New paper on memorability, with @davogelsang.bsky.social !

New preprint out together with @mheilbron.bsky.social We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! w/@drhanjones.bsky.social Adding human-like memory limitations to transformers improves language learning, but impairs reading time prediction This supports ideas from cognitive science but complicates the link between architecture and behavioural prediction arxiv.org/abs/2508.05803

CCN has arrived here here in Amsterdam! Come find me to meet or catch up Some highlights from students and collaborators:

Waarom vergeet je namen maar weet je nog precies wat iemand doet? En zijn herinneringen ooit echt helemaal weg? Ik ging bij Oplossing Gezocht in gesprek over hoe ons brein informatie opslaat en waarom vergeten eigenlijk heel slim is: www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/...

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

New preprint, w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social ! we've found that visual cortex, even when just viewing natural scenes, predicts *higher-level* visual features The aligns with developments in ML, but challenges some assumptions about early sensory cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint, w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social ! we've found that visual cortex, even when just viewing natural scenes, predicts *higher-level* visual features The aligns with developments in ML, but challenges some assumptions about early sensory cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Higher-level spatial prediction in natural vision across mouse visual cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.15.654212v1

"Opoffering Psychologie door Universiteiten van Nederland (UNL) raakt ons allemaal. (...) Dit is geen compromis, maar een ‘verdeel-en-heers’-strategie. Vandaag is het Psychologie, morgen een andere opleiding." #DOEHETNIET @woinactie.bsky.social www.scienceguide.nl/2025/04/coll...

Collega's in andere disciplines: spreek je uit tegen de UNL opoffering van psychologie-opleidingen Vandaag wij, morgen jullie? Laat je stem horen bij je bestuur. Met @mkdeserno.bsky.social @bnbakker.bsky.social @berendvdkolk.bsky.social @scienceguide.bsky.social www.scienceguide.nl/2025/04/coll...

✨New paper ✨ Introducing 🌍MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Minimal Pairs for Subject-Verb Agreement, covering 101 languages! We present over 125,000 minimal pairs and evaluate 17 LLMs, finding that support is still lacking for many languages. 🧵⬇️

en route to Scotland, visiting universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow tomorrow & Friday. do reach out if you are around and want to talk language models, brains, or anything in between!

lovely and slightly surreal to be back at Queen Square after all those years, but had a blast talking about generative AI and the predictive brain at the FIL today @peterkok.bsky.social @clarepress.bsky.social

Encouraging to see 5000+ protesters at our local Amsterdam protests against the budget cuts in higher education in the NL! In this time of geopolitical tensions, changing climate, democratic backsliding, & tech revolutions, governments should *invest* in knowledge & the future of the next generation

We are excited that Ellie Pavlick from Brown University & Google DeepMind will be the third keynote speaker of CCN2025! Join us in August for the 8th CCN conference, on cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI. Details on paper submission (both short & full length papers) below!

Cog-sci folks!
What's your favourite platform for developing/running online studies? I’m looking for something that: 1) integrates with prolific; 2) requires minimal web-development experience, ideally just python.

CCN 2025 Area Chair Nomination Intrigued about supporting CCN’s new 8-page conference proceedings track? 📄 Fill out this form to nominate yourself or a colleague to act as (Senior) Area Chair at CCN25. forms.gle/MTBgZZxQaDY8...

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain: arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Felix Hill was such an incredible mentor — and occasional cold water swimming partner — to me. He's a huge part of why I joined DeepMind and how I've come to approach research. Even a month later, it's still hard to believe he's gone.

Why do diverse ANNs resemble brain representations? Check out our new paper with Colton Casto, @nogazs.bsky.social , Colin Conwell, Mark Richardson, & @evfedorenko.bsky.social on “Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks.” 🧠🤖 tinyurl.com/yckndmjt

‘people who are paranoid or perceive meaning in the universe’ is my new favourite demographic

Column | De wooncrisis is misschien wel de belangrijkste oorzaak van het chagrijn in Nederland, maar er gebeurt niks of zelfs precies het verkeerde.

In welke bochten het CU en CDA zich ook wringen, het is een bezuiniging op het hoger onderwijs om belastingkorting mogelijk te maken voor het grote bedrijfsleven, en wat snippers voor het volk.

Maar je kiest er wel voor. De rest is retoriek. Je. Kiest. Hier. Voor. Own it.

How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this: Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢 🧵⬇️

After a great conference in Boston, CCN is going to take place in Amsterdam in 2025! To help the exchange of ideas between #neuroscience, cognitive science, and #AI, CCN will for the first time have full length paper submissions (alongside the established 2 pagers)! Info below👇 #NeuroAI #CompNeuro

1/ Here's a critical problem that the #neuroai field is going to have to contend with: Increasingly, it looks like neural networks converge on the same representational structures - regardless of their specific losses and architectures - as long as they're big and trained on real world data. 🧠📈 🧪

I can't believe we could actually see this happen. It is one of the weirder and more impactful climate change tipping points. And as Genevieve says, "If it collapses it would be very, very hard for many, many people to eat." We simply can't let it happen

Emerging from a bsky-slumber to ask a question that was perhaps too difficult for cog-sci twitter: What’s your favourite (historical) example of *groupthink*, where an idea was widely accepted in cog/neuro science despite ample contradictory evidence, or despite the lack of empirical support?

🚨Job alert!🚨 Are you curious about curiosity, and looking for a post-doc position? Then please consider applying: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Feel free to e-mail/DM me if you have questions. Thanks very much for sharing/re-posting!

We’re excited about our first paper looking at speech encoding in single neurons across the depth of human cortex. Out today in @nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... [1/6]

NeuroSpin is opening a position in ultra-high field functional MRI of cognitive functions, in order to optimally exploit its amazing 11.7 Tesla human magnet. Please spread the word!

famous moments in psychology / cog-sci as lego sets, a thread. 1. Pavlov's dogs.

Two years ago @danakarca.bsky.social & I wondered: Could the features we observe in brains across species be caused by shared functional, structural & energetic constraints?🧠⚡️   With our spatially embedded RNN we show this is true!   www.nature.com/articles/s42... 🧵 #neuroscience #compneuro #NeuroAI

Is AI close to matching human intelligence? And should we be concerned?  For The Dutch Review of Books, I take stock and discuss three of my favourite books on this question - by @melaniemitchell.bsky.social, Brian Christian & @summerfieldlab.bsky.social - in the light of recent developments in AI

Just 1% of global population are regular flyers; they represent 50% of climate pollution from flights. (That was me until 2012!) For regular flyers, it's the biggest slice of your climate footprint. How to start flying less personally, at work, collectively: wecanfixit.substack.com/i/70289095/a... 🧪

Apparently ~40% of crowdsource workers use LLMs when completing surveys Relatively simple fix for text responses: Add Javascript to Qs to prevent pasting Credit to Jiabi Wang for idea + Kaushal Addanki for code below github.com/rafmbatista/...

New paper out! "Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments" #CulturalEvolution #cssky 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thrilled at publication of @stephan-meylan.bsky.social's "How adults understand what young children say", featuring Bayesian noisy-channel inference, LLMs, & child speech datasets! TL;DR: prior expectations of what kids *want to say* is crucial. (Knowing how kids mispronounce words is too.)

my first paper ever is out now in PNAS 🎉🔥!! (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠) (w/ Simon van Gaal, @juliaha.bsky.social, @smfleming.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social) we introduced a novel method to distinguish between effects in subjective experience from effects in decision-making. let me know what you think!

Check out this new paper! Led by @mehdiazabou.bsky.social and @evadyer.bsky.social, we show that it is possible to get SOTA brain decoding with transfer across individuals and tasks! The key is a clever way to tokenize spiking data for transformers. #neuroskyence #brain #neurotech

To researchers doing LLM evaluation: prompting is *not a substitute* for direct probability measurements. Check out the camera-ready version of our work, to appear at EMNLP 2023! (w/ @rplevy.bsky.social) Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.13264 Original thread: twitter.com/_jennhu/stat...

This study looks amazgin! Selective disruption of entorhinal inputs to CA1 disrupts sequence replay and flexible navigation, but not assembly reactivation or associative memory: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Folks, Michigan Linguistics is hiring and the deadline is extended to Nov 5th! Seeking candidates who apply computational methods for linguistics research; sub-discipline open. This is a wonderful department to be a part of. Feel free to reach out to me with questions.

My department (MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences) is hiring a tenure-track faculty! We're especially interested in researchers who span multiple levels of analysis. Candidates from underrepresented backgrounds strongly encouraged to apply. Apply by November 1! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25916

We’re very happy to share our latest study: ‘Brain decoding: toward real-time reconstruction of visual perception’ led by Yohann Benchetrit and Hubert Banville - paper: ai.meta.com/static-resou... - blog (with videos!): ai.meta.com/blog/brain-a...

Open PhD position with Christophe Pallier & myself, to work on the brain and computational bases of language using neuroimaging and deep learning: - application: forms.gle/equJz92rGtiL... - requirements: python, ML, and ideally, neuroimaging experience. Please RT🙏

Every (neuro)biologist should read this indeed, so I'll put it here to save you the clicks. #neuroskyence #compneuro #PsychSciSky