Alex Martin talking about his science career
Alex Martin talked about his "eclectic" career spanning over 4 decades, including 31 years in the Laboratory of Cognition (NIH), with some reflections on what makes a successful scientific career: "the right place at the right time", "it's good to be first", "controversy is helpful"
Second day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin
Day 2 tomorrow bit.ly/alexmartinsymposium
First day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin
Great symposium in honor of Alex Martin at the NIMH
Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw
🚨New preprint alert! 🚨
Do multimodal LLMs (VLMs) reason about high-level visual perception like humans do? We asked over 2000 human observers and 18 VLMs to describe scenes using 15 different tasks, ranging from general knowledge, affordances, affect, sensory experiences, and future prediction. 1/
How do we define "good" fMRI data? Especially with resting state, there are circularity risks if we evaluate data quality as showing the networks we expect to see. Javier Gonzalez-Castillo (& me & others) developed pBOLD, a new metric that uses multi-echo info. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/8
Speakers
@samaudrain.bsky.social
@fmri-today.bsky.social
Michael Beauchamp
Alfonso Caramazza
Avniel Ghuman
@action-brain.bsky.social
Brad Mahon
Michal Ramot
Mick Rugg
W Kyle Simmons
@thaliawheatley.bsky.social
Cheri Wiggs
Questions: @cibaker.bsky.social
@shrutijapee.bsky.social
@sjgotts.bsky.social
Picture of Alex Martin, National Institute of Mental Health
The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw
Can we use robotic augmentation limbs as flexibly as our natural limbs⁉️
🧨 Our new study, just out in @currentbiology.bsky.social, tested this using the Third Thumb @daniclode.bsky.social: a wearable robotic
extra thumb you control with your toes!
www.cell.com/current-biol... ‼️‼️
Really looking forward to diving into these replies to @jbrendanritchie.bsky.social recent paper, which I found very inspiring and provoking
Vision #neuroscience should work to balance the study of category-specificity without isolating our stimuli from their rich, complex behavioural relevance
Category selectivity vs. behavioral relevance in visual cortex? 👁️🧠
@levandyck.bsky.social and I really enjoyed diving into this piece and appreciated the authors’ thoughtful response. We're curious to see how the field moves forward from here! ➡️
Is the concept of “category-selectivity” holding the field back in understanding high-level visual cortex? Detailed discussion in our published perspective piece and accompanying commentaries:
Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
It’s out!
New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...
🚨 We’re recruiting a fully funded PhD student (from outside the UK) to join the lab with @tessamdekker.bsky.social 🌍👁️🧠 The PhD is part of IndiBrain.eu and will use cutting‑edge fMRI+qMRI+psychophysics to study information flow between eye and brain in ocular gene therapy. Apply by 27 Feb! t.ly/gahGB
New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/
🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...
Postdoc position to work on neuroimaging methods with @fmri-today.bsky.social (and me) fim.nimh.nih.gov/positions-av...
It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:
I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15).
werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
I finally got around to setting up a lab website!
Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io
Just in time to start the new semester.
🔥Design the next #VSS2026 T-shirt! Show off your creativity & win $500 + recognition at the meeting.
Deadline: Jan 15, 2026 → www.visionsciences.org/2026-graphic...
Has anyone attended any pre-data-collection poster sessions (i.e., poster sessions where people present their plans for experiments before data collection in order to get feedback when it's most useful) at conferences other than VSS?
photo of a human hand holding a tiny gold analog clock, two brain pictures showing fMRI results in medial parietal cortex on the inflated cortical surface (one brain map is thresholded, the other is not)
Now out in #JNeurosci -- we found changes in medial parietal cortex after manual exploration of everyday real-world objects
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
with Beth Rispoli, Vinai Roopchansingh & @cibaker.bsky.social
New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social
Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy
Is the “standard workflow” holding back fMRI analysis?
Mass-univariate analysis is still the bread-and-butter: intuitive, fast… and chronically overfitted. Add harsh multiple-comparison penalties, and we patch the workflow with statistical band-aids. No wonder the stringency debates never die.
