Anna Schapiro
@annaschapiro.bsky.social
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📥 453
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Associate Prof at U Penn. Learning, memory, sleep, neural network modeling...
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Anna Schapiro
Theresa Kim, PhD, MS
7 days ago
Tap tap tap. Does this work?
@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social
is serves the people. Not the political will. We are
#scientists
.
#NIHStrong
#imwithjenna
#BethesdaDeclaration
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Eitan Schechtman
8 days ago
The 5th International Sleep Replay Workshop is just 80 days away- Mar 6th in Vancouver!
isrw.bio.uci.edu
If you'd like to be considered to give a short talk, register by December 19th, 2025. General registration & poster submission ends February 15th, 2026.
@cnsmtg.bsky.social
Please repost
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International Sleep Replay Workshop – International Sleep Replay Workshop
https://isrw.bio.uci.edu
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Mick Bonner
8 days ago
Prediction: task-based optimization will ultimately prove to have a relatively minor role in DNN models of the ventral stream. Although tasks (including self-supervised ones) are currently crucial, there are signs that a simpler approach is possible. A thread:
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todd gureckis
8 days ago
Several people have mentioned online that they get terrible responses from online services such as Prolific, e.g., bots, LLM responses. I'm curious if anyone who has experienced that in a memorable way would mind sharing the details of their project (code, etc.).
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Mick Bonner
12 days ago
Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
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Proud of the Penn faculty senate for *unanimously* passing this resolution.
12 days ago
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Celeste Labedz
17 days ago
It's over. Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut.
www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...
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BREAKING: ‘This hurts’: UNL eliminates 4 programs despite faculty, student pleas
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln eliminates the Earth and atmospheric sciences 8-0, educational administration 7-1, statistics 7-1, textiles, merchandising and fashion design 7-1 programs.
https://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/administration/breaking-this-hurts-unl-eliminates-4-programs-despite-faculty-student-pleas/article_e0d11a61-0fcc-4e66-b364-d16e89bea336.html
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Nicole Rust
17 days ago
Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1
www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
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Sharpened visual memory representations are reflected in inferotemporal cortex
Humans and other primates can robustly report whether they've seen specific images before, even when those images are extremely similar to ones they've previously seen. Multiple lines of evidence sugg...
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/11/26/JNEUROSCI.0833-25.2025
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Robert Reich
21 days ago
Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”
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The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine
A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-science-funding-cuts.html
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Joey Fishkin
23 days ago
The most frustrating thing about American universities’ fragmented response to the Trump administration (shall each school capitulate with a “deal”?) is that it takes attention and focus away from the broad, destructive cuts to federally funded research that are an ongoing generational disaster.
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I don't think it is physically possible for me to be more excited about this. You want to join this lab, trust me!!
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27 days ago
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tyler bonnen
28 days ago
starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at
@upenn.edu
🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊
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www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/u...
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Wealthy People Have Always Shaped Universities. This Time Is Different.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/us/billionaires-influence-universities-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
29 days ago
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Jeremy Berg
30 days ago
Forceful op-ed in the Guardian about the UVA and Cornell "deals" with the administration by two lawyers from Penn.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
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The University of Virginia and Cornell deals with Trump set a dangerous precedent | Serena Mayeri and Amanda Shanor
The bespoke agreements are full of peril for the universities, allowing the federal government to quietly exert control
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/23/uva-cornell-trump
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Mina Kimes
about 1 month ago
Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia.
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
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about 1 month ago
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This is very bad.
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about 1 month ago
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Mark Joseph Stern
about 1 month ago
We can laugh about how stupid this is, but at the end of the day, a not-insignificant number of parents will believe the CDC and refuse to vaccinate. And some of their children will die because of it.
www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safe...
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Joshua Eaton
about 1 month ago
Now that’s a lede. Story by
@taracopp.bsky.social
and
@michelleboorstein.bsky.social
. Read here:
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
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Athena Akrami
about 1 month ago
paper🚨 When we learn a category, do we learn the structure of the world, or just where to draw the line? In a cross-species study, we show that humans, rats & mice adapt optimally to changing sensory statistics, yet rely on fundamentally different learning algorithms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Different learning algorithms achieve shared optimal outcomes in humans, rats, and mice
Animals must exploit environmental regularities to make adaptive decisions, yet the learning algorithms that enabels this flexibility remain unclear. A central question across neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning, is whether learning relies on generative or discriminative strategies. Generative learners build internal models the sensory world itself, capturing its statistical structure; discriminative learners map stimuli directly onto choices, ignoring input statistics. These strategies rely on fundamentally different internal representations and entail distinct computational trade-offs: generative learning supports flexible generalisation and transfer, whereas discriminative learning is efficient but task-specific. We compared humans, rats, and mice performing the same auditory categorisation task, where category boundaries and rewards were fixed but sensory statistics varied. All species adapted their behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise. Yet their underlying algorithms diverged: humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Crucially, end-point performance concealed these differences, only learning trajectories and trial-to-trial updates revealed the divergence. These results show that similar near-optimal behaviour can mask fundamentally different internal representations, establishing a comparative framework for uncovering the hidden strategies that support statistical learning. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 219880/Z/19/Z, 225438/Z/22/Z, 219627/Z/19/Z Gatsby Charitable Foundation, GAT3755 UK Research and Innovation, https://ror.org/001aqnf71, EP/Z000599/1
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.30.526119v2.abstract
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Will Bunch
about 1 month ago
You know what media is NOT bending the knee in the Trump era? College journalists! The Harvard Crimson's brutal takedown of the lecherous ex-prez Larry Summers is just the latest example of students showing a failing 'grown-up' media how it's done My new column
www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...
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College journalism exposes the rot of ‘grown-ups’ | Will Bunch Newsletter
Plus a history lesson on the real ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ and fascism,
https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/student-journalism-harvard-crimson-epstein-larry-summers-charlottes-web-20251118.html
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“Veena Dubal, the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors, one of the groups that brought the case, said in an interview on Friday that she was “kind of in tears” after the ruling.” 🥹
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/u...
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Judge Orders Trump Not to Threaten University of California’s Funding
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/us/trump-university-of-california-funding.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
about 1 month ago
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tal yarkoni
about 1 month ago
the internet has decided that em-dashes are a hallmark of llm writing, which is *extremely* annoying to me, as someone who uses em-dashes all the time. dear internet please consider the possibility that LLMs use em-dashes a lot because they're, like, good
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Miriam Posner
about 1 month ago
WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.
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Carlos Brody
about 1 month ago
@markhisted.org
, you have been and are incredibly brave and admirable. I hope the rumors are false. and: keep up the amazing work!
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Wow this looks incredibly useful
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about 1 month ago
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Eitan Schechtman
about 1 month ago
Registration is open. Please spread the word. The preliminary schedule will be up on the site later this month, and we've got an amazing line up!
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Mark Histed
about 1 month ago
A bad thing is unfolding at NIH this week: It looks like the Trump administration is trying to replace key civil servant scientific leaders, the Institute Directors, with political hires. These directors control the NIH budget, tens of billions. A bit of a video explainer here: 1/ 🧪
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Jenna Norton
about 1 month ago
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Andrew Lampinen
about 1 month ago
What aspects of human knowledge do vision models like CLIP fail to capture, and how can we improve them? We suggest models miss key global organization; aligning them makes them more robust. Check out LukasMuttenthaler's work, finally out (in Nature!?)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
+ our blog! 1/3
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Aligning machine and human visual representations across abstraction levels - Nature
Aligning foundation models with human judgments enables them to more accurately approximate human behaviour and uncertainty across various levels of visual abstraction, while additionally improving th...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09631-6
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Jeremy Berg
about 1 month ago
New podcast with me and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health team about the NIH situation over the course of this year.
podcast.publichealth.jhu.edu/974-a-tumult...
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Public Health On Call: 975 - A Tumultuous Year for NIH Funding
About this episode: Between lawsuits, layoffs, and lags in funding, NIH has undergone significant changes in how it reviews and approves grant proposals for critical research. In this episode: Jeremy ...
https://podcast.publichealth.jhu.edu/974-a-tumultuous-year-for-nih-funding
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Jeremy Berg
about 1 month ago
Good news. Faculty expressing their concerns seems to be having effects. If you are in academia, make sure your administration knows your views on the compact.
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Lior Pachter
about 2 months ago
Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted.
liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...
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James Watson in his own words
“Some anti-Semitism is justified” “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them” “Japan should be bombed for d…
https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in-his-own-words/
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Cornell AAUP
about 2 months ago
The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. At best, we can say that this deal could have been worse. Read our full statement here:
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Statement on Cornell’s agreement with federal government
The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. We ar…
https://aaup-cornell.org/2025/11/07/statement-on-cornells-agreement-with-federal-government/
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Yvonne Chen
about 2 months ago
My Lab
@unlv.edu
is recruiting motivated students interested in human memory and brain research! Learn
#EEG
,
#fMRI
, and data analysis while exploring how we remember 🧠 📧 DM me or check out
#PhD
program
www.unlv.edu/degree/phd-n...
&
www.unlv.edu/psychology/g...
Plus, Vegas is a fun place to live!🤟
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Doctor of Philosophy - Neuroscience
This interdisciplinary Ph.D. program provides coursework and research training in neuroscience, with research mentoring spanning a range of different dimensions (basic to applied/clinical neuroscience...
https://www.unlv.edu/degree/phd-neuroscience
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What is this strange feeling I woke up with this morning? Is it… hope?
about 2 months ago
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Dr Anna Leshinskaya
about 2 months ago
I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website -
www.relcoglab.org
for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.
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Relational Cognition Lab
https://www.relcoglab.org/
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NBC News
about 2 months ago
BREAKING: Pennsylvania voters approve to retain three state Supreme Court justices, NBC News projects, preserving Democrats’ 5-2 majority on the state’s high court.
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Pennsylvania voters retain three state Supreme Court justices, preserving Democrats' 5-2 majority
NBC News projects the incumbents survived an up-or-down vote to keep their seats on the battleground state’s high court.
https://nbcnews.to/3JsRj13
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Aidan Horner
about 2 months ago
I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting. A neural state space for episodic memories
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#neuroskyence
#psychscisky
#cognition
🧪
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A neural state space for episodic memories
Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661325002840
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Eleanor Holton
about 2 months ago
When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com
Work with
@summerfieldlab.bsky.social
,
@tsonj.bsky.social
, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Barack Obama
about 2 months ago
Pennsylvania has an important Supreme Court race coming up on Tuesday, November 4. If you live in the Keystone State, or know someone who does, vote YES to retain three justices who will protect your fundamental rights and freedoms.
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Brynn Sherman
about 2 months ago
Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)!
tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7
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Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time
Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027725002951?dgcid=author
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Mona Garvert
about 2 months ago
🚀 We’re hiring - Join our lab 🚀 🔍 Hiring: PhD (75% TV-L) & Postdoc (100% TV-L) 🧠 fMRI, VR, EEG, modelling We combine a range of cognitive neuroscience methods to study flexible behaviour. 📅 Start: Feb 2026 or later | ⏳ Apply by Nov 3! More details:
tinyurl.com/ms3a9ajt
#CognitiveNeuroscience
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Sarah Solomon
about 2 months ago
⭐ My lab is recruiting a grad student for fall 2026! ⭐ 🧠 If you are interested in semantic learning & memory, and want to use fMRI + computational models to ask these questions, I'll be excited to hear from you. Come join us in Bing! 🔗
sites.google.com/view/spinslab
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MindCORE at the University of Pennsylvania
about 2 months ago
Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship. MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior. Apply by Dec 1:
mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...
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Grace Lindsay
about 2 months ago
If you want to know the latest on the government's 'compact' (i.e. extortion) offer to universities, you can use this tracker. Feel free to suggest edits as well.
#academia
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
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University 'Compact' Tracker
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JXCXHZ4KfeRmDVby2csH0KqafGaH-wfuN02XXtYJIfQ/edit?usp=sharing
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Joey Fishkin
about 2 months ago
The UC Regents finally released the “settlement agreement” the Trump administration proposed in August. It’s a doozy. UC alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents, donors—and all citizens of California: Now is the time to let the UC Regents know you do not want them to sign this bad deal.
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Sam Gershman
2 months ago
In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers:
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.
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Nina Rouhani
2 months ago
I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏
rouhanilab.com
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Interactive Cognition Lab | USC
Interactive Cognition Lab at USC, led by principal investigator, Dr. Nina Rouhani.
https://rouhanilab.com
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Peter Kok
2 months ago
@dotproduct.bsky.social
's first first author paper is finally out in
@sfnjournals.bsky.social
! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With
@jhaarsma.bsky.social
. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖
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Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies
Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/10/15/JNEUROSCI.0474-25.2025.abstract
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