And come see the substack series: danyamins.substack.com/p/the-theory...

The Theory of Contravariance, Part 0

Breaking down our extensive new theory paper.

danyamins.substack.com

Aran Nayebi@anayebi.bsky.social · 3w ago

1/6 Why have deep neural networks aligned so strongly with brains for the past 15 years? What explains it? @dyamins.bsky.social & I make progress on this question in our new paper👇 In a nutshell, we *prove* that for sufficiently hard tasks, the choice of alignment metric does *not* matter.

Ever wondered what happens to your #brain when you become an expert at something? 🧠 Check it out at www.nature.com/articles/s41...!

Andrea Costantino@costantinoai.bsky.social · 4w ago

🎉 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...

🎉 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...

Andrea Costantino@costantinoai.bsky.social · 9mo ago

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

Conference wrap-ups are about science. And #VSS2026 had some GREAT science. But now that VSS is (sadly) over, what I really want to celebrate is our community. The old and new (!!) friends, the science talks at 1am, the tiki, and all the good times. Thank you all! THIS is what I work for

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy? What does the term 'representation' mean to you? We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields. eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

🔥 We have a new preprint! 🔥 It's really nice, I recommend reading it Here's a summary question: Can FFA activation predict RT to faces? ⏬ Check out the answer below ⏬ @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Returning home inspired after a great visit to KU Leuven, where I presented our work on CorText in the Brain & Cognition group. Thank you for the invitation and great discussions! @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social @costantinoai.bsky.social (pictured: the magnificent architecture of the Liège station)

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

Can the adult brain acquire typical representations after missing an essential early-life experience? New work with Marge Livingstone: “Early face deprivation leads to long-lasting deficits in cortical face processing”. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Eiko Fried@eikofried.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A wonderful surprise to see our latest study on expertise so beautifully explained by @bjbalas.bsky.social on @lichess.org. Go check it out!

Ben Balas@bjbalas.bsky.social · 6mo ago

After a rather long delay, I've finally got a new Science of #Chess post up on lichess! This time I'm looking at a very neat #neuroscience paper (co-authored by @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social) using chess as a model for studying expertise. Enjoy! #cogneuro #PsychSciSky

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

Dan Levenstein@dlevenstein.bsky.social · 9mo ago

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Huh, funny. 40 years passed, but this is still so relatable

Not directly related to @neurograce.bsky.social’s comment here but to the thread: I am baffled by the number of people who seem to think the claim is that all brain computation is low-d vs. the *emprical* finding that task-related neural activity is (linear) low-d in many (not all) cases.

Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · 9mo ago

This kind of stuff is why I say that I worry that the tools of neuroscience are not properly vetted

1. 🧵 Thread: What happens to the visual brain after early transient blindness? Our new Nature Communications paper examines a rare population: people born with dense bilateral cataracts—a short blindness occurring during a critical window of visual development. 🔗 rdcu.be/eQjMH

Low-Dimensional and Optimised Representations of High-Level Information in the Expert Brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.12.688012v1

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

New paper (and thread) on the representational dynamics of the main dimensions of object space: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 1/n

It's finally out! Our work with @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & @costantinoai.bsky.social is published. We went looking for dissociations between types of recurrence in DNNs, but we found something quite different.. hopefully that can tell us somehting about our models! rdcu.be/eLwBA

We’re hiring! We’re looking for two RAs to study neuroplasticity in sight loss, sight rescue and development in children and adults @ucl.ac.uk using a wide range of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Please help spread the word! Apply by 16 Oct! t.ly/q3aYe #neurojobs #NeuroSkyence

Research Assistant at UCL

Recruiting now: Research Assistant on jobs.ac.uk. Click for details and explore more academic job opportunities on the top job board

t.ly

🧠 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...

It was great reconnecting with friends and colleagues at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam and presenting our latest #expertise work. We 👀 into how #chess experts represent the board, and how the content, structure, and location of these repr shift w/ expertise.⬇️

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Neural population-based approaches have opened new windows into neural computations and behavior

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with complex information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations.

thetransmitter.org

🚨 New preprint alert! Our latest study, led by @DrewLinsley, examines how deep neural networks (DNNs) optimized for image categorization align with primate vision, using neural and behavioral benchmarks.

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/...

You know what I'd love to be able to do? Research.

Paper🚨 "Objects, Faces, and Spaces: Organizational Principles of Visual Object Perception as Evidenced by Individual Differences in Behavior" by @heidasigurdar.bsky.social & @ingamariao.bsky.social JEP:G editor's choice ->free to read psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... #visionscience #psychscisky 🧵1/13

🚨PhD opportunity Fall/Winter 2025🚨 Join me in Geneva Switzerland #unige to learn more about colour perception. Using neuroimaging & computational modelling, you'll be working with an international & interdisciplinary team to understand how we transform light into a colourful world!🧠👁️🌈 #neurojobs