Alex Martin talked about his "eclectic" career spanning over 4 decades, including 31 years in the Laboratory of Cognition (NIH), with some reflections on what makes a successful scientific career: "the right place at the right time", "it's good to be first", "controversy is helpful"

Second day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin

First day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin

Great symposium in honor of Alex Martin at the NIMH

Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

🚨New preprint alert! 🚨 Do multimodal LLMs (VLMs) reason about high-level visual perception like humans do? We asked over 2000 human observers and 18 VLMs to describe scenes using 15 different tasks, ranging from general knowledge, affordances, affect, sensory experiences, and future prediction. 1/

How do we define "good" fMRI data? Especially with resting state, there are circularity risks if we evaluate data quality as showing the networks we expect to see. Javier Gonzalez-Castillo (& me & others) developed pBOLD, a new metric that uses multi-echo info. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/8

The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

Can we use robotic augmentation limbs as flexibly as our natural limbs⁉️ 🧨 Our new study, just out in @currentbiology.bsky.social, tested this using the Third Thumb @daniclode.bsky.social: a wearable robotic extra thumb you control with your toes! www.cell.com/current-biol... ‼️‼️

Really looking forward to diving into these replies to @jbrendanritchie.bsky.social recent paper, which I found very inspiring and provoking Vision #neuroscience should work to balance the study of category-specificity without isolating our stimuli from their rich, complex behavioural relevance

Category selectivity vs. behavioral relevance in visual cortex? 👁️🧠 @levandyck.bsky.social and I really enjoyed diving into this piece and appreciated the authors’ thoughtful response. We're curious to see how the field moves forward from here! ➡️

Is the concept of “category-selectivity” holding the field back in understanding high-level visual cortex? Detailed discussion in our published perspective piece and accompanying commentaries:

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It’s out!

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

🚨 We’re recruiting a fully funded PhD student (from outside the UK) to join the lab with @tessamdekker.bsky.social 🌍👁️🧠 The PhD is part of IndiBrain.eu and will use cutting‑edge fMRI+qMRI+psychophysics to study information flow between eye and brain in ocular gene therapy. Apply by 27 Feb! t.ly/gahGB

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

Postdoc position to work on neuroimaging methods with @fmri-today.bsky.social (and me) fim.nimh.nih.gov/positions-av...

It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:

I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

I finally got around to setting up a lab website! Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io Just in time to start the new semester.

🔥Design the next #VSS2026 T-shirt! Show off your creativity & win $500 + recognition at the meeting. Deadline: Jan 15, 2026 → www.visionsciences.org/2026-graphic...

Has anyone attended any pre-data-collection poster sessions (i.e., poster sessions where people present their plans for experiments before data collection in order to get feedback when it's most useful) at conferences other than VSS?

Now out in #JNeurosci -- we found changes in medial parietal cortex after manual exploration of everyday real-world objects doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... with Beth Rispoli, Vinai Roopchansingh & @cibaker.bsky.social

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

Is the “standard workflow” holding back fMRI analysis? Mass-univariate analysis is still the bread-and-butter: intuitive, fast… and chronically overfitted. Add harsh multiple-comparison penalties, and we patch the workflow with statistical band-aids. No wonder the stringency debates never die.

New paper (and thread) on the representational dynamics of the main dimensions of object space: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 1/n

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. 🧵

I’ll soon(ish) post an ad for a postdoc position in my lab to study individual differences in brain plasticity following blindness or deafness, with a start date of spring/summer 2026. Feel free to email me if you’re interested.

🌏 Come spend some time with us in Sydney! 🇦🇺 @marcsinstitute.bsky.social is offering International Visiting Scholarships for PhD students + postdocs. Spend 1–3 months collaborating, exploring ideas, and building connections. 📅 Apply by 4 Dec 📍 Sydney, Australia Curious or keen? DM or email me

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...

📣 New preprint by a stellar team 🤩 I’m most excited by “phase III” in the alignment time course, which is best captured by mid-layers of temporally integrating video models! While we do not directly compare with image-EEG (yet - will do so in the #VIDI) I suspect this is unique to video vision 🎥🔥

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience. mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age. Link in post below 👇

🧠 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...

Happy to hear any and all feedback on our discussion article! So much fun to work with this amazing set of authors :)

Excited to have this one out! We found that the perception of illusory faces relies on parallel brain representations of faces and objects with different dynamics, enabling flexible behaviour.

Eye movements, vision and memory through the lens of Sherlock - awesome collaborative project led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social

A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief go.nature.com/3Jp9NPG

Loss of sensory input has long been used to study brain plasticity - here, we challenge the prevailing view of massive reorganization in a longitudinal study of amputees Massive effort from @hunterschone.bsky.social who was in the awesome NIH/UCL PhD program with @plasticity-lab.bsky.social

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...

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:

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 !!

Amazing effort from @gcaedwards.bsky.social @ryanruhde.bsky.social Mica Carroll to rigorously test hf-tRNS on visual cortex. We didn’t replicate, but learned a lot and have ideas for moving forward Thanks to @pci-regreports.bsky.social for constructive guidance through the whole process

Can humans use artificial limbs for body augmentation as flexibly as their own hands? 🚨 Our new interdisciplinary study put this question to the test with the Third Thumb (@daniclode.bsky.social), a robotic extra digit you control with your toes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵1/10

New work from our lab investigating the relationship between repetition suppression, repetition priming and increases in oscillatory power in simultaneous fMRI-EEG. Induced power increases are strongly associated with priming magnitude, supporting a mix of the synchrony and facilitation models.

In these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):

How is high-level visual cortex organized? In a new preprint with @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social, we show that category-selective areas encode a rich, multidimensional feature space 🌈 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence 🧵 1/n