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"
Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw
New paper out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🎉
What determines contextual modulation in V1? Why does the visual surround sometimes facilitate and sometimes suppress a neuron's response to its preferred stimulus?
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
Why is the #cerebellum (known for coordinating motor functions) also engaged in #cognition? @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @actlab.bsky.social investigate the problems that have made it so difficult to answer this question and outline strategies to make progress. 🧪 #NeuroSky
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 👇
**Postdoc position in human category learning**
@thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social.
www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...
Why do children struggle to recognise objects in cluttered scenes more than adults? Our new paper looks at the development of visual acuity and crowding across childhood, and the way the visual system fine tunes our ability to see detail: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
10 PhD positions at JLU Giessen in the new Research Training Group "PIMON"! We will explore how humans perceive and interact with materials and objects in natural environments.
More information on the project, the PIs, and how to apply here:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
Please share!
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:
This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth...
...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex.
This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory:
www.richardgregory.org/experiments/
❤️ Bluesky fMRI people! 3-day #fMRI course live online Jan 7-9, 2026.
#SPM, #ICA, GLM, connectivity, mediation, MRI physics, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl.
We love talking methods & connecting with colleagues! Come join us!
Register here:
sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...
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
Announcing the next AFNI Bootcamp: Sep 23-25, 2025.
Free, open & virtual.
This "Part 1" will focus on basic visualization and single subject FMRI processing, including discussions of alignment, templates, regression, ROIs and quality control.
Details & registration: afni.nimh.nih.gov/bootcamp
If you’d like to write a commentary to accompany our new article arguing for a rethinking of how we approach understanding visual function in occipitotemporal cortex, now is your chance!
Now out in @natneuro.nature.com
What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed?
Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation
www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7
🧵1/18
High-frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (hf-tRNS) targeted at motion processing region hMT+ does not improve visual motion discrimination. Failed #replication in #registeredreport
@ryanruhde.bsky.social Mica Carroll @cibaker.bsky.social
#trns #nibs #NIMH
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
1/6
In these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):
The result of a large (42 authors!) collaboration:
"Go Figure: Transparency in neuroscience images preserves context and clarifies interpretation"
arxiv.org/abs/2504.07824
TL;DR: The FMRI world can (and should) improve results interpretation and reproducibility *today*, via transparent thresholding.
Two more days until our workshop 🥳@cosynemeeting.bsky.social #Cosyne2025
Object-centric neural representations across species 🐒🐁🕷️🐝🖥️
Check out our homepage: toliaslab.org/workshop/cos...
Excellent speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & many more 🙌
I'll be giving a talk at the foundation model workshop #Cosyne2025 tomorrow: neurofm-workshop.github.io
In response to @thetransmitter.bsky.social article by @tyrellturing.bsky.social & Eva Dyer I'll be talking about:
How do "foundation"/AI models help us (experimenters) study the brain?
Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I wrote a commentary on a very nice paper that just appeared in @brain1878.bsky.social by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social, Sobolewska, de Haan & @neurosteven.bsky.social.
Spoiler: It's about modularity in mid-level vision. 🤓
Original paper:
doi.org/10.1093/brai...
Commentary:
doi.org/10.1093/brai...
The dynamic version is even more disturbing...
New Paper out in @Cognition with @peelen.bsky.social !🚨📣
In a large-scale (N = 13539!) inattentional blindness experiment ran on naive museum visitors we demonstrate visual sensitivity to the 🚶♀️ upright human form 🚶♂️
@dondersinst.bsky.social
Open access link
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
www.nature.com/articles/s41... awesome new work out today! From the Lee lab in the intramural research program at NIMH!
Why is it hard to make bathroom tiles look random? I really enjoyed discussing how our pattern-seeking visual brains make it tricky to perceive randomness with the BBC CrowdScience team.
