Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller
@lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social
#neuroscience #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Great stuff by @skjerns.de !
1/N: Dear colleagues, I would like to share a new paper on the subiculum, part of my PhD with the Neural Computation Group @andrejbicanski.bsky.social @mpicbs.bsky.social . We present “A theory of subicular function and generalized vector coding” that we call Disco. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🔔PREPRINT: Sleep ripples drive single-neuron reactivation for human memory consolidation
1/9: How does sleep support human memory consolidation? To test this, we recorded hundreds of neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) across learning, wakefulness, and sleep.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Proud of this one, led by former lab student Ali Caron (not on bluesky) and online at @jocn.bsky.social.
direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...
🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu)
"Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks"
We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context.
How might this work...? 🧵1/8
Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪
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! 👏
Our work exploring how we can resolve ambiguous visual inputs has now been accepted in Communications Psychology.
Many thanks to the reviewers for their time and insights!
Open-access link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
New paper! 🚨 ~1.8K Mooney images from THINGS + ~1K participants to study visual ambiguity resolution.
Results suggest the visual system shifts from a top-down guess to bottom-up matching after disambiguation, and a U-shaped link between info gain and identification.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
We believe visual neuroscience is undergoing a paradigm shift — and the Beyond Binding exchange in @TrendsCogSci makes it visible. Five papers, excellent critics, and a discussion that sharpened and nuanced our argument. Thread 👇
How does the brain build a memory?
A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram.
In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.
But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?
We tested this directly.
🧵1/8
Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747
1/N: Dear cognitive map fans, I’d like to share a model I’ve been working on for a while (clearing backlog :). I show how a vector navigation architecture (VNA) and a “positional inference network” (PIN) can build Universal Cognitive Maps (UCMs) for abstract spaces.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Can whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic video stimuli be predicted using only transcripts?
Last year, I gave a tutorial on exactly that. Since the response was very positive, I’ve now released both the tutorial notebook and the trained models publicly.
Now out in Hippocampus. Fei Wang‘s model of Trace Vector Cells and intra-subiculum processing, consistent with know effects in CA1.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CPZPYM...
🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?
Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...
I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠
And the paper of course: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
9/9 Take-home: when attention can’t keep items in the focus, VWM leans toward more abstract, LTM-like/semantic formats that stay more readily accessible than fine perceptual detail. Really fun one to work on with my mates.
8/9 DDM again: sem. effects were primarily pre-accumulation (non-decision time) and selectively larger when items had to be maintained under competing demands.
7/9 Experiment 2 (Immediate vs Delay vs Interference): delay alone didn’t reliably amplify sem. prio, but interference did.
6/9 DDM nailed the dissociation:
Valid cueing eliminated the sem. advantage in non-decision time (access demands reduced).
But it boosted sem. advantages in drift rate (how efficiently evidence is used once decision starts).
So cueing shifts where the sem. edge shows up in the decision pipeline.
5/9 Experiment 1 (retro-cues): tested whether sem. prio is just a decision/selection bias.
Valid cue lets you pre-select the to-be-tested item.
Neutral cue forces you to keep multiple items available until probe.
Result: semantic prioritisation shrinks with valid cues but doesn’t vanish.
4/9 Reanalysis of our earlier dataset: sem. judgements showed a robust reduction in NDT across loads + lags → consistent w faster pre-accumulation access to sem. info. Drift-rate advantages for semantics were conditional (mainly under higher demands: higher load / longer lag btw study & test).
3/9 To figure out why, we used hierarchical drift-diffusion modelling (HDDM) to separate:
Non-decision time (t): pre-accumulation processes (probe processing / access / prep)
Drift rate (v): evidence accumulation efficiency (decision formation)
2/9 The striking behavioural pattern: when multiple items are in VWM, people are faster (and often more accurate) for semantic judgements than perceptual ones.
That’s the reverse of perception, where low-level visual features typically win the race.