Noise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data. But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality. Let's dive into why. 🧵

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

*Neurocomputational architecture for syntax/learning* Neuroscience & Philo Salon: join our discussion with @elliot-murphy.bsky.social with commentaries by @wmatchin.bsky.social and @sandervanbree.bsky.social Nov 5, 10:30 am eastern US Register: umd.zoom.us/my/luizpesso... #neuroskyence

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

Large-scale similarity ratings of 768 short action videos uncover 28 interpretable dimensions—such as interaction, sport, and craft—offering a framework to quantify and compare human actions. @martinhebart.bsky.social 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...

I’m really excited to be part of this collaboration that started with a chat at the poster of @treber.bsky.social and @humansingleneuron.bsky.social at SfN in 2018 (!) Katharina and everyone involved did a really fantastic job at using adaptive sampling to learn about semantic tuning in human MTL.

“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...

1/Preprint Alert🔔: Across two experiments plus a computational model, we show the visual system compresses complex scenes into summary statistics that can guide behavior without conscious access to the task-defining features. We term this the Ensemble Blindsight effect.

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

I wanted to add some thoughts to this excellent blog post, not detailed, maybe wrong, maybe useful: 1. Unique variance is easy to interpret as a lower bound of what a variable explains (the upper bound being either what the variable explains alone or what the other variables cannot explain uniquely)

🧠 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...

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations tinyurl.com/5dku4du9 @timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social please repost 🙏

Pretty amazing how you can learn something in books and in school and it explains everything around you - how the planets move, etc. But then it’s just next level when you can see it is real, with your own eyes.

Huge congratulations 🥳 to @sofievalk.bsky.social & @reznikdan.bsky.social for receiving ERC Starting Grants 2025! We're proud of you! Learn more about their projects: www.cbs.mpg.de/2397348/2025...

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date. We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400. Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

Today I had a curious encounter with my 4-yo son. He told me he discovered that his Batman action figure could switch the Batman logo to something else. He showed me, touched its arm, shook it and said: “there, it changed.” The thing is: the logo is fixed and cannot change. So what had happened?

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

Really happy that PhD candidate Malin Styrnal in our lab won both the Best Student Poster Award *and* the Poster of the Day Award at #ECVP2025 for her presentation "The similarity of similarity tasks: Comparing eight different measures of similarity"! (unfortunately no photo with her!) Go Malin! 🥳

Last day of #ECVP tomorrow (Thursday). And at 8.30 I’ll be introducing what promises to be a coherent and lively symposium on how visual representations are held in mind. In the Audimax, with Maria Servetnik, @tbchristophel.bsky.social, Clay Curtis, and @bradpostle.bsky.social

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

Very much looking forward to #CCN2025! Would love to see you at our lab's talks and posters, and meet me at the panel discussion in the Algonauts session on Wednesday!

looking forward to seeing everyone at #CCN2025! here's a snapshot of the work from my lab that we'll be presenting on speech neuroscience 🧠 ✨

Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! If you're here, check out the presentations from our lab 👇@qinwenshuo.bsky.social @ziruichen.bsky.social @manasimalik.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

If anyone fancies moving to NZ, the @universityofotago.bsky.social are advertising for up to SIX faculty positions in their School of Psychology 👀 www.seek.co.nz/psychology-j...

On Friday, niklasmuller.bsky.social shows that estimating population receptive fields (pRF) using DNN feature maps but without assuming a Gaussian pRF shape yields better predictions of THINGS ephys data, uncovering surprising pRF geometries! 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=1... Poster C105, 14:00-17:00

After preparing for a full year together with @neurosteven.bsky.social and all other amazing organizers of @cogcompneuro.bsky.social, #CCN2025 is finally here! While I'm proud of the entire program we put together, I'd now like to highlight my own lab's contributions, 6 posters total:

Excited to share that our lab has three presentations at #CCN2025! Please check out our posters:

Check out our new preprint on spatial hearing👂 in humans and deep neural networks We found that humans exhibit more robust sound localization than models when probed with out-of-distribution sounds, like those lacking primary interaural cues! Link 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Full thread 🧵👇

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

In 2019, the CNeuroMod team and 6 participants began a massive data collection journey: twice-weekly MRI scans for most of 5 years. Data collection is now complete! 1/🧵

🚨 Finally out in Nature Machine Intelligence!! "Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models" 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Nice work by @yoichimiyawaki.bsky.social showing the fMRI hemodynamic response contains enough info to decode stimulus type within 2sec. Happy to have helped with this project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New CNeuroMod-THINGS open-access fMRI dataset: 4 participants · ~4 000 images (720 categories) each shown 3× (12k trials per subject)· individual functional localizers & NSD-inspired QC . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.09024 Congrats Marie St-Laurent and @martinhebart.bsky.social !!

@tnm-lab.bsky.social Kausalitätswahrnehmung, Erwartungen & fMRT begeistern dich? Bewirb dich auf die Promotionsstelle (3 Jahre, 75%) in Marburg (www.theadaptivemind.de) bis zum 17.08.: stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/1... #Job #Promotion #fMRI #Psychologie

🧠✨ Excited to share that our literature review on retinotopic mapping in the human visual cortex is now published! tinyurl.com/5d9ne68b Amazing collab with Noah Benson and Alex Puckett! We hope this will be a helpful resource for pRF modellers and visual neuroscientists!

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

🚨 New paper in Journal of Vision! We show that scene affordances—what you can do in a space—shape how we perceive and categorize scenes. This shapes your similarity preferences, predicts your categorization false alarms, and even alters neural representations. 🧵👇 🔗 doi.org/10.1167/jov.... (1/7)

🚨 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

2 more days to apply! Updated info here: drive.google.com/file/d/1WGEE...

My first dissertation paper is out in Nature Mental Health! 🤩 With colleagues from @tudresden.bsky.social and @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social, we conducted a meta-analysis on the link between childhood trauma and interoception — our ability to sense internal bodily signals. rdcu.be/eu8bo 1/🧵

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Go work with Rosanne!

🚨 Our new paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! 🤔 Deep neural nets (DNNs) often align with humans in performance and even representations — but do they "think" like us? 📄 “Dimensions underlying the representational alignment of deep neural networks with humans”

Big year for our lab at #OHBM2025! Thrilled to present an exciting mix of posters, talks, and lots of brainy fun 🧠🤓 Come check us out! We’d love to connect! @cognizelab.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OHBM #OHBM2025 #Neuroimaging

@neocosmliang.bsky.social demonstrating a domain general neural signature that predicts perceived beauty of objects 🌹🥀 in collab with the amazing @martinhebart.bsky.social and @dkaiserlab.bsky.social #THINGS

What makes humans similar or different to AI? In a paper out in @natmachintell.nature.com led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @lukasmut.bsky.social, w/ Umut Güclü, we took a deep look at the factors underlying their representational alignment, with surprising results. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A more personal note: my sister Alexandra is a professional singer in the Northern German Radio Choir. She has a great solo tonight at 8pm CET in the Hamburg Elbe philharmonic hall. If you like Italian baroque, tune in online: www.ndr.de/orchester_ch...