It's #VSS2026 time! We're super excited to be back and presenting some exciting, ongoing projects in the lab. Come by and say hi! 🤗

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

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!

Encoding models uncover fine-grained feature selectivity for bodies, hands and tools https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.09.717525v1

Face-selective neurons in the macaque visual cortex dynamically change their tuning properties, a new study finds. By Holly Barker www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just in time for my PhD defense, the work I started during my visiting PhD in the lab of Martin Hebart at Giessen University is available as a preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ever wondered how your brain knows exactly how to pick up and use a tool? ☕🔨 bsky.app/profile/comm...

1/7 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.

Essential reading on how the brain makes language possible, @gregoryhickok.bsky.social's "Wired for Words" provides a critical synthesis of over 150 years of research to build a new understanding of the neural architecture of the brain’s language system: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255341...

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.

Excited to share our new paper in Imaging Neuroscience! doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... #neuroscience

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Alexis Kidder, Tijl Grootswagers, et al: Mapping object space dimensions: New insights from temporal dynamics doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

#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. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0187-25.2025

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Now in press at Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Check it out if you are interested in category selectivity, the organization of visual cortex, and topographic models!

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...

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

1. 🧵 Thread: What happens to the visual brain after early transient blindness? Our new Nature Communications paper examines a rare population: people born with dense bilateral cataracts—a short blindness occurring during a critical window of visual development. 🔗 rdcu.be/eQjMH

Our new preprint on the FOODEEG open dataset is out! EEG recordings and behavioural responses on food cognition tasks for 117 participants will be made publicly available 🧠 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Revealing Key Dimensions Underlying the Recognition of Dynamic Human Actions” New work led by Andre Bockes and Angelika Lingnau - with some small support from me - on dimensions underlying the mental representation of dynamic human actions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684 🧵

@annabavaresco.bsky.social and @tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images. doi.org/10.1145/3768...

Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1

New findings from my lab in Nature Communications suggest that racial stereotypes can lead the brain's perceptual system to temporarily "see" weapons where they don't exist. Led by: @dongwonoh.bsky.social Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/6)

The myth of optimality in human movement science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New in #JNeurosci: People share the same brain responses to different colors, and Bannert and Bartels predicted what color a person is looking at by using the brain activity of others. @unituebingen.bsky.social https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well? We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics. 📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share my latest work with @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @andpru.bsky.social! We asked: How does the motor cortex account for arm posture when generating movement? Paper 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/10

"Assuming that functional specialisation necessarily implies an ‘encapsulated module’ is a widely recognised error even in evolutionary accounts."

Shared texture-like representations, not global form, underlie deep neural network alignment with human visual processing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.29.673066v1

Can self supervised learning help understand how the brain learns to see the world? Our latest study, led by Josephine Raugel (FAIR, ENS), is now out: 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18226 🧵 thread below

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

Now 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

Congratulations to Flo Martinez-Addiego and ‪@striemamit.bsky.social‬ for the publication of a cool new paper in PNAS showing that high-level actions like tool use generalize between hand and foot, even in individuals born without hands. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Presented my study a few days ago at a minitalk during the Cognitive Science Arena #CSA in Brixen. It was fun :) #VisionScience #ObjectPerception

At #EWCN I presented my poster. Preliminary results from 2 #fMRI experiments (2nd ongoing) suggest scene clutter may influences size & animacy along the ventral stream—with animacy staying robust after mid-level controls. Feedback welcome! #VisionNeuroscience #CognitiveNeuroscience #VisionScience

🚨 Preprint alert! Excited to share my second PhD project: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision” -- a nice case showing that biology, neuroscience, and psychology can still help AI :)! arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

Interested in category selectivity and topographic modelling? Come see my poster tomorrow at CCN (A57). We show that encoding models confirm dissociable selective responses to bodies, hands, and tools, and test if topographic ANNs capture that organization. See you there!

New lab preprint, led by @tlmnhut.bsky.social. We show that certain topographic CNNs offer computational advantages, including greater weight matrix robustness, better handling of OOD noisy data, and higher entropy of unit activation. arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043

Nhut Truong, Uri Hasson: Improved Robustness and Functional Localization in Topographic CNNs Through Weight Similarity https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.00043

New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n