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!

Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307

Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it? (OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )

A “universal” pattern of cortical brain oscillations may be less ubiquitous than previously proposed. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-waves/...

🚨 🆕 Preprint 🚨 How does the brain represent natural images? Using MEG + multivariate analysis, we disentangle contributions of retinotopy, spatial frequency, shape, and texture Together, our results reveal how visual features jointly and dynamically support human object recognition. link 👇

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

@cimcyc.bsky.social is hiring! SIX postdoc positions are coming up to dive into collaborative projects bridging together psychological science. Amazing opportunity to boost a postdoc career in a cutting-edge research center with outstanding human teams! 👇🏽 cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

Very thoughtful thread on why it matters to compute the right noise ceiling & why communication is so important to prevent this issue from spreading. Kudos to Sam for being so transparent! In brief: NC for best R^2 == data reliability expressed as r NC for best r == sqrt(reliability)

We recently stumbled upon a surprisingly common misunderstanding in computing noise ceilings that can be quite consequential. So if you care about noise ceilings, please check out Sander’s thread and our preprint! 👇

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...

Super happy to announce that our Research Training Group "PIMON" is funded by the @dfg.de ! Starting in October, we will have exciting opportunities for PhD students that want to explore object and material perception & interaction in Gießen @jlugiessen.bsky.social ! Just look at this amazing team!

New Correspondence with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social in Nat Rev Neurosci. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here, we critique a recent paper by Rosas et al. We argue that "Bottom-up" and "Top-down" neuroscience have various meanings in the literature. PDF: rdcu.be/eSKYI

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

Really excited to see this preprint out! Fernanda did an amazing job at demonstrating how you can accurately predict retinotopy from T1w scans alone. This is important for several reasons: 1/4

We’d love your feedback on BERG (github.com/gifale95/BERG): pretrained encoding models + a Python toolkit for generating in silico neural responses for in silico experimentation. Your input will make BERG more useful and reliable! forms.gle/pybrqcaqdso2... #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI

It’s not too late to apply for the PhD position in my lab! Please send your documents (cover letter, CV, transcripts, names of references) through the official application platform by Nov 25!

Huge congrats to Philipp Kaniuth for successfully defending his PhD summa cum laude (with distinction) “on the measurement of representations and similarity”! Phil was my first PhD candidate, so it’s a particularly special event for me, and he can be very proud of his achievements!

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/🧵