Today is the only day you can experience Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” on the day it is set. Audio: archive.org/details/brad... PDF: thephilosopher.net/bredberi/wp-...
Chris Baker
@cibaker.bsky.social
Cognitive neuroscientist interested in high level vision (faces, scenes etc.), learning and plasticity. All views are my own.
Very excited to start my lab in NY this August as an Assistant Professor in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience & Simons Empire Faculty Fellow at the University at Albany – SUNY. My lab will focus on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying real-world visual cognition (perception & memory).
This is a really interesting and important study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... However, isn't it concerning that sweeping conclusions about functional organization of cortex are being reached on the basis of a single task?
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
nature.com
Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8
Brain-wide gaze-dependent activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep
Gaze behavior and brain activity are tightly coupled during perception and mental imagery. Whether this coupling extends to eyes-closed states remains largely unknown, primarily because measuring eye ...
biorxiv.org
Thrilled to share our new #preprint, and super proud of @zednud.bsky.social and our work on eye–brain dynamics during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Also excited to share that Zach started his PhD with me recently! 🎉 Lots of ideas and cool work ahead. Follow him on Bluesky and check out his thread! 🧵
Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8
The 2026 fMRI Summer Course with @fmri-today.bsky.social has begun and the recordings and slides are shared here: fmrif.nimh.nih.gov/SummerCourse
FMRIF Summer Course
fmrif.nimh.nih.gov
🎉 This is finally out on @natcomms.nature.com @natureportfolio.nature.com! Ever wondered what happens to your #brain when you become an expert at something? 🧠 If the answer is “yes” (+bonus points if you like #chess), check out our latest #fMRI work below! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Low-dimensional and optimised representations of high-level information in the expert brain - Nature Communications
What transforms a novice into an expert? In an fMRI study of chess players, the authors show that expert codes prioritise relational content, are more compressed, and reside in domain-general frontopa...
nature.com
Super excited to share a new preprint! We asked a simple-but-big question: What changes in the brain when someone becomes an expert? Using chess ♟️ + fMRI 🧠 + representational geometry & dimensionality 📈, we ask: 1️⃣ WHAT information is encoded? 2️⃣ HOW is it structured? 3️⃣ WHERE is it expressed? 1/n
In-scanner thoughts contribute to resting-state functional connectivity pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42365014/ I've long thought that this is the "elephant in the room" of resting state #fMRI esp. for comparing groups. If two groups think & feel differently in the scanner, of course rsfMRI will differ!
I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...
My Peer Review of The 1%
I wanted to like QED's new 1% ranking. I don't.
open.substack.com
I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3
Finally out: my review in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social covering how my lab and others have been ‘Looking into working memory through micro eye movements’ over the years. What does the microsaccade bias buy us? A lot I argue. Go see for yourself at: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Redirecting
doi.org
Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵
And if you are in the Washington DC area this coming weekend, feel free to come to our conference! futurerealities.org/FOR2026/
FOR 2026 | The Future of Our Realities: Work and Truth
A June 20, 2026 conference in Washington, DC about how AI is reshaping work, truth, media, labor, and shared reality.
futurerealities.org
📢 We are recruiting a full-time lab manager/RA joint between our lab and @marinabedny.bsky.social 's lab. A great opportunity for a recent grad interested in gaining more research experience in cognitive neuroscience. Details and apply here: hiring.jhu.edu/careers/job/...
Research Assistant (KSAS - Cognitive Science) | Johns Hopkins University
We are seeking a Research Assistant who will work jointly in the Isik and Bedny labs on projects involving neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), behavioral testing, and computational approaches. The position is p...
hiring.jhu.edu
Postdoc position available at postlab.psych.wisc.edu. Pls send cv to postle@wisc.edu
PO-STL-AB
Our interests in human memory and cognition encompass the cognitive and neural basis of working memory, attention, control, and consciousness.News Madison Symposium on Memory & Control. On 30 May 202...
postlab.psych.wisc.edu
Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
About to start my travel to #OHBM2026 Excited to help organize a full day ed course on multi-echo fMRI. Schedule is here: me-ica.github.io/ohbm-2026-mu... @enekourunuela.com @drjuliamoser.bsky.social @dowdlelt.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social
me-ica.github.io
Job ad (2/2): data scientist in the AFNI group (SSCC, NIMH, NIH, USA). FMRI/MRI methods dev, software design, statistics, analysis, data viz, quality control, machine learning and more! Please see: discuss.afni.nimh.nih.gov/t/job-ad-dat... I am happy to chat at OHBM+Brainhack. Please share!
Job ad (1/2): Postdoc fellowship in the AFNI group (SSCC, NIMH, NIH, USA). FMRI/MRI methods dev, software design, statistics, analysis, data viz, quality control, machine learning and more! Please see: discuss.afni.nimh.nih.gov/t/job-ad-pos... I am happy to chat at OHBM+Brainhack. Please share!
🚨New dataset just dropped🚨 Introducing Places in the Wild: 67,000 RAW-format photographs (45 mpix) densely sampled from 810 places (260 basic-level categories). This is 11x the number of pixels in ImageNet! Preprint is here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.02481 1/
Places in the Wild: A Large, High-Resolution RAW Photograph Dataset for Ecologically Valid Vision Research
Large image datasets have accelerated progress in cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. However, most datasets are low-resolution, internet-sourced JPEGs with unknown capture conditions and limi...
arxiv.org
Last week, I had the chance to present our work at #VSS2026! This was my first time presenting a poster, and I was really excited! Special thanks to @maryamvaziri.bsky.social and all the collaborators for this opportunity. Looking forward to making new connections and attending future conferences.
Spencer and MJ’s project is now out! Let me say something about the study, why it is important to me personally, and why I think it is important given what is happening right now at NIH and how science there is being disrupted or suppressed. 1/N (N = 19) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The visual perks of (not) being a wallflower: sociality is a stronger predictor of individual differences in face recognition than childhood experiences
Individuals vary considerably in their ability to recognize faces. Such variability may in part reflect individual differences in exposure to faces ba…
sciencedirect.com
Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>
NAS 163rd Annual Meeting - Awards Ceremony
YouTube video by National Academy of Sciences
youtube.com
VSS (@vssmtg.bsky.social) is coming up! Do you have an idea for a vision experiment but want to check you haven't missed anything? Looking for collaborators or relevant resources? Wanting to chat about a theory or model? Consider the pre-data poster session! www.visionsciences.org/pre-data-col...
VSS Pre-Data-Collection Poster SessionPre-Data-Collection Poster Session – Vision Sciences Society
visionsciences.org
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"
Second day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin
First day of ‘Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience’ in honor of Alex Martin
Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw
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