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Posts by Samuel Recht

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...

4 days ago 25 13 0 0
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Novelty is not just about whats new, but also what feels new given past experience. New study from Sophia Becker in Wulfram Gerstner’s @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social lab posits a model showing how similarity between familiar and novel stimuli shapes exploration and learning - doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

2 weeks ago 19 6 0 1
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PhD researcher for the project: Cognitive Control and Multitasking in the Digital Age We are looking for a motivated PhD researcher to study the behavioral and neural dynamics between cognitive control and multitasking in young and aging populations.

We’re hiring!
Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me?
We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven.
RTs much appreciated!
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

6 days ago 17 18 0 2
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Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex - Nature Face cells in the macaque inferotemporal cortex are initially able to detect faces and then rapidly switch to a face-specific neural code to discriminate between different face identities.

This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab:

Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex
@nature.com

"..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

6 days ago 75 32 0 0
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Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.

1 week ago 48 15 1 0
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Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

ICYMI, our new paper: Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41...

3 weeks ago 41 9 0 0
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Determinants of individual navigation ability - Nature Reviews Psychology There is substantial variation across people in navigation ability, which is shaped by multiple factors. In this Review, Yavuz and Spiers organize these factors into lifetime, lifestyle and personal attributes, and discuss the cognitive and neural mechanisms of their influences on navigation.

There is substantial variation across people in navigation ability, which is shaped by multiple factors. A Review in Nature Reviews Psychology organizes these factors and discusses the cognitive and neural mechanisms of their influences on navigation. 🔒

1 month ago 11 2 0 0
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In a recent University of Oxford Podcast, Professor Cathy Creswell spoke about the role of philanthropy in sustaining a global research university.

Professor Creswell discusses how a gift of £27 million has been used to establish the Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research.

tinyurl.com/2cj5xhmw

3 weeks ago 5 3 1 0

***Please forward to interested colleagues***

The call for symposia (deadline 15 April) and abstracts (deadline 1 May) for Biomag 2026 in Beijing (23-25 Aug) is now open:

biomag2026.scimeeting.cn

3 weeks ago 3 13 0 0
Neural correlates of subjective sleep depth and subjective sleepiness. Scalp topographies illustrate the results of GLME models assessing the relationship between EEG activity (delta power, gamma power, and gamma/delta ratio) and subjective sleep depth (top half) or subjective sleepiness (bottom half). The top rows show the main effects of each brain activity index; the bottom rows show the interaction between brain activity and conscious experience (CE+CEWR vs. NCE). Significant interaction effects were found for subjective sleep depth but not sleepiness.

Neural correlates of subjective sleep depth and subjective sleepiness. Scalp topographies illustrate the results of GLME models assessing the relationship between EEG activity (delta power, gamma power, and gamma/delta ratio) and subjective sleep depth (top half) or subjective sleepiness (bottom half). The top rows show the main effects of each brain activity index; the bottom rows show the interaction between brain activity and conscious experience (CE+CEWR vs. NCE). Significant interaction effects were found for subjective sleep depth but not sleepiness.

Perceived #sleep depth is generally thought to reflect reduced brain activity. @giuliobernardi.bsky.social &co show this relationship weakens during #dreaming, suggesting that dreaming helps sustain the subjective experience of deep sleep @spacelabimt.bsky.social @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4v8OxkH

3 weeks ago 23 8 0 1
OSF

New preprint!🚨

How do people learn how to search the visual world?

Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.

3 weeks ago 29 9 1 0
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In a new preprint, we use a combination of 2AFC and discrimination tasks to quantify sensory, decisional, and metacognitive noise in units of the physical stimulus. We find that, across two experiments, sensory and decisional noise are comparable, while meta noise is lower.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

3 weeks ago 18 9 0 0
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Repeated Viewing of a Film Clip Changes Event Timescales in The Brain Many everyday experiences share a recurring structure: routines, familiar routes, rewatched films, and replayed songs. How do repeated encounters with such structure alter the brain’s representations ...

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?

Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory.

Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

3 weeks ago 107 39 0 1
Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention - Nature Communications Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain? Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, Song and colleagues show that the geometry of neural dynamics alo...

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

4 weeks ago 78 33 2 0
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New lab paper! 🧠

Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements.

plos.io/4dwJhR8

Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏

1 month ago 93 41 4 0
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Increased generalisation in trait anxiety is driven by aversive value transfer - Communications Psychology Anxiety is associated with increased generalisation of threat to similar stimuli. This paper used computational modelling to dissociate perceptual mistakes from value generalisation and links stronger...

Anxiety is associated with increased generalisation of threat to similar stimuli. This paper dissociates perceptual mistakes from value generalisation and links stronger value-transfer to trait anxiety.
@nicoschuck.bsky.social
@ondrejzika.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

1 month ago 17 2 1 1
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Why the Brain Consolidates: Predictive Forgetting for Optimal Generalisation Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

1 month ago 93 32 3 3
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1 month ago 116 19 1 1
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⚛️ Introducing CREATE, a benchmark for creative associative reasoning in LLMs.

Making novel, meaningful connections is key for scientific & creative works.

We objectively measure how well LLMs can do this. 🧵👇

1 month ago 41 13 2 4

Trying to imagine the looks on the faces of the people I worked with at Google in 2018 if you’d told them that in 7 years their flagship product would be sending users to commit terrorism at airports

and that no one will do anything about it

1 month ago 73 22 3 0
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A crowdsourced megastudy of 12 digital single-session interventions for depression in US adults Nature Human Behaviour - An online experiment compared 12 brief online interventions for depression. Most improved mental health immediately, but these gains decreased over time, with only two...

Our crowdsourced megastudy comparing a diverse set of 12 single-session interventions for depression is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com!

Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/e6pzz (no paywall)

We also published a brief non-academic piece about the study today: theconversation.com/free-10-minu...

1 month ago 39 18 1 3
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Job Opening Annonce d'ouverture de poste

We are looking for a new colleague!🧠🇨🇭🦩
A new post doc position is available in our lab - check the link for more details!

www.unige.ch/fapse/womcog...

1 month ago 11 10 0 3
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Signatures proposed to index perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review A central question in many studies on perception and consciousness is whether the effects of a given manipulation are perceptual or cognitive. Typically, studies seek to find evidence that the raw sen...

New paper from the lab in which we test whether DDM and confidence distributions can be used to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. We show that putative signatures of perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

1 month ago 30 10 0 0
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The inferred value of unchosen options spreads to related items in memory Counterfactual thinking — considering what could have come of choosing the other path — can facilitate inference. Previous studies have demonstrated t…

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!

Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?

In short, yes!

1 month ago 59 25 1 0
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🚨New pre-print🚨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?

1 month ago 51 20 3 3
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Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.

Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

5 months ago 1341 616 20 46
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Interested in cognitive maps? Wondering how you should best train your participants? Luckily for you, we have investigated just that! Very excited to share a preprint from my PhD in which we show how initial training curriculum affects the cognitive maps we form

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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2 months ago 29 5 1 2

a while back i threatened to share this. finally online

for detection tasks we often systematically estimates sensitivity wrong. we need to control for unequal variance in models, but we often don't coz it needs extra data

now there's a virtually 'free' way to do it

www.cell.com/iscience/pdf...

2 months ago 39 9 4 1
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Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain - Nature Communications How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

Cognition is not steady state.
Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

2 months ago 27 8 0 0
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Paris Brain Institute Call for Junior Group Leaders in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science | Paris Brain Institute The Paris Brain Institute is launching a Call for Junior Group Leaders, inviting outstanding early-career scientists in artificial intelligence, data science, computational neuroscience, and related f...

🧠 The Paris Brain Institute is launching a Call for Junior Group Leaders, inviting early-career scientists to establish their own independent research groups within one of Europe’s most dynamic neuroscience research centers.

👉 More information: parisbraininstitute.org/news/paris-b...

#Hiring #AI

2 months ago 17 11 1 0
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