Nicholas Menghi
@nichome.bsky.social
📤 255
📥 500
📝 13
Postdoc
@mpicbs.bsky.social
, interested in Generalization, Transfer Learning, Cats and Pirates
pinned post!
🚨 New preprint! Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference 🧠 We compare humans and neural networks in a learning task, showing how training regime and task similarity interact to drive transfer or interference.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference
Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677779v1
about 2 months ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Donner Lab
12 days 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
15 days 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
17 days 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
17 days 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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Nicholas Menghi
Soroush Mirjalili
about 1 month ago
🧠🚨 How does the hippocampus transform the visual similarity space to resolve memory interference? In this new preprint, we found that the hippocampus sequentially inverts the behaviorally relevant dimensions of similarity 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Hippocampal transformations occur along dimensions of memory interference
The role of the hippocampus in resolving memory interference has been greatly elucidated by considering the relationship between the similarity of visual stimuli (input) and corresponding similarity o...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.682242v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Andrej Bicanski
about 1 month ago
New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Dynamic updating of cognitive maps via traces of experience in the subiculum
In the classical view of hippocampal function, the subiculum is assigned the role as the output layer. In spatial paradigms, some subiculum neurons manifest as so-called boundary vector cells (BVCs), ...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.01.679719v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Martina Saltafossi
about 2 months ago
I'm thrilled to share that our new paper is now published in Psychophysiology (Open Access):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@zacndr.bsky.social
@teamlabuda.bsky.social
@fraferri.bsky.social
@danlikesbrains.bsky.social
add a skeleton here at some point
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🚨 New preprint! Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference 🧠 We compare humans and neural networks in a learning task, showing how training regime and task similarity interact to drive transfer or interference.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
loading . . .
Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference
Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677779v1
about 2 months ago
1
21
11
reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Andrej Bicanski
2 months ago
A while in the making, here's a short paper on how one might get from spatial to episodic memory with temporal indexing, sequence generation via grid cell analogs, + a bit of perspective/review on time, wider HPC function ...
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
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Nicholas Menghi
Qiaoli Huang
3 months ago
Happy to share our new preprint. We found that brain adaptively switches between relational and item-based coding strategies based on the structure of memory contents.
@doellerlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Efficient coding in working memory is adapted to the structure of the environment
Working memory (WM) relies on efficient coding strategies to overcome its limited capacity, yet how the brain adaptively organizes WM representations to maximize coding efficiency based on environment...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.20.671058v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Nico Schuck
3 months ago
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/...
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Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS
Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2507516122
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Paper AND preprint day. If you’re interested in motor control, incentives, and brain oscillations, we have new results to share. Together, they reveal how feedback and motivation shape behavior, and how brain rhythms help keep our force stable.
3 months ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Shrey Dixit
4 months ago
We did it! 🏆 We won Phase 1 and placed 2nd overall in the Algonauts 2025 Challenge. So proud of the crew
@keckjanis.bsky.social
,Viktor Studenyak,Daniel Schad,Aleksandr Shpilevoi. Huge thanks to
@andrejbicanski.bsky.social
and
@doellerlab.bsky.social
for support. Report:
arxiv.org/abs/2507.17958
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Harrison Ritz
4 months ago
We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication. At first, what we found was very confusing! But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks
doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736
🧵
add a skeleton here at some point
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Nicholas Menghi
SCONe - Scottish-EU Critical Oscillations Network
4 months ago
/1 We took our sweet time (~3yrs) to put this into its final shape - but happy to say that the pre-print of an extensive review of brain rhythms in cognition - from a cognruro perspective - is now available. Please let us know what you think.
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.48550/arX...
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Brain rhythms in cognition -- controversies and future directions
Brain rhythms seem central to understanding the neurophysiological basis of human cognition. Yet, despite significant advances, key questions remain unresolved. In this comprehensive position paper, w...
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.15639
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Nicholas Menghi
Daniel S. Kluger
5 months ago
New preprint with amazing work from
@nchalas.bsky.social
: How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :)
#neuroskyence
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling
Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.26.661828v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Jörn Alexander Quent
5 months ago
Amazing
#RegisteredReport
led by Sumaiyah Raza from
@mrccbu.bsky.social
. We (again) found evidence against a memory benefit of spatial novelty. However, this time we did find a retroactive benefit of rest, which highlights that more work is needed here.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Nico Schuck
5 months ago
Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by
@anikaloewe.bsky.social
&
@maritpetzka.bsky.social
. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro
#psychscisky
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N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task
Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...
https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003185
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Nicholas Menghi
Shrey Dixit
5 months ago
🚨Preprint Alert: Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Contribution of Neural Units using Game Theory:
arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732
The result of my MSc thesis is out with
@kayson.bsky.social
@fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social
@patrickmineault.bsky.social
@kordinglab.bsky.social
, Claus C. Hilgetag
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Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units
Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI ...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Janis Keck
5 months ago
Excited to share that our work on the interplay of symmetric learning rules and successor representations (SR) is published in
@plos.org
(
comp.bio
) Work done together with
@doellerlab.bsky.social
,
@caswell.bsky.social
and Juergen Jost.
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
#neuroskyence
#compneurosky
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Impact of symmetry in local learning rules on predictive neural representations and generalization in spatial navigation
Author summary The hippocampus is a brain region which plays a crucial role in spatial navigation for both animals and humans. Contemporarily, it’s thought to store predictive representations of the e...
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013056
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Nicholas Menghi
Salma Elnagar
5 months ago
📣 Very excited for our symposium on “Building Knowledge Structures” tomorrow at 16:30 at
@pug2025.bsky.social
Together with amazing people:
@barnaveliirina.bsky.social
@lukaskunz.bsky.social
@mirkothm.bsky.social
and Andrea Greve
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Simon Kern
5 months ago
preprint alert 🚨 1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇
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Nicholas Menghi
Jörn Alexander Quent
6 months ago
Did you ever wanted to see a visualisation how two common brain 🧠 network parcellations (Yeo 7 vs. CAB NP) differ? Here is a small something I quickly cooked up because I was curious myself.
#neurosky
#neuro
#brain
#brainsky
#neuroimaging
Code:
github.com/JAQuent/netw...
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Nicholas Menghi
Volker Reisner
6 months ago
New preprint! We explored how learned movement patterns affect our sense of traveled distance and proposed a neurocomputational model that leverages embodied memories to denoise spatial codes. 🔗
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
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Re-enacting steps supports human path integration consistent with motor-corrected grid cell drift
Efficient navigation, especially in the absence of vision, requires path integration - the continuous updating of spatial position from self-motion cues. However, path integration is prone to cumulati...
https://www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2025.05.18.654711v1
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Mengya Zhang (张梦雅)
7 months ago
🍾🥳 Proud to share our new paper published on eLife 📄:
elifesciences.org/articles/100...
Accompanied by an insight piece by
@neurojacob.bsky.social
📄:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
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🧠 Can a short period of awake, quiet rest help you generalize better? In our new study, we tested this with a learning paradigm comparing offline vs online wake period.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Delayed emergence of EEG-based task-relevant representations
This paper examines the effect of a period of quiet wakefulness (an “offline wake” state) on the performance of a decision making task. An initial fee…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074742725000334?dgcid=author
6 months ago
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Juan Linde-Domingo
6 months ago
New paper out! 🎉 “Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues” (Hippocampus). In this opinion piece, we discuss how retrieval processes can be enhanced and offer an alternative to one of the field’s few enduring principles: encoding specificity.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues
A longstanding principle in episodic memory research, known as the encoding specificity hypothesis, holds that an effective retrieval cue should closely match the original encoding conditions. This p...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hipo.70015
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Nicholas Menghi
Louis Renoult
7 months ago
It is a great pleasure to share this new collaborative work on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Representations with
@fnim-lab.bsky.social
@cvlneuro.bsky.social
@psychologyuea.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Nicholas Menghi
7 months ago
🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences. We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)
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Nicholas Menghi
Rob Woodry
7 months ago
Excited to share a preprint from work with
@rewaniw.bsky.social
and Serra Favila, where we show that visual cortex responses during memory retrieval are spatially tuned to the locations of objects previously seen only once It's an early draft — feedback is welcome! See 🧵 for more
#neuroskyence
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Memory responses in visual cortex track recall success after single-trial encoding
Classic models of episodic memory propose that retrieval relies on the reactivation of previous perceptual representations in sensory cortex, a phenomenon known as cortical reinstatement. Supporting t...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.04.647327v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Volker Reisner
8 months ago
Curious about spatial memory in 3D? Our new preprint explores how environmental boundaries and the way we move affect our memory for locations in volumetric space! Huge congrats to co-1st
@theoschaefer.bsky.social
w/ Leonard König, Misun Kim, Christian Doeller. 🔗
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Locomotion-dependent use of geometric and body cues in humans mapping 3D space
The ability to represent locations across multiple dimensions of space is a core function of cognitive maps. While the influence of boundary-dependent environmental geometry on spatial representations...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.11.642663v1.article-metrics
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Nicholas Menghi
Rosanne Rademaker
8 months ago
Are short-term memories just noisier versions of what we perceive? Are they fundamentally different? We (Chaipat Chunharas,
@mjwolff.bsky.social
,
@meikehettwer.bsky.social
and myself) delved into this in a paper out now in
#elife
:
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
. For a quick summary, a 🧵 below:
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Nicholas Menghi
Mengya Zhang (张梦雅)
9 months ago
🧠 Thrilled to share our latest study, now published in PLOS Biology! 🌟
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
In this work, conducted by me and Dr. Qing Yu at the Institute of Neuroscience, we uncovered how the brain encodes and implements abstract task information (such as goals) in working memory.
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The representation of abstract goals in working memory is supported by task-congruent neural geometry
Successful goal-directed behavior requires that abstract task goals are maintained and implemented in working memory - how does this occur? This neuroimaging study shows that the frontal cortex mainta...
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002461
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Nicholas Menghi
Elio Balestrieri
9 months ago
Aaaand the paper is out on Imaging Neuroscience! 🤩 To learn about cool new (and old) features to be used in classifying M-EEG brain states, check it out:
doi.org/10.1162/imag...
Big thanks to all the co-authors and the reviewers for their great input 🫶
add a skeleton here at some point
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reposted by
Nicholas Menghi
Eleanor Holton
9 months ago
New preprint out with
@summerfieldlab.bsky.social
! When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge? We compare continual learning in humans and artificial neural networks, revealing similar patterns of transfer & catastrophic interference (1/8)
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Nicholas Menghi
Doby Rahnev
9 months ago
New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications
Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57115-y
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Very cool opinion paper by
@ckerren.bsky.social
and colleagues on the role of dimensionality transformation in episodic memory!
add a skeleton here at some point
9 months ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Charley Wu | hiring PhDs/Postdocs
9 months ago
🚨 Finally out! My new
@annualreviews.bsky.social
in Psychology paper:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵
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Excited to share our new preprint on the effect of low-dimensional task similarities on representation learning in brains and neural networks! Work collaboration with DoellerLab,
@stefanofusi.bsky.social
,
@wjj.bsky.social
,
@vigano.bsky.social
, B Maess, and M Hinrichs.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks
The complexity of our environment poses significant challenges for adaptive behavior. Recognizing shared structures across tasks can theoretically improve learning through generalization. However, how...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.20.633896v1
10 months ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Valeria Centanino
11 months ago
Yay! Our dear SpaceChrono project is officially out! Check out our paper on how temporal and spatial processing are intertwined in the brain:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Credits to
@gianfrancof.bsky.social
and Domenica Bueti!
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The neural link between stimulus duration and spatial location in the human visual hierarchy - Nature Communications
Common organizational principles of spatial and temporal information processing are not fully understood. This study shows that the duration coding of brief visual events transforms along the human co...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54336-5
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Nicholas Menghi
Nico Schuck
about 1 year ago
Happy to share our review on OFC/vmPFC representations in Trends in Neurosciences, written with
@nirmoneta.bsky.social
and Shany Grossman
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Very short thread below to summarize our review
#neuroscience
#neuroskyence
#compneurosky
#PsychSciSky
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ScienceDirect.com | Science, health and medical journals, full text articles and books.
https://kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F%2Fauthors.elsevier.com%2Fsd%2Farticle%2FS0166-2236(24)00202-9/1/010201932c9ecd5c-76f15061-8266-4c52-b24f-67e16e82a879-000000/uHAvggs5Jv_HE9hQa2lcFEQ85Rg=400
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Nicholas Menghi
Jana Fehring
over 1 year ago
Excited to share this preprint in which we find individual and robust neurophysiological markers of cortical hierarchy and highlight the dynamic nature of the brain's organization throughout life :)
biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
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Neurophysiological correlates of cortical hierarchy across the lifespan
bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution
https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2024.07.15.602693v1
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Nicholas Menghi
Elio Balestrieri
over 1 year ago
It's preprint time!!! Check out our new work led by
@cstier.bsky.social
exploring novel MEG features for predicting age 🧒🧑🧓
tinyurl.com/MEGphenotype
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Extensive MEG time-series phenotyping unveils neural markers predictive of age
bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution
https://tinyurl.com/MEGphenotype
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Nicholas Menghi
Elio Balestrieri
over 1 year ago
Excited to share the first preprint of my postdoc! We explored a novel features space to describe M-EEG timeseries. These features are highly informative in differentiating brain states, even more than canonical features like power in predefined frequency bands! :D
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Nicholas Menghi
Simone Viganò
over 1 year ago
New paper out with Rena Bayramova, Christian Doeller, and Roberto Bottini on the link between spontaneous eye movements and the representational geometries of conceptual spaces during verbal fluency tasks
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
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Nicholas Menghi
Norman Lab
over 1 year ago
Our paper on how blocked training supports learning of multiple schemas, with Andre Beukers,
@collinsilvy.bsky.social
, Ross Kempner, Nick Franklin, and
@gershbrain.bsky.social
, is now out in Communications Psychology!
rdcu.be/dEeaG
#neuroskyence
#psychscisky
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Excited to see the third chapter of my PhD thesis out. If you are interested in the emergence of low-dimensional, task-relevant representations in decision-making have a look!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
almost 2 years ago
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Nicholas Menghi
Annick Tanguay
almost 2 years ago
Incredibly stoked to share this paper with lead team
@renoultlouis.bsky.social
@danipalombo.bsky.social
and Dr Patrick Davidson.
elifesciences.org/articles/83645
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The shared and unique neural correlates of personal semantic, general semantic, and episodic memory
Four types of declarative memory rely on different weightings of similar component processes, according to fMRI and subjective ratings.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/83645
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Nicholas Menghi
Elio Balestrieri
about 2 years ago
Hey there! As first post on BS I am thrilled to share the poster that I am presenting at SfN 2023 tomorrow, November 12th, from 1 pm EST. Pass by, or reach out for a walk-through! Beyond oscillations? The potential of a diversified characterization of brain states changes
tinyurl.com/yxszckhn
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Nicholas Menghi
Elliott Wimmer
about 2 years ago
Postdoc job alert! We have an opening in our growing group. The research will focus on neuroimaging of memory and goal-directed decision-making, with decoding of representations with MEG (+ RL, mood, and computational psychiatry) @ UCL @ FIL @ Max Planck UCL Centre
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