CfA: Workshop “Philosophical Issues in Neural Computation” (@ruhr-uni-bochum.de) Jun 2–3 2026. Deadline: March 31. Further Speakers: @adriendoerig.bsky.social, @francesegan.bsky.social, @olivia.science, @gualtiero.bsky.social, @seelikat.bsky.social, Oron Shagrir.

Turns out that individual differences in accuracy, confidence, and RT among ANNs that only differ in their random initialization mimic the individual differences in humans. It may be time for NeuroAI to take individual differences even more seriously. Check out Herrick's thread 👇

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published. #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI doi.org/10.1038/s414...

New paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Out today in Journal of Vision: Mapping the visual cortex with Zebra noise and wavelets By Sophie Skriabine and Max Shinn, with Samuel Picard and @kenneth-harris.bsky.social doi.org/10.1167/jov....

Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

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

Happy to see this preprinted! We show temporally fine-grained auditory representations in EEG during silent reading. Could be a candidate neural substrate for the inner voice many people report having while reading! Congrats @jiaweili.bsky.social on all the hard work.

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...

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...

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

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.

Excited to share my first paper: Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn’t the Right One (NeurIPS 2025). link below.

Very cool work, go check it out! Rich, brain-like scene representations built from acrive vision

This seems very cool, @singerjohannes.bsky.social decidedly did loads of cool stuff before I got lucky and he joined our group

Ask a brain anything! This is incredible work led by Victoria Bosch @initself.bsky.social at the Kietzmann Lab @timkietzmann.bsky.social, developing interactive and flexible brain decoding. I'm excited to see where this goes next.

New preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Today I want to share two new works on this topic: Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425 Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492 1/9

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

Awesome work by @jorge-morales.bsky.social and team, using LLMs to suggest that propositional reasoning might be enough to solve classic imagery tasks! ✨

So excited to see this preprint released from the lab into the wild. Charlotte has developed a theory for how learning curriculum influences learning generalization. Our theory makes straightforward neural predictions that can be tested in future experiments. (1/4) 🧠🤖 🧠📈 #MLSky

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)

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

🧠 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...

What determines where specialisation for sensory information occurs in the cortex? We observe a spatial competition between primary sensory areas and the Default Mode Network, using our new Spatial Component Decomposition method. Work by @ulysse-klatzmann.bsky.social , with Bazin & Daniel Margulies

Preprint alert! 🚨 1/ How does deep sleep reshape our memories? Our new study shows that slow-wave sleep (SWS) reorganises episodic memory networks, shifting recall from the parietal cortex to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). With Polina Perzich and @bstaresina.bsky.social . A thread below👇

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧠 “You never forget how to ride a bike”, but how is that possible? Our study proposes a bio-plausible meta-plasticity rule that shapes synapses over time, enabling selective recall based on context

New paper with @ManuKirberg 💭 Is “unconscious mental imagery” real? The evidence is weaker than it seems. We explain why—and how to move the debate forward. 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🔍 Large language models, similar to those behind ChatGPT, can predict how the human brain responds to visual stimuli New study by @adriendoerig.bsky.social @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social with colleagues from Osnabrück, Minnesota and @umontreal-en.bsky.social Read the whole story 👉 bit.ly/3JXlYmO

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...

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

So happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Very happy to see this preprint out! The amazing @danwang7.bsky.social was on fire sharing this work at #ECVP2025, gathering loads of attention, and here you can find the whole thing! Using RIFT we reveal how the competition between top-down goals and bottom-up saliency unfolds within visual cortex.

Job alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models www.nature.com/articles/s42... by @adriendoerig.bsky.social @timkietzmann.bsky.social et al.; more information in the thread bsky.app/profile/adri... #neuroscience #AI #NeuroAI

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Is it possible to manipulate a high-level visual property while holding ~all low-level visual properties constant? “No!”, you say. Allow @talboger.bsky.social to show you otherwise! Now in press @currentbiology.bsky.social 🐇🐘

In our new paper, we explore how we can build encoding models that are both powerful and understandable. Our model uses an LLM to answer 35 questions about a sentence's content. The answers linearly contribute to our prediction of how the brain will respond to that sentence. 1/6

New paper with @rjantonello.bsky.social @csinva.bsky.social, Suna Guo, Gavin Mischler, Jianfeng Gao, & Nima Mesgarani: We use LLMs to generate VERY interpretable embeddings where each dimension corresponds to a scientific theory, & then use these embeddings to predict fMRI and ECoG. It WORKS!

📜[PUBLICATION ALERT]📜 I had the honour to be co-first author of this huge effort to advance dream science and our understanding of conscious experience during sleep. In Nature Communications rdcu.be/eAwni. @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @thomasandrillon.bsky.social #sleep #dreams #EEG

Check out Jiawei's cool work at her poster tomorrow! Includes neural correlates of auditory processing during reading, and some mysterious negative correlations about which we'd love to hear your ideas.

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...

🧠 NEW PREPRINT Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168