in court twice - under both Conservative and Labour leadership Gov must now commit to reviewing ALL arrests made under these unlawful powers www.lbc.co.uk/news/exclusi...
- Reposted by Francesco Poli✨Excited to share that our new paper is now out in iScience!✨ 🧠 We show that people can coordinate surprisingly well in novel interactions by violating others' expectations - without requiring deep, recursive reasoning about others’ beliefs. 📄 Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliNew from The Strain Team: 🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊 Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗). Gross! 😀 1/n #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky
- Reposted by Francesco PoliIs the UK military providing Israel with the ships position? A UK sovereign ship?
- Reposted by Francesco PoliNew paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
- Congrats @sofiascatolin.bsky.social! This is such cool work showing how mothers might attune to the attentional abilities of the infants! With insights that could only be achieved with hierarchical Bayesian modelling
- 🎉 My first first-author paper is out 🎉 Our work on the associations between infant cognitive functioning and maternal caregiving quality was published on Infant Behavior and Development! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Francesco Poli🚨PhD position alert!🚨 Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric... Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!
- If you go to settings -> moderation, you can mute words, and you won't see posts with those words anymore. It feels like breathing fresh air again.
- I often wonder what would happen if the science budget cuts we see in the US would happen in Europe. I also wonder what we can do to avoid the same faith. It feels like beginning of COVID all over again, where each country thought they were immune, to then realise everyone was equally screwed...
- Reposted by Francesco PoliDemocracy has always been a contest to get different issues and framings on political agenda. Now seems to be a contest between reality and political entertainment complex. Science struggling to compete with merchants of distraction to get attention on state of the planet, economy and society.
- Reposted by Francesco Poli#neuroskyence What are your favorite papers on the idea of redundancy in the brain? E.g. how a different neural circuit can step in when the "original" is damaged? Or just how the same function can be executed in different ways within the same brain?
- Live from Cambridge - setting up a new encampment for Palestine in front of Trinity College 🇵🇸 #freepalestine
- While King's college has committed to divest millions from arms and occupation by the end of the year, Trinity College is still complicit in genocide.
- 💫
- 🏆 Each year, outstanding early-career researchers are honored with the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Award in Cognitive Science. Meet some of this year’s winners and learn about their work! #CogSci2025 #GlushkoPrize cognitivesciencesociety.org/2025-glushko...
- Everyone knows scientists who cherry-pick results or outright fabricate findings. Entire fields collapsed because figures were manipulated in Microsoft Paint! The system pressures to succeed, and who cheats has an edge—but when a fascist government attacks science, the whistle-blowers get blamed?
- This is a really cool project! Please repost to anyone interested at the intersection between developmental cognitive neuroscience and education!
- Funded PhD opportunity with @sjblakemore.bsky.social and I, at Cambridge. We are looking for someone interested in developmental science, to start in the coming academic year. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested (see details attached 😁). drive.google.com/file/d/1RIvg...
- Reposted by Francesco Poli1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social
- Reposted by Francesco Poli🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨 We're looking for a postdoc to work on EEG and fNIRS projects with 3-18-month-old infants, looking at whether/how/when infants represent affordances: careers.ceu.edu/job-invite/8... Part of the @simonsfoundation.org SCENE project: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...
- Reposted by Francesco Poli“Data centers in the US used somewhere around 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly what it takes to power Thailand for a year.” A quarter to a third of which is due to #AI. #AIEthics www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...
- I understand that capitalists need an economic reason to be convinced that universities are essential, but I find that so sad. Academia used to be a place where people fell in love with knowledge—not a place where knowledge is exploited for economic gain. We’ve come so far from that.
- Reposted by Francesco PoliFaces of the EU leaders after they hung up the phone with Trump earlier this week. I recommend zooming in on each one of them.
- Reposted by Francesco Poli[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Francesco PoliToday's paper in the "things are really hard to understand" series shines light on ANN feature visualizations: arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04719
