📣 New preprint 📣 "Neural Dynamics of Belief and Value Computations Guiding Strategic Social Decisions" We use EEG and computational modeling (combining learning + DDM) to explain participants' choices, RT, and neural signals in a strategic game. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do we learn & estimate effort in changing environments? @rongbi.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social &co show that humans integrate different sources of uncertainty re #effort into internal priors, allowing flexible effort regulation without explicit effort info @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ez7aIx

A huge effort and a new take on what constitutes the "feedforward pass" across the visual system. Make sure to check out our new preprint:

Why do humans exhibit such a striking right-hand preference? @tpuschel.bsky.social &co study 41 anthropoid species, revealing #Homosapiens as an evolutionary outlier & identifying #bipedalism & #brain expansion as likely drivers of human lateralization @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ufOvWJ

Please help out my Msc student! She's doing a study on decision making in forensic contexts and needs participants. Takes about 15 minutes. Decide if the defendents are guilty or innocent: research.sc/participant/...

My review on the "Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making" is now published. I think that this will be useful to both experts and newcomers to the field. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beyond binding: from modular to natural vision: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni... #neuroskyence #visionscience

My suggestion would be something like: Brief application: 3 pages of text, CV, list of 10 relevant publications Reviewers skim through and select top 50%. Followed by an honest-to-good lottery. Would allow for actually brave ideas, still select for merit (somewhat), waste less time for all.

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Does our very human ability to anticipate #musical structure exist at birth? @robertabianco.bsky.social @giacomonovembre.bsky.social &co show that #newborns encode #rhythmic (but not melodic) expectations based on statistical regularities in real #music @plosbiology.org plos.io/4kqKVWg

Traditional behavioral models of bargaining interpret acceptance of #unfair offers as simple reward maximization. This study shows that #inequality aversion also shapes these decisions and identifies the #dACC as a regulator of responses to disadvantageous inequity @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4kmRadA

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Incredible article which points out that it often collectively costs more to apply for scarce research funding than the funds awarded to the successful proposals. What an absurd system we've built in the service of efficiency and competition. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

‪Voxelwise Encoding Models (VEMs) are a great framework for modeling fMRI data, but it can be difficult to implement. We've made VEM accessible by providing software, tutorials and reviews that guide its use an implementation. Get it here: gallantlab.org/blog/2025-12... #neuroscience, #neuroimaging

🧠👀 'These findings reveal high-dimensional aspects of cortical representation undetectable with conventional methods, such as RSA, & contradict previous theories suggesting that high-level visual cortex representations are low-dimensional.' #neuroskyence journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Exciting "new" work illustrating our broken publishing system. Seb presented this work online at neuromatch 2.0 at the height of the pandemic. Then, Xin-Ya worked years on addressing reviewer comments, which added some rigor but didn't change the message. 1/2

Birds are both intelligent and incredibly agile, yet they are quite small. How do they achieve this with their little brains? They have twice as many neurons per brain mass than mammals, including primates. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

What is driving social foraging dynamics in the wild? In a new pre-print, we investigate decision-making mechanisms in large groups of Finnish ice-fishers competing for resources: osf.io/preprints/ps... Big thanks to drone pilot Félicie Dhellemmes. 1/n youtu.be/I_RH2diXcAk

Online Now: Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

A meme for the modern university...

Our #sEEG study is now published in Nature Communications: rdcu.be/eIkoG! 🧠 Key finding: We discovered neural evidence accumulation for visual perception that's independent of report preparation—recorded from >3000 channels across 3 experiments! #Neuroscience #Consciousness #OpenAccess

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

detection d' is generally overestimated, coz we tend to be too lazy to collect the necessary data in order to correct for the unequal variance between target present vs absent distributions. turns out we can do this for free - using reaction times data. so, let's do it~ osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠📈

Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o. Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

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...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Our new EEG + modeling work using the beads task is now preprinted osf.io/preprints/ps..., led by Christina Dimitriadou @rhulpsychology.bsky.social

Interested in #EEG #FPVS #FaceLearning? *An Ecological and Objective Neural Marker of Implicit Learning of Unfamiliar Identities* Preprint 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... @bfh-ch.bsky.social University of Malta @snsf.ch

Hot off the press: 1st ever #FPVS #EEG investigation into #SuperRecognizers Congrats to my amazing collaborators Jeff Nador, Kim Uittenhove & Dario Gordillo and thanks to all #police SRs & control participants! @bfh-ch.bsky.social, EPFL, @snsf.ch, Polizei Berlin link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨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.

This is good on the extraordinary alienation that has now grown up in academia. The gap between the values of lecturers and the universities that employ them are now a huge unbridgeable chasm. One stands for education, the other institutional self-interest. blog.matthewbarnard.phd/a-world-with...

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

It's a pity we have to write conclusions for papers and can't just fade them out, like musicians do.

EEG shows illusory faces in objects initially resemble real faces then shift to object-like representations, with task demands determining which identity guides behavior. @amandakrobinson.bsky.social @jesstaubert.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

really fun to be reading critiques of "AI" from the 90s, 80s, 70s, and 60s that perfectly identify all the core questions the field still hasn't resolved and anticipate exactly where we're at now

I'm going to finish this manuscript by the end of the week, I told myself

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

Reconstructing sounds from #fMRI data is limited by its temporal resolution. @ykamit.bsky.social &co develop a DNN-based method that aids reconstruction of perceptually accurate sound from fMRI data, offering insights into internal #auditory representations @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4fhNw1Z

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

Navigating the value space during choice Rhesus macaques represent choices as navigation trajectories in a value space using a grid-like code www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Reward expectation modulates #attention & #DecisionMaking but are these mediated by common or distinct mechanisms? This study shows that spatial manipulation of #reward expectation modulates sensitivity, while choice-based manipulation affects decision making @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4eDPERq

Facial muscle activity can shape how we recognize emotions. Using electrical stimulation and EEG, the study found that activation of smiling muscles makes people more likely to see neutral faces as happy. @themisefth.bsky.social @sebkorb.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How smart are #NonHumanPrimates? This study shows that #macaques can learn to rearrange members of 5-object sequences to non-adjacent positions, suggesting that they form non-spatial cognitive maps of item relationships during learning, a hallmark of #intelligence @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40fZIKi

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? We’re not clear on what intelligence is, at all

How about using LLMs to check if referee reports raise legitimate concerns or are just gatekeeping? This I could get behind.

Paper finally published in JEP General! Individual variability in mental imagery vividness does not predict perceptual interference with imagery: A replication study of Cui et al., 2007: osf.io/preprints/os... A study cited over 500 times couldn't be replicated, even in extreme imagery... a 🧵 1/8

Peer review is to science like democracy is to government: "the worst form of government, except for all the others.” It's far from perfect and could potentially be improved. But that it does not do anything for science trustworthiness is an incredible exaggeration.