The "Version of Record" of my paper with Mike Woodford is finally there. I am very glad with this paper that points to new laws of psychophysics, which we derived from a carefully considered principle of endogenous efficient coding.
New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).
How about the cat licking itself lol?
New paper in PBR: "Working memory’s pointer system is governed by physical objecthood, not spatiotemporal information"
rdcu.be/fd2tY
Without valid WM pointers, we miss OBVIOUS changes in visible items; the study shows that this "resetting" process is all about objects and not spatiotemporal change!
you shouldn’t learn about bands from shady TikTok manipulation, you should learn about bands by hanging out with a girl you like but are also extremely afraid of
"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God"
How did “The Backrooms” go from an obscure creepypasta to an A24 film? For @shirachess.bsky.social, its rise reflects the “liminal aesthetic” and a new Institutional Gothic of corporate dread.
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...
Check out a new paper in Nature Communications Biology with @dianadima.com and Yalda Mohzenzadeh using fMRI-EEG fusion to reveal how brain responses to action videos and sentences unfold across the visual system over time www.nature.com/articles/s42...
What does it mean for culture to 'shape' cognition? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41807136/ "Culture can (i) privilege some cognitive processes, while leaving alternative processes intact; (ii) prune unused alternative processes (iii) produce new cognitive processes; or (iv) have no effect"
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Functional MRI scans of more than 100 2-month-old infants suggest that they are capable of distinguishing among a variety of different objects. The findings challenge perceptions of cognitive development as a gradual process.
By @helenak.bsky.social
www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne...
New preprint
"Human-Like Coarse Object Representations in Vision Models"
arxiv.org/pdf/2602.12486
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
🧵
My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here:
forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...
A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics:
arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929
What's going on in aphantasia? Balaban and I recently argued it might be 'broken rendering'; but then why do normies bother rendering anything?
Monzel, Zeman & co wrote an interesting response:
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
...and this is our response response:
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
now accepted at ICLR! 🐺🥳🐺
arxiv.org/abs/2506.20666
Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
Even as Atte Kadoma and Isaias Ghezae are immersed in demanding PhD programs at Harvard, being resident advisor brings balance to their lives and enriches both their student experience and their scholarly pursuits.
Super great opportunity!
new: Eric Bigelow @ericbigelow.bsky.social suggests the 2 main ways of controlling LLMs (prompting & steering) can be understood as changing model beliefs (as in Bayesian belief updating)
"Belief Dynamics Reveal the Dual Nature of In-Context Learning & Activation Steering"
arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00617
Thanks Alex for the opportunity to work on this project!
Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"abandoned teddy bears" category on wikimedia commons
Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Dr. Roosevelt is the overarching antagonist of Naoki Urasawa's 2003 manga thriller series Pluto and its 2023 anime adaptation, both of which are a reimagining adaptation of The Greatest Robot in the World arc of Astro Boy. He is an advanced supercomputer that takes the form of an immovable brown teddy bear that speaks with a child-like voice.
Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences:
"Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
