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...
happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉
building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax
🚨 Announcing another edition of the Metacognitive Science satellite in NYC, August 2nd 2026 (day before CCN) 🧠 🧪
Abstract submission is now open and closes May 15th!
metacognitivescience.org
Co-organised with @meganakpeters.bsky.social @luciecharlesneuro.bsky.social @dobyrahnev.bsky.social
Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of?
In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
🚨new lab preprint; brain fingerprinting entirely revisited:
Can we differentiate individuals from just seconds of neurophysiological recordings with machine learning, without resorting to black-box approaches?
In this work, Maxence Lapatrie says 'yes'.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Now in press one of my last PhD projects! We traced the neurobiological profile of fMRI BOLD signal variability, a measure that has been related to age, behaviour, disease status, but had not yet been fully contextualised within the brain's multiscale architecture. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thank you so much to the brilliant @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social and @alexwiesman.bsky.social for all their support. And to our wonderful collaborators at @sickkidsto.bsky.social Margot Taylor! (6/6)🌈
Our findings suggest a growing influence of genetic factors on neurophysiological traits across the lifespan and advance our understanding of the evolving biological foundations of inter-individual differences. (5/6) 🧬🧬🧠🧠
The cortical regions most critical for determining individuality shift across the lifespan🧠, with sensorimotor cortices becoming increasingly prominent in adulthood. These changes closely align with the expression of cortical genetic systems involved in ion transport and neurotransmission. (4/6)
Children 👦👧 were more difficult to distinguish from one another based on their neurophysiology than adults. This is because children's neurophysiological traits are more similar to one another. Arrhythmic brain activity drives this effect—children are differentiable from rhythmic brain traits. (3/6)
People’s brain activity is much like a fingerprint and can distinguish individuals from one another. But all of this work has been done, for the most part, in adults. What about children and older adults? (2/6)
Very proud to announce that the final chapter of my thesis is now out in Cell Reports! How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? We combined data from over 1,000 individuals aged 4–89 to answer this question. (1/6) 🧠👶👦👧👱👩🦱🧔♂️🧓👴
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
It does not, however, speak to the origins of the 1/f. I agree that many mechanisms could produce the same spectrum. More work is needed to clarify these neural mechanisms.
This is a great question! Our paper is grounded in the 'specparam' framework and aims to test whether current approaches yield biased and/or correlated estimates of spectral parameters. I think this is an important question given the widespread use of these methods.
Using an empirical dataset, we show that analytical choice in quantifying brain rhythms impacts the interpretation of your results! 😰 Lastly, we find that resting state alpha power and arrhythmic slope are positively correlated at rest, which dovetails with the cortical inhibition account.
(4/4)
We show that spectral detrending methods produce biased estimates of rhythmic power that introduce spurious correlations between brain rhythms and arrhythmic brain activity. Modelled Gaussian power, on the other hand, does not. 🤯
(3/4)
Brain rhythms are important! 🚨Peristimulus alpha power predicts participants’ subjective experience. 👀 Arrhythmic brain activity is equally important! Both are theorized to be markers of cortical inhibition⚡️. But can we measure the two independently of one another with our current tools?
(2/4)
Quantifying rhythmic and arrhythmic brain activity is a hot 🥵 topic. But how independent are the two components from one another? 🤔 In my latest work with @smfleming.bsky.social & @matlandry.bsky.social, I explore the relationship between the two.
(1/4)
New study ✨!
⍺ regulates perceptual switches during binocular rivalry:
⍺↓ before dominant percepts, ↑ before mixed percepts + PO connectivity shifts from top-down to feedforward after perceptual alternations
Led by Janine Mendola @mcgill.ca, w/ E Mokri & @jasondasilvac.bsky.social
🚨The first paper of my postdoc is out now in @elife.bsky.social! 🚨 We explored the role of attention in planning. Thank you 🙏 to the reviewers for their helpful comments & suggestions. Keep your 👀 peeled for additional analyses and our response. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...
After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️
🧬🧠 Our latest study shows that individual brain dynamics are partly written in our genes. We found that heritable neurophysiological traits align with adult cortical gene expression and psychological function.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
@theneuro.bsky.social @mcgill.ca
Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on 4 inhibitory control tasks, Lee et al. show that more than 1000 trials/participant are necessary to reduce within-subject variability and improve the reliability of the congruency effect.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨Excited to share my first preprint from my postdoc with @smfleming.bsky.social! 🚨 We explore how attention shapes simplified mental representations for planning. We show that inductive biases characteristic of attentional selection shape how we plan. Check it out: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠🔦🤖
Want to present at MEG-UKI but funding is a barrier?
We’re offering a limited amount of travel bursaries for presenters to help cover the cost of:
- Registration
- Accommodation
- Travel expenses
Click the link below to find out more:
meguk.ac.uk/apply-for-bu...
Deadline approaching, only 6 days left!
Follow the link below to submit your abstract:
meguk.ac.uk/abstract-sub...
Drumroll please... 🥁
Abstract submission for MEG-UKI 2025 is now open!!!
All the details can be found meguk.ac.uk/meg-uki-2025/
We are looking forward to welcoming you to London!
-Sensorimotor cortices 🏋️♀️🚴♀️ become increasingly prominent for differentiating individuals across neurodevelopment and aging.
-These changes become increasingly aligned with cortical gene expression🧬.
🧵 (3/3)