🧠 the Digital Brain Project is now live: $5M total · up to $500k per selected team Let's open-source the modeling of the human brain brain activity! ➡️Apply on: digitalbrainproject.org

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

Excited about this one!

The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏

Excited to share our new publication, “Measuring Naturalistic Speech Comprehension in Real Time”! ➡️ rdcu.be/fa3hk #psynomBRM w/ @kriesjill.bsky.social, Shiven Gupta, Maria Papworth Burrel, & @lauragwilliams.bsky.social 🧵1/11

Just posted an update of this study, where we show how the receptive fields of number-encoding neural populations shift and rescale with the prior — "distributed range adaptation" — in line with (dynamic) efficient coding, and predictive of behavior. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢 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

A new study by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social, @kriesjill.bsky.social, and team suggests that phonetic features are robustly encoded in healthy older adults, but show reduced encoding strength in individuals with post-stroke aphasia during speech comprehension. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...

Excited to share our new publication “The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia”, published in JNeurosci 🧠 ➡️ www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4... with @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @mvandermosten.bsky.social 🤝 Check out @stanfordbrain.bsky.social ’s summary of it ⬇️

'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨ The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506

proud to share this work, led by the brilliant @ilinabg.bsky.social, now out in Nature! Ilina finds that speech-sound neural processing is VERY similar in a language you know and one you don't. differences only emerge at the level of word boundaries and learnt statistical structure 🧠✨

Our new preprint on the FOODEEG open dataset is out! EEG recordings and behavioural responses on food cognition tasks for 117 participants will be made publicly available 🧠 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

happy to share our new paper, out now in Neuron! led by the incredible Yizhen Zhang, we explore how the brain segments continuous speech into word-forms and uses adaptive dynamics to code for relative time - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am so honored to have received an Outstanding PhD Thesis award from the Luxembourg National Research Fund @fnr.lu! 🏆 My PhD research was about how language is processed in the brain, with a focus on patients with a language disorder called aphasia 🧠 Find out more➡️ youtu.be/E-Zww-B1jFQ?...

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

Fantastic commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's BBS paper by @renrutmailliw.bsky.social, @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & Hinze Hogendoorn. Hits lots of nails on the head. As @neddo.bsky.social & I also argue: postdiction doesn't prove consciousness is slow! 1/3

Super happy to share my very first first-author paper out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! We show content-specific predictions are represented in an alpha rhythm. It’s been a beautiful, inspiring, yet challenging journey. Huge thanks to everyone, especially @peterkok.bsky.social @jhaarsma.bsky.social

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models "Furthermore, when generating and evaluating resumes, ChatGPT assumes that women are younger and less experienced, rating older male applicants as of higher quality." No surprise, but now documented: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

really fun getting to think about the "time to consciousness" with this dream team! we discuss interesting parallels between vision and language processing on phenomena like postdictive perceptual effects, among other things! check it out 😄

🚨 Out now in @commspsychol.nature.com 🚨 doi.org/10.1038/s442... Our #RegisteredReport tested whether the order of task decisions and confidence ratings bias #metacognition. Some said decisions → confidence enhances metacognition. If true, decades of findings will be affected.

New BBS article w/ @lauragwilliams.bsky.social and Hinze Hogendoorn, just accepted! We respond to a thought-provoking article by @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, and argue that it's premature to conclude that conscious perception is delayed by 350-450ms: bit.ly/4nYNTlb

We present our preprint on ViV1T, a transformer for dynamic mouse V1 response prediction. We reveal novel response properties and confirm them in vivo. With @wulfdewolf.bsky.social, Danai Katsanevaki, @arnoonken.bsky.social, @rochefortlab.bsky.social. Paper and code at the end of the thread! 🧵1/7

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share: phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

Looking forward to #ICON2025 next week! We will have several presentations on mental imagery, reality monitoring and expectations: To kick us off, on Tuesday at 15:30, Martha Cottam will present: P2.12 | Presence Expectations Modulate the Neural Signatures of Content Prediction Errors

In August I had the pleasure to present a poster at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) conference in Amsterdam. My poster was about 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 🧒➡️🧑 🧠

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

looking forward to seeing everyone at #CCN2025! here's a snapshot of the work from my lab that we'll be presenting on speech neuroscience 🧠 ✨

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!

It takes time for the #brain to process information, so how can we catch a flying ball? @renrutmailliw.bsky.social &co reveal a multi-stage #motion #extrapolation occurring in the #HumanBrain, shifting the represented position of moving objects closer to real time @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3Fm83Fc

It takes time for the #brain to process information, so how can we catch a flying ball? This study provides evidence of multi-stage #motion #extrapolation occurring in the #HumanBrain, shifting the represented position of moving objects closer to real time @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3Fm83Fc

New preprint from the lab! We used EEG⚡🧠 to map how 12 different food attributes are represented in the brain. 🍎🥦🥪🍙🍮 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by Violet Chae in collaboration with @tgro.bsky.social

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

New paper out in @plosbiology.org w/ Charlie, @phil-johnson.bsky.social, Ella, and Hinze 🎉 We track moving stimuli via EEG, find evidence that motion is extrapolated across distinct stages of processing + show how this effect may emerge from a simple synaptic learning rule! tinyurl.com/2szh6w5c

📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based [email protected]! ...

I'm very pleased to share our latest study: ‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’, by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al: - Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... - Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa... - Thread below 👇

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

In @elife.bsky.social: Stimulus dependencies—rather than next-word prediction—can explain pre-onset brain encoding during natural listening doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Check out the latest -From Our Neurons To Yours- podcast episode! I discuss my work using large speech and language systems as "model species" to understand how the human brain processes language 🧠

Very happy that this primer on software engineering principles for psychology and cognitive neuroscience is now out! This was a great joint project between my group (lead by postdoc Yunyan Duan) and @martinhebart.bsky.social's group (led by @rothj.bsky.social). #psychology #cogsci #neuroskyence

PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that? In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj

Paper: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Parcellate codebase: github.com/coryshain/pa... Study-specific codebase: github.com/coryshain/la... Data repository (under construction): openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...

New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

🚨 First preprint from the lab! 🚨 Josh Rozner (w/@weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social) uses counterfactual experiments on LMs to show that word distributions can provide a learning signal for diverse syntactic constructions, including some hard cases.

i really enjoyed speaking at the LLMs, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience workshop earlier this month!

New layer-fMRI manuscript describing the predictive processing across layers of auditory areas. By Lonike Faes et al. biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/1...