Human-like fleeting memory improves language learning but impairs reading time prediction in transformer language models. New paper by Abishek Thamma & @mheilbron.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/TACL.a.688

Als geen ander wist Lieke Marsman (1990-2026) het allerzwaarste licht te maken

Nu online te bekijken! Een Wereld vol Denkers 🌍🌿🤖🧠🐝 bij Studium Generale #Maastricht. Dit was echt een hele leuke avond! Met @mheilbron.bsky.social! @maastrichtu.bsky.social @uitgeverijbalans.bsky.social #wetenschap #boeken #biologie #psychologie #AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKjh...

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

Ik heb er zin in! Morgen zijn @mheilbron.bsky.social en ik bij @maastrichtu.bsky.social voor een avond vol #wetenschap, #biologie, #psychologie en #AI! 🧠🐝🌿🤖 Meld je aan via www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/events/ee... #maastricht

Nijmegen friends: Tomorrow (10–12) I'll be debating Pim Haselager at a Donders Session on the thesis: "Artificial neural network models are adequate mechanistic models of the mind" I'm defending, he's opposing. Should be fun. Come join us! www.ru.nl/en/donders-i... @dondersinst.bsky.social

23 april geven @mheilbron.bsky.social en ik een lezing in het mooie #Maastricht over Een wereld vol denkers. Een avond vol verhalen over het denken en doen van mens, dier, plant en AI! 🧠🐝🌿🤖 Ik hoop jullie daar te zien! www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/events/ee... #wetenschap #psychologie #biologie

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

Classic predictive coding: V1 predicts low-level features, higher areas high-level. But recent studies + AI models suggest prediction happens at higher levels of abstraction. Who's right? In new work w/ @wiegerscheurer.bsky.social we find that both are – distinct regimes across the visual field

New preprint! w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social We found that, even during simple natural scene viewing, human visual cortex predicts—hierarchically in central vision and at higher levels peripherally—reconciling classical predictive coding with recent evidence from animal models and AI (e.g. JEPA) (1/10)

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

Interested in pursuing a PhD in NLP/cog-sci? Studying language learning in LMs from the perspective of human language acquisition? Few more days to apply!!

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the brain's responses to sight, sound & language. 📄 Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... ▶️ Demo: aidemos.atmeta.com/tribev2/ 💻 Code: github.com/facebookrese... 🤗 Model: huggingface.co/facebook/tri...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

Job update: Next week I start as a group leader at the Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen @mpi-nl.bsky.social 🧠 Building the Language and Predictive Computation group -- using LLMs to model language in the mind/brain, and vice versa. Hiring soon!

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Interesting convergence: The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1 Now published: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

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!

🚨New Preprint! How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715 + @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social 🧵 1/14

This is, without a doubt, the best popular article about current state of AI. And on whether LLMs are truly 'thinking' or 'understanding' -- and what that question even means www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

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