Nicholas Menghi
@nichome.bsky.social
📤 314
📥 551
📝 35
Postdoc
@mpicbs.bsky.social
, interested in Generalization, Transfer Learning, Cats and Pirates
pinned post!
Our new paper, now published in
@natcomms.nature.com
, asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU
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The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks
Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...
https://rdcu.be/eSwvU
6 months ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Tobias Staudigl
3 days ago
📢 New paper out in
@nathumbehav.nature.com
: we identify a previously undescribed fast thalamic oscillation (~19–45 Hz) in rare intracranial human recordings that appears specifically during wakefulness and REM sleep — but disappears during NREM sleep.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Thalamic oscillations distinguish natural states of consciousness in humans | Nature Human Behaviour
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02446-z
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Nicholas Menghi
Aidan Horner
19 days ago
Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread...
#neuroskyence
#psychscisky
#cognition
🧪
@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
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A neural state space for episodic memories
Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661325002840?via%3Dihub
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Nicholas Menghi
Davide Gheza
23 days ago
New preprint! Last year we showed humans adapt attention in a dimension-specific way when multiple things compete for attention. Now we read out the neural dynamics of this adaptation.
doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.16.688701
w/
@mikefreund.bsky.social
@theazalabak.bsky.social
@wouterkool.bsky.social
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Nicholas Menghi
Jay Hennig
25 days ago
🥳 Super excited to share our lab's first preprint, led by
@hungyun.bsky.social
"Distinct tasks engage shared neural subspaces in human hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/9)
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.24.720703v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Randolph Helfrich
26 days ago
Very excited to share our latest paper led by
@nbinish.bsky.social
in
@natneuro.nature.com
We demonstrate how a communication subspace channels higher-dimensional PFC dynamics into lower-D motor activity to enable efficient behavior using human iEEG.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence
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A communication subspace relays context-dependent actions from human prefrontal to motor cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Context-dependent behavior selects actions according to task demands. Using direct brain recordings in humans, Binish et al. uncover how coordinated population activity efficiently channels informatio...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02290-4
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Nicholas Menghi
Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی
26 days ago
Our new study (Debray*, Karami* et al.) explores how the brain encodes basic math concepts (integers, fractions, shapes). Samuel Debray led the 7T fMRI & behavioral work; I led the MEG.
@danielavalerio.bsky.social
@chrplr.bsky.social
@standehaene.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Daniel S. Kluger
29 days ago
Latest preprint from
@bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social
by
@teresaberther.bsky.social
and
@martinasaltafossi.bsky.social
on cardio-respiratory modulation of arousal and excitability states in the human brain - overlap, distinctions, and implications for brain-body
#neuroskyence
.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Nicholas Menghi
Charley Wu
about 1 month ago
🚨 New preprint w/ Valerio Rubino and Peter Dayan: how do people discover and use compositional structure under constraints?
osf.io/preprints/ps...
A key factor is a simple heuristic that favors reuse of repeated and symmetric fragments across scales, is robust to time pressure, and sped up RTs 🧵👇
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Nicholas Menghi
Daniel S. Kluger
about 2 months ago
Out now in
@natcomms.nature.com
, our latest from
@bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social
: Visual perception, oscillatory excitability markers, and network connectivity are modulated by the breathing rhythm - depending on how much you know about the stimulus.
#brainbody
#neuroskyence
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Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling
Nature Communications - Breathing shapes perception: Inspiration upregulates arousal and excitability, sharpening sensitivity to visual signals. By aligning respiration with task timing, people...
https://rdcu.be/fcmHU
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Nicholas Menghi
Luigi Acerbi
about 1 month ago
1/ Another
@iclr-conf.bsky.social
paper thread! Do you want to make SOTA probabilistic predictions using transformers & your dataset is a *set* (not a sequence or time series), so you care about permutation invariance... but also efficiency? Keep reading, we have exactly what you need. 👇
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Nicholas Menghi
Communications Psychology
2 months ago
This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-lived adjustments and slower, more enduring adaptations.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
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Cognitive flexibility versus stability via activation-based and weight-based adaptations - Communications Psychology
This study presents a unified computational framework of meta-control that explains how people regulate cognitive control across different timescales and contexts, accounting for both rapid, short-liv...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-026-00397-9
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Nicholas Menghi
Sarah Solomon
about 2 months ago
Super excited to share this preprint! How do we disentangle underlying structure from the particular features of a learning episode to benefit future learning? We find that memory reactivation during sleep promotes this structure abstraction process.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717748v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Simon Kern
about 2 months ago
Can we really measure replay in humans using MEG with current methods? In our most recent paper we simulated replay under realistic conditions via a novel hybrid approach with astonishing results. we're delighted that it has now been published
@elife.bsky.social
!
elifesciences.org/articles/108...
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TDLM-Resting-State Simulation
How sensitive is TDLM really? Can we actually find replay when we know it is present?
https://cimh-clinical-psychology.github.io/DeSMRRest-TDLM-Simulation/
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Nicholas Menghi
Fei Wang
about 2 months ago
1/N: Dear colleagues, I would like to share a new paper on the subiculum, part of my PhD with the Neural Computation Group
@andrejbicanski.bsky.social
@mpicbs.bsky.social
. We present “A theory of subicular function and generalized vector coding” that we call Disco.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.04.716474v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Leonie Glitz
about 2 months ago
Now in eLife as a reviewed preprint too
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
add a skeleton here at some point
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5
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Camille Grasso
about 2 months ago
Happy to share our new preprint: Uncovering the representational geometry of durations Is time represented along a single mental timeline? We combine behaviour + EEG to show that duration is organised in a richer, multidimensional space. w/
@lnalborczyk.bsky.social
&
@virginievanw.bsky.social
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.29.715088
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Nicholas Menghi
Marcel S. Kehl
about 2 months ago
🔔PREPRINT: Sleep ripples drive single-neuron reactivation for human memory consolidation 1/9: How does sleep support human memory consolidation? To test this, we recorded hundreds of neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) across learning, wakefulness, and sleep.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
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https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.27.714528
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Nicholas Menghi
Angela Radulescu
2 months ago
Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic
@christinamaher.bsky.social
! 🎉 Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy. Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.
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Nicholas Menghi
Andrej Bicanski
3 months ago
1/N: Dear cognitive map fans, I’d like to share a model I’ve been working on for a while (clearing backlog :). I show how a vector navigation architecture (VNA) and a “positional inference network” (PIN) can build Universal Cognitive Maps (UCMs) for abstract spaces.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.07.705326v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Andrej Bicanski
3 months ago
Now out in Hippocampus. Fei Wang‘s model of Trace Vector Cells and intra-subiculum processing, consistent with know effects in CA1.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CPZPYM...
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Dynamic Updating of Cognitive Maps via Traces of Experience in the Subiculum
You have to enable JavaScript in your browser's settings in order to use the eReader.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CPZPYMDRFVDEXB7IDR3W?target=10.1002/hipo.70078
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Nicholas Menghi
Hugo Spiers
3 months ago
Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Nicholas Menghi
Matthew Logie
3 months ago
1/6 Happy to share our new paper with
@grassocamille.bsky.social
and
@virginievanw.bsky.social
: "Nested contextual change and the temporal compression of episodic memory".
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.26.708184v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Casper Kerrén
3 months ago
1/9 New paper with
@gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
and
@lindedomingo.bsky.social
: “Characterising semantic prioritisation in visual working memory.” Core question: when we hold visual info briefly in mind, what gets accessed first: perceptual details or semantic meaning?
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Nicholas Menghi
Juan Linde-Domingo
3 months ago
New preprint 🚨 Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A lot of fun with my colleagues
@ckerren.bsky.social
and
@gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
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Nicholas Menghi
Qiaoli Huang
3 months ago
Our new preprint is out on bioRxiv!
@doellerlab.bsky.social
We show that eye-movement sequences actively organize information by aligning with underlying structure and flexibly adapting to cognitive demands in working memory.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.16.706087v1
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Nicholas Menghi
SueYeon Chung
4 months ago
Our paper is out in
@natneuro.nature.com
!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.
@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
1/14
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Nicholas Menghi
Leonie Glitz
3 months ago
Interested in cognitive maps? Wondering how you should best train your participants? Luckily for you, we have investigated just that! Very excited to share a preprint from my PhD in which we show how initial training curriculum affects the cognitive maps we form
osf.io/preprints/ps...
[1/6]
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OSF
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/t6kde_v1
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Nicholas Menghi
4 months ago
Super thrilled to finally share the results of our team effort, from the lab of the one and only
@ayab.bsky.social
. Hopefully it will stir interesting discussions about how the brain balances continuity and segmentation
add a skeleton here at some point
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Nicholas Menghi
Harrison Ritz
4 months ago
Final paper of my PhD 🤗
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making. However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.
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Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice - Communications Psychology
In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating th...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00374-8
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Nicholas Menghi
Jörn Alexander Quent
4 months ago
Finally: the fantastic
#registeredreport
from bsky-less Roni Tibon is out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
showing less difference between
#episodic
vs.
#semantic
#memory
than one might have thought. Proud to have contributed a tiny part to this great paper.
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Neural activations and representations during episodic versus semantic memory retrieval - Nature Human Behaviour
In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Tibon et al. showed using fMRI that neural activity associated with successful memory retrieval did not differ between semantic and episodic memory, using a task wit...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4#citeas
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Nicholas Menghi
Giacomo Aldegheri
4 months ago
🚨 New paper out in Science Advances 🚨 With
@suryagayet.bsky.social
and
@peelen.bsky.social
, in two fMRI studies we investigate mental object rotations that are driven by the scene context, rather than purely by cognitive operations. 🧵
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Nicholas Menghi
Nico Schuck
4 months ago
How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by
@fabianrenz.bsky.social
dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman
@nathanieldaw.bsky.social
Peter Dayan &
@doellerlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693963v2
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Nicholas Menghi
Qiaoli Huang
4 months ago
Our new paper, now published in Cell Reports, asks how the brain adaptively shapes its representations according to the statistical structure of the environment to overcome the limits of working memory capacity.
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
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Efficient coding in working memory is adapted to the structure of the environment
Huang et al. show that the brain optimizes working memory by compressing information when environmental regularities exist. MEG reveals distinct neural systems for abstract structure and item details,...
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247%2825%2901633-X
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Nicholas Menghi
Earl K. Miller
4 months ago
Efficient coding in working memory is adapted to the structure of the environment
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
#neuroscience
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Redirecting
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116861
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Nicholas Menghi
Rochelle Kaper
5 months ago
super excited to share my preprint with
@meganakpeters.bsky.social
stimulus familiarity shapes hierarchical structure learning and metacognitive dynamics🚀😊!!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
add a skeleton here at some point
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Nicholas Menghi
Luigi Acerbi
5 months ago
1/ Excited to share our new work published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), Stacking Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (S-VBMC)!
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Nicholas Menghi
Casper Kerrén
5 months ago
New preprint: Inference over hidden contexts shapes the geometry of conceptual knowledge for flexible behaviour. In this pre-reg study, our core claim was that we don’t just learn stimulus-reward. We infer hidden context and that inference re-wires attention and neural state space on the fly. 1/8
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Nicholas Menghi
Time Perception Lab
5 months ago
Our holiday celebrations are especially happy this year, with a new paper out: "Global and Local Deviance Effects in the Processing of Temporal Patterns", about how we detect and keep track of temporal regularities. Congrats to
@duniagiomo.bsky.social
and the whole team!🎉
doi.org/10.1111/nyas...
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NYAS Publications
Our experience of the world is inherently structured by temporal patterns. Yet a full understanding of how we process such patterns is still lacking. Across three finger-tapping experiments employing...
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.70173
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8
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Volker Reisner
5 months ago
We’re very happy to share that our work on 3D spatial memory was published in PNAS just before the end of the year! 🎉 Link:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
(1/8)
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PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2505613122
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Nicholas Menghi
Jiawei Li
6 months ago
New preprint!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
As you are silently reading this, you may experience a little voice in your head. How is it represented in the brain, and what purpose does it serve? Our new study answers the questions. Together with
@adriendoerig.bsky.social
and Radek Cichy.(1/8)
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Auditory representations of words during silent visual reading
Silent visual reading is accompanied by the phenomenological experience of an inner voice. However, the temporal dynamics and functional role of the underlying neural representations remain unclear. H...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693932v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Nikolai Kapralov
6 months ago
Our new preprint on promises and caveats of the extraction of M/EEG activity from ROIs is out (see more details in the reposted thread):
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Huge thanks to
@studenova.bsky.social
, Ruben Eguinoa, Guido Nolte,
@sparsity.bsky.social
, Arno Villringer, and Vadim Nikulin!
add a skeleton here at some point
1
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Nicholas Menghi
Deniz Vatansever
6 months ago
🧠 New paper alert (the 1st one from our new lab)! Led by 1st author & VR wizard
@jaquent.bsky.social
@natcomms.nature.com
How do our brains distinguish novel from familiar places as we explore our environments, e.g., a new city? 🔗
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵 Thread below with key findings ⬇️
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Nicholas Menghi
Hugo Spiers
6 months ago
New article by
@jaquent.bsky.social
and co: Graded encoding of spatial novelty scales in the human brain
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Nicholas Menghi
Janis Keck
6 months ago
New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2)
arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899
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Probabilistic Foundations of Fuzzy Simplicial Sets for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction
Fuzzy simplicial sets have become an object of interest in dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, most prominently through their role in UMAP. However, their definition through tools from alg...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899
1
14
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Our new paper, now published in
@natcomms.nature.com
, asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU
loading . . .
The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks
Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...
https://rdcu.be/eSwvU
6 months ago
4
86
36
reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Daniel S. Kluger
6 months ago
'Robust circular cluster-based statistics for respiration-brain coupling' New preprint, and what a way to welcome
@teresaberther.bsky.social
to the
#neuroskyence
community. With
@eliobalestrieri.bsky.social
, she developed CBPT for circular
#bodybrain
analyses. Paper:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵🔽
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Nicholas Menghi
Donner Lab
7 months ago
🚨New preprint on
@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
: “Competing Neural Decision Variables in Human Frontal Cortex Shape Decision Confidence” by Alessandro Toso,
@ayeletarazi.bsky.social
,
@jrochav.bsky.social
,
@ktsetsos.bsky.social
& Tobias H. Donner 🔗
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Competing Neural Decision Variables in Human Frontal Cortex Shape Decision Confidence
Mounting evidence indicates that decisions emerge from a competition between populations of neurons encoding the different choice options. Theoretical models propose that the outcome of this competiti...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.28.684827v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Eleanor Holton
7 months ago
When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com
Work with
@summerfieldlab.bsky.social
,
@tsonj.bsky.social
, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
add a skeleton here at some point
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Nicholas Menghi
UEA School of Psychology
7 months ago
Do we perceive static vs dynamic emotions differently? New research finds both shared and unique patterns in how stimulus properties, recognised emotion, and perceived intensity jointly shape how we see facial emotions.
doi.org/10.1080/0269...
@psplabatuea.bsky.social
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Nicholas Menghi
7 months ago
🚨Checkout our new article! "Observer and stimulus factors jointly shape perceptual similarity of static and dynamic facial emotions"
doi.org/10.1080/0269...
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