So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

“Researchers looked at two high-profile AI agent tools developed to help computer scientists in the field of machine learning. Both systems engaged in acts that violate research integrity, including making up data & p-hacking: running an experiment multiple times but only reporting best outcome.” 🧪

Tony is 100% right. This can't be said often enough.

What do we look for when searching for objects in our daily-life environments? Very happy that I can now share this review, together with @suryagayet.bsky.social , @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social🥳 A brief thread below!

New paper alert: very proud to share our review published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, spearheaded by @maellelerebourg.bsky.social, and together with @peelen.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social, about goal-directed search in real-world environments. See below for a thread/tldr!

What does it mean for cognition to be Bayesian? The view that cognition is Bayesian inference is often intended at Marr's computational level. In a new paper in Nat Rev Psych, @kaixue98.bsky.social and I formulate the "explicit-Bayes" hypothesis that lives at the algorithmic level. rdcu.be/ff1XA

And a nice summary by Richard Antonello can be found here: elifesciences.org/articles/111...

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

I think this chart is absolutely wonderful for people who think about the environment but find it hard to cut on meat. Remember: eating a bit less beef is much easier than going full veg(etari)an, while still helping a lot. And after a while you notice that you don't even need it that much... 🤷‍♀️

When it comes to blood flow in the brain, not all neurons are created equal. Rather, only a subset of neurons may be driving vascular changes, a new study finds. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neurovascula...

Our work on how neural circuits in the cerebellum encode prior probabilities led by Julius Koppen is out now in Nature Neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big thanks to Julius Koppen & the whole team! And dedicated to all of us who found inspiration in Bayesian theories of the brain!

Very interesting sounding paper on the role of the default mode network in visual perception by Ujhelyi, Korda & Zaretskaya. The authors propose that the DMN provides top-down information from memory and semantic knowledge to guide perception. #neuroskyence

@lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence The Perspective article by Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl K. Miller states that categorization is a fundamental property of the brain and.....

The Obleser lab will be hiring soon! New postdoc (fully funded) and new PhD or part-time postdoc position (soft-money funded). Spread the word. Start in Sept/Oct. Watch out for official announcements! Please be in touch. auditorycognition.com obleserlab.com hoerhanse.de lemmi.uni-luebeck.de

We’re hiring! Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me? We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven. RTs much appreciated! www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

fully agree with Stefano. I spent years of my training learning to translate scientific thinking into models and code. if that’s no longer a bottleneck, what was the point — and what should replace it?

New preprint! w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social We found that, even during simple natural scene viewing, human visual cortex predicts—hierarchically in central vision and at higher levels peripherally—reconciling classical predictive coding with recent evidence from animal models and AI (e.g. JEPA) (1/10)

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits. Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

Join us for a postdoc @ the Donders Institute; application deadline March 24. www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

How do humans adapt their behavior in natural, uncertain environments? Open PhD position in the collaborative DFG Excellence Cluster “The Adaptive Mind” (theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de) Apply: www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

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...

⏰️ LAST CALL - Student and TA applications close on Sunday 22 March! 🚨 Don't let the deadline pass you by! ➡️ Create a portal account and apply now: portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in #DeepLearning #ComputationalNeuroscience #NeuroAI #ClimateScience #OpenScience #SummerSchool #Neuroscience #TA

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

We have three lectureships available at York Psychology (@yorkpsychology.bsky.social) with a broad remit for research/teaching areas. Home and overseas applications are welcome. Deadline for applications is early April - enquiries welcome. Come and join us! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

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...

#Aphantasia and visual working memory: No direct evidence of impaired visual working memory in aphantasics, either in behavioral performance or the accuracy of a multivoxel pattern classifier www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Registration and abstract submission for our symposium Naturalistic Neuroscience – from perception to action and back (University of Bonn 28-29 May 2026) is no open! www.nn2026.uni-bonn.de/en/registrat... #NN2026 @unibonn.bsky.social #naturalisticneuroscience #neuroscience #symposium #cfa

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

What a wonderful keynote by Peter Hagoort! For more information on Hagoort's work, read this exclusive Q&A on the CNS blog: www.cogneurosociety.org/making-the-b... #CNS2026 10/ end 🧵

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience

Great opportunity to work in a terrific lab:

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Why are tactile sensations suppressed during movements? In our new preprint, we explain this as optimal integration of sensory signals with an internal model. Work led by @fatatai.bsky.social with Dimitris Voudouris, Katja Fiehler and @c-rothkopf.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Preprint alert ❗ Holistic and kinematics priors enable predictive neural representations during biological motion perception With: @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @moritzwurm.bsky.social At: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

📢 Workshop announcement. We are super excited to announce the workshop Perceptual Inferences, from philosophy to neuroscience, organized by Alexander Schütz and Daniel Kaiser. 📍 Rauischholzhausen Castle, near Marburg, Germany 🗓️ June 8 to 10, 2026. 1/4

Interesting convergence: The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1 Now published: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

"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...

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

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.

🧠 Feature-specific predictive processing: What’s in a prediction error? 🧠 Perspective article w/ Cem Uran, @martinavinck.bsky.social & @predictivebrain.bsky.social now in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, highlighting recent work on the nature of surprise reflected in visual prediction errors. 🧵👇

This 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!

Rep. Seth Moulton comes on CNN and starts by saying: "Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? This is insane. What the hell are we doing? We've got a lot of problems in America today, and invading / occupying / running Venezuela does not solve any of them."

Me getting back to sending nagging emails on January 6th when people return to work from the Christmas break

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI? ➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com rdcu.be/eWVmA

There's been a cluster of recent work on these sort of flow based or trajectory based world models, including nova flow and amplify (amplify a past episode of ours). These are super exciting because they reduce requirements for really accurate action labels imo