If neuroscience needs behavior, then it also needs control theory ... but that's not the only reason: check out the workshop at #Bernsteinconference bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

We got accepted at #NeurIPS2025. I am very happy that I could merge my knowledge of Mathematics with AI to create sth new and useful for the community. ☺️ The paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.17190 The code: github.com/Baran-phys/T...

New #preprint - @bhartl.bsky.social , Léo Pio-Lopez arxiv.org/abs/2509.11131 "Neural cellular automata: applications to biology and beyond classical AI"

❗️Russian strike on the National Pharmaceutical University in #Kharkiv. Four people injured: 89, 54, 52 and 51 years old. Civilian building. It is badly damaged.

🧠 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...

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

The Dept. of Psychology at the U. Wisconsin–Madison has an opening for an Assistant Professor in the area of Computational Neuroscience and/or Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI). Domain of behavior or cognition is open. Details at jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

This is an amazing success story. We are happy to have published several papers there - it really has become the top neuroimaging journal within just two years. Kudos to all who had the courage to make it happen!

We developed Arnold - the first control policy that learns multiple motor skills across detailed musculoskeletal models. A small step towards understanding the computational principles behind motor intelligence.

Some ups and downs on Sara’s journey: ER visit in June, uncertain scan results, insurance battles—but also progress: she’s stronger, seizure-free, and several therapies are planned for the months ahead 💚Full update here: gofund.me/7d072ec4

I’ll be presenting tomorrow morning on associative knowledge & VWM as a part of the fun symposium “working memory beyond the item” put together by @johannahein.bsky.social !

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

🚨 Clinicians have noted for decades how planning & anxiety are linked. Yet, computational psychiatry thus far failed to show how. Here, I explain that we need to broaden how we model planning to reveal its *biases* in chronic anxiety. A 🧵 on the framework 1/n authors.elsevier.com/a/1kAJC4sIRv...

We introduce PuzzleJAX, a benchmark for reasoning and learning. 🧩💡🦎 PuzzleJAX compiles hundreds of existing grid-based PuzzleScript games to hardware-accelerated JAX environments, and allows researchers to define new tasks via PuzzleScript's concise rewrite rule-based DSL.

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)

This paper shows that some human "gestalt" style visual processing can emerge in purely feedforward deep nets with the right inductive biases and fine-tuning: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

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

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Datasets like NSD & THINGS offer rich stimuli but often test a single task. After great conversations at #CCN2025 on multi-task studies & generalization in brains & models, I thought I would repost our perspective for those interested in this topic. We need multiple tasks!👉 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

Fast weight programming and linear transformers: from machine learning to neurobiology arxiv.org/abs/2508.084...

🤖 🧠 NEW PAPER ON COGSCI & AI 🧠 🤖 Recent neural networks capture properties long thought to require symbols: compositionality, productivity, rapid learning So what role should symbols play in theories of the mind? For our answer...read on! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 1/n

One week later, and another interactive world model drops, but this one’s open source. matrix-game-v2.github.io As western companies are closing down their models, eastern ones are increasingly opening theirs up. #MLSky

Last chance to apply for this tenure track position in Genetics at Trinity College Dublin! Come join us!

If you’re into predictive processing and curious about the ‘what & when of visual surprise’, come see me at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam! Poster B23 · Wednesday at 1:00 pm · de Brug.

Really looking forward to #CCN2025! On Tuesday, I'm presenting new work with @kathadobs.bsky.social on segregated vs. integrated face & body processing in visual cortex 😊🧍🧠 Using DNNs & fMRI, we test competing hypotheses, finding both distinct & shared selectivity. Come by Poster A64 for more.

Looking forward to @compcogneuro.bsky.social's #CCN2025, which takes place in my backyard this year. If you are there as well, hook me up for a chat, and go and visit @lassedietz.bsky.social, @liangyouzhang.bsky.social, and @arora-borealis.bsky.social's posters on Tue/Wed/Fri. [1/2]

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!

Folks at #CCN2025, drop by my poster tomorrow to hear about the fun task I have been developing with Roland Fleming, to gauge internal models of diverse physical objects in a controlled way! There will be a demo as well 🕹️ Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

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...

It’s just matrix multiplication

#CCN2025 is starting tomorrow in Amsterdam, and our lab is presenting and contributing in several ways. A summary thread:

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:

me: “holy smokes that robot wrote a poem, wtf, amazing” 1000 people on bluesky: “you’re the dumbest man alive for thinking that’s a poem, it’s a facsimile of a poem. anyway a monkey could build a machine that writes poems. by the way you’re a loathsome shill for tech who everyone finds disgusting”

Successful prediction of the future enhances encoding of the present. I am so delighted that this work found a wonderful home at Open Mind. The peer review journey was a rollercoaster but it *greatly* improved the paper. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Excellent work exposing current limitations for capturing syntactic representations in LLMs “Probing Syntax in Large Language Models: Successes and Remaining Challenges” www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.03211

Hi, we will have three NeuroAI postdoc openings (3 years each, fully funded) to work with Sebastian Musslick (@musslick.bsky.social), Pascal Nieters and myself on task-switching, replay, and visual information routing. Reach out if you are interested in any of the above, I'll be at CCN next week!

On Tuesday, Sushrut's (@sushrutthorat.bsky.social) Glimpse Prediction Networks will make their debut: a self-supervised deep learning approach for scene-representations that align extremely well with human ventral stream. Time: August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm Location: A55, de Brug & E‑Hall

OK, time for a CCN runup thread. Let me tell you about all the lab’s projects present at CCN this year. #CCN2025

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

Happy to announce that I am presenting a poster today at #CogSci25: Physical reasoning during motor learning aids people at transferring mass, but not motor control mappings. This is joint work with Dominik Ürüm, @mariaeckstein.bsky.social and @c-rothkopf.bsky.social Find out more at P3-T-192!

Super excited to share our new article: “Dissociable cortical regions represent things and stuff in the human brain” with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @rtpramod.bsky.social and @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social Video abstract: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0XR... Paper: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lWxv3QW8S...

One remarkable aspect of human physical reasoning and perception is our ability to track and predict the motion of hidden objects. Come see my poster at #CogSci2025 (P1-D-44), where I show how people “see through occlusion”, and how we model it using Bayesian inference. @cogscisociety.bsky.social

Can you tell if a tower will fall or if two objects will collide — just by looking? 🧠👀 Come check out my #CogSci2025‪ poster (P1-W-207) on July 31, 13:00–14:15 PT to learn how people do general-purpose physical reasoning from visual input!

Accepted in the European Journal of Neuroscience: "Wider than the Sky: An Alternative to “Mapping” the World onto the Brain" (Barwich, A.S., Firestein, S., and M. Dietrich) Open Access link to journal as soon as the paper is online! Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... #NeuroSky #PhilSky #HPS

My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv... Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)

Very sad to learn of the death on 18th July of Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a titan of cognitive science and AI. I met her many times, and respected her greatly. www.theargus.co.uk/memorials/de...