🔭JOB ALERT🔬 Fully-funded PhD (+ soon postdoc) openings in my lab @cimecunitrento.bsky.social in Italy, as part of an Italian FIS3 starting grant. TOPIC: Investigating predictive neural representations in naturalistic settings using MEG-based dynamic RSA

1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.

What makes some stimuli more memorable than others? In a new paper w/ @davogelsang.bsky.social, we show that the magnitude of a stimulus's ANN representation predicts both image and word memorability Stimuli that activate more features, more strongly, leave a stronger memory trace Out now in JML⬇️

A huge effort and a new take on what constitutes the "feedforward pass" across the visual system. Make sure to check out our new preprint:

Daniel Anthes@anthesdaniel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited about our new preprint: “The illusory simplicity of the feedforward pass: evidence for the dynamical nature of stimulus encoding along the primate ventral stream” arxiv.org/abs/2604.12825 Work with Sushrut Thorat, Anna Mitola, Paolo Papale, Peter König & Tim Kietzmann 🧵 thread below

Spend your July doing research in Granada! The CIMCYC is calling for talented undergraduate students (non-UGR) to join our Summer Research Stays 2026. 📍 9 Placements available 💶 €1,600 scholarship 🔬 8 specialized Research Groups (see next post!) 🏡 Housing support included Apply by May 11

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

📢Publication Alert: New Paper on Human Pavlovian Fear Conditioning! It has been speculated that psychophysiological responses to an outcome during learning could express prediction errors. ➡️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #associativelearning #psychophysiology #PavlovianFearConditioning

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library

Pavlovian reward learning is driven by prediction errors (PE), but it remains unclear whether this is also the case for aversive learning, and to what extent PE are expressed in physiological indices...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Looking forward to it! Hope to see some of you there!

Department of Imaging Neuroscience@imagingneuroucl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺 This Friday, May 1st, the Brain Meeting speaker will be David Richter giving a talk entitled "What's in a prediction error?" In person or online. Read more: www.in.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/events

OPEN POSTDOC position (part of @erc.europa.eu Consolidator DYNALANG) We build math&comp models of neural dynamics using insights from formal linguistics + ML Seeking theory-driven researchers w/ interests in language, neural dynamics, & math/comp neuroscience. Apply here: tinyurl.com/55exdpse

JOB ALERT: PhD opening in my lab! @cimecunitrento.bsky.social in Italy, as part of an Italian FIS3 starting grant. The project will use advanced analysis methods of MEG data to investigate how our world's naturalistic hierarchical structure facilitates predictive neural processing.

I recently had the pleasure to visit the great Neurospin institute in Paris where I presented my work on the neural prediction of naturalistic dynamic input: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywxt... Some data from the talk is published at: doi.org/10.1038/s414... and doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Hierarchical priors and stimulus familiarity facilitate neural prediction of naturalistic...

YouTube video by Cognitive Neuroscience & Brain Imaging conferences

youtube.com

Check out our new paper out in communications psychology! @commspsychol.nature.com

Communications Psychology@commspsychol.nature.com · 4mo ago

This study shows that past experiences alter the basic processing of visual input, showing that learning alters attentional processing in a similar way to what was previously shown with endogenous and exogenous attention. @docdocdunk.bsky.social @jthee.bsky.social 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...

Temporally-precise sensory encoding of predicted content, entraining motor oscillations to derive time. @akalt.bsky.social's first study out @currentbiology.bsky.social, testing parts of this idea (tinyurl.com/TiCSKaltenma...). Huge thanks @leverhulme.ac.uk ac.uk @erc.europa.eu, great work Aaron!

Fixed and flexible perceptual rhythms

Our sensory inputs are never identical across time and contain temporal structure. Cognitive scientists have recently been fascinated by how these sensory rhythms interact with neural oscillatory rhyt...

tinyurl.com

Aaron Kaltenmaier@akalt.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Excited to share that our MEG project is now out in Current Biology! We show how visual content codes relate to motor oscillations in telling time. Huge thanks to Quirin Gehmacher, Peter Kok, Matt Davis and Clare Press (bsky links below).🧵 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧠 Feature-specific predictive processing: What’s in a prediction error? 🧠 Perspective article w/ Cem Uran, @martinavinck.bsky.social & @predictivebrain.bsky.social now in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, highlighting recent work on the nature of surprise reflected in visual prediction errors. 🧵👇

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference! 🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Summary 🧵 below 👇

Rapid computation of high-level visual surprise

Health sciences

cell.com

🧠 Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain direct.mit.edu/jocn/article... (still uncorrected proofs, but they should post the corrected one soon--also OA is forthcoming, for now PDF at brainandexperience.org/pdf/10.1162-...)

Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain

Abstract. The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)sc...

direct.mit.edu

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies

Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

jneurosci.org

If you’re into predictive processing and curious about the ‘what & when of visual surprise’, come see me at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam! Poster B23 · Wednesday at 1:00 pm · de Brug.

Hi, we will have three NeuroAI postdoc openings (3 years each, fully funded) to work with Sebastian Musslick (@musslick.bsky.social), Pascal Nieters and myself on task-switching, replay, and visual information routing. Reach out if you are interested in any of the above, I'll be at CCN next week!

We are recruiting a new PI at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, Associate or Full Professor. This is an amazing place to do cognitive neuroscience, in the heart of London. If you or someone you know might be interested, please pass it on. #neuroskyence www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ucl.ac.uk

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, specially targeting conscious vs. unconscious processing, contact me. We are recruiting 🙏🧠 please RT

🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc! Join the FLARE project @cimcyc.bsky.social to study sudden perceptual learning using fMRI, RSA, and DNNs. 🧠 2 years, fully funded, flexible start More info 👉 gonzalezgarcia.github.io/postdoc/ DMs or emails welcome! Please share!

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

The what and when of visual surprise: EEG shows that high-level visual surprise emerges rapidly and modulates neural responses ~200ms after stimulus onset. New preprint with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social available here: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Summary 🧵 below

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social. Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

New MEG paper by @jhaarsma.bsky.social and @dotproduct.bsky.social‬! Same design and behavioural results as our 7T layer fMRI study (www.jneurosci.org/content/43/4...), but now shedding light on the temporal dynamics of the sensory signals underlying false percepts. #neuroskyence

Shared and diverging neural dynamics underlying false and veridical perception

We often mistake visual noise for meaningful images, which sometimes appear as convincing as veridical percepts. This suggests considerable overlap between the mechanisms that underlie false and verid...

jneurosci.org