Preprint! Representations in working memory wax and wane with relevance. How does this affect what we remember later? We show that temporal expectations drive competition between items in working memory and that these neural dynamics predict long-term forgetting.

We have an exciting series of talks coming up this semester. Starting on April 22nd, Wednesday's 6pm Berlin time! Join us in going back to mental representations!

In a new preprint, we use a combination of 2AFC and discrimination tasks to quantify sensory, decisional, and metacognitive noise in units of the physical stimulus. We find that, across two experiments, sensory and decisional noise are comparable, while meta noise is lower. osf.io/preprints/ps...

new preprint! 🐍 In a dynamic Snake game inspired task, we show participants flexibly replan their behaviors after distraction, but this ability is constrained by memory load and distraction strength. EEG results coming soon👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper! Out now in Neuropsychologia: “Sparsity and memory constraints interact with training sequence to bias learning of associative maps” with @dalezhou.bsky.social*, @kwcooper.bsky.social, @lovecrabmeat.bsky.social, and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mipv6TBG9... 🧵:

🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu) "Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks" We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context. How might this work...? 🧵1/8

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma www.nature.com/articles/s41...

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro! www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/

Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉 Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy. Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.

Very happy to share our review on Reinforcement Learning vs Statistical Learning, with @ambrafer.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A nice summary: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/two-eng...

Whether the hippocampus is involved in unrewarded learning has been a controversial question. A new preprint finds that it may be critical for passively learning information. By @natmesanash.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/memory/hippo...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking: Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods? (alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

it's out! @hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place. philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

I'll be giving a talk in the #CNS2026 Rising Star session on Saturday. Come say hi if you're around!

it's endearing when your friend makes an emoji out of your face & it's used it in the department slack... right😅?

How hierarchical structures affect the when (what, where) of event memory? Hint: temporal compression 👇 A first virtual reality study by @matthewrlogie.bsky.social as part of experience-project.eu

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social & @valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.

New preprint! We mapped out how ‘diffuse’ predictions affect neural representations. We show predictions reshape the geometric layout of the neural representations by compressing the representational spread and stabilize the neural code by reducing the neural variance during memory encoding.

It's here and it has drag and drop. 💖

Which "statistic" governs statistical learning? Find out in this new article of our lab: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New preprint 🚨 Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

An Efficient Computing Theory of Prefrontal Structured Working Memory Representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.16.706126v1

Our paper is now out at JNeuro! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... How do we avoid attentional capture by salient stimuli? We found that inversions of singleton distractor representations support attentional suppression of salient items.

Applications are officially OPEN! Become a student or a Teaching Assistant in #NeuromatchAcademy or #ClimatematchAcademy ➡️ Apply now: portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in Applications close 15 March. 🤓 Learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/ #ComputationalScience #OnlineLearning #GlobalLearning

My course notes have been updated to discuss how different models can be reframed in terms of a learning update rule (fusaroli.github.io/AdvancedCogn...) feedback is very welcome, as I was making it up as I was teaching the other day :-)

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum @erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

New paper just published in Cerebral Cortex 🧠 Frontal midline theta synchronization causally supports updating statistical regularities, improving adaptive prediction without boosting simple performance. doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaf346 @orspesthy.bsky.social #neuroskyence

📜 Very happy to see our article on domain-general metacognition now published in Psychological Sciences ! Congrats to my co-authors @khat.bsky.social, Renate Rutiku, Michał Wierzchoń, and @krsandberg.bsky.social #skudnet journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Quick thread:

Final paper of my PhD 🤗 www.nature.com/articles/s44... There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making. However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.

Join us 7-15 Feb for Python for Computational Science Week! 🐍 Strengthen your Python skills at your own pace with light support on Reddit. 🤓 Perfect for students applying to our July courses or potential TAs looking to practice. ➡️ Take the pledge: airtable.com/appIQSZMZ0Jx... #PythonWeek

"Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception" @predictivebrain.bsky.social @clarepress.bsky.social nice to see our work situated within a broader research program on differences between learning & perceptual predictions www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Over the years, I have written a few Jupyter/Rmd/Matlab notebooks that attempt to teach some statistical concepts, particularly in neuroimaging. You can find them here: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.h..., though I will say a bit more about each one in a number of posts over next few days.

Stimulus familiarity shapes hierarchical structure learning and metacognitive dynamics: https://osf.io/x5atk

Massive kudos to @rochellekaper.bsky.social for incredible work putting together a super complex design, gorgeous analyses, and excellent writing. Clever, insightful, and brilliant all around! All materials and analyses shared openly too – see link for details!

super excited to share my preprint with @meganakpeters.bsky.social stimulus familiarity shapes hierarchical structure learning and metacognitive dynamics🚀😊!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

A normative account of human temporal structure learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.10.698785v1

For 15(!) years I’ve been teaching introductory #MRI to grad students, and struggled to find a textbook for a wide variety of backgrounds. I'm happy to share an online textbook I created, fully open source (including code for generating figures and plots shown): larsonlab.github.io/MRI-educatio...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Meta-learning is expressed through altered prefrontal cortical dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.01.697272v1

Congrats to @laurennross.bsky.social, @ucirvine.bsky.social logic & philosophy of science Dean's Professor and Chancellor's Fellow, who’s received research funding from the John Templeton Foundation to study token causality, which concerns explanations for specific events!

Happy to share this new paper from the lab led by Angus Chapman, now out in PLoS Biology! It presents an integrated spatiotemporal normalization model for continuous vision. @afchapman.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Building hierarchically nested structure by rapid neural sequences www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

is it considered character building when you have to cut your finished 2500 word proposal to 1000🥶