🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...

Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last mo.

Brainwide representation of navigation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.29.747979v1

New preprint, w/ Karolina Drożdż Understanding language requires internally modelling what's happening where, even when unstated We built a new task to measure this ability in language models and people, and find it emerges at model scales far smaller than previously thought

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Efficient coding makes and breaks Weber's law

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

biorxiv.org

Why do we breeze through some sentences, but others make us slow down and reread? A popular answer is predictability: unexpected words are harder to process. In our new @pnas.org article, we used LMs as models of human prediction to ask how far this explanation can actually go🧵

Belated, but still happy to see our paper (with @drhanjones.bsky.social) on fleeting memory transformers is out in TACL! We find that giving language models human-like memory decay *improves* language learning, while, unexpectedly, impairing human reading time prediction Follow up results soon!

Wonderful to see this! For (controversial?) context. There’s long been an argument that what brains & ANNs are doing cannot be fathomed beyond the meta like (eg) architecture, learning rules and such. And there’s a counter-idea: ”let’s try?”. When we stumbled on the correlates of memorability /1

micha heilbron@mheilbron.bsky.social · 3mo ago

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⬇️

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⬇️

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning last week. I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...

What will be left for us to work on?

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

cs.princeton.edu

Human-like fleeting memory improves language learning but impairs reading time prediction in transformer language models. New paper by Abishek Thamma & @mheilbron.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/TACL.a.688

Als geen ander wist Lieke Marsman (1990-2026) het allerzwaarste licht te maken

Als geen ander wist Lieke Marsman (1990-2026) het allerzwaarste licht te maken

volkskrant.nl

Nu online te bekijken! Een Wereld vol Denkers 🌍🌿🤖🧠🐝 bij Studium Generale #Maastricht. Dit was echt een hele leuke avond! Met @mheilbron.bsky.social! @maastrichtu.bsky.social @uitgeverijbalans.bsky.social #wetenschap #boeken #biologie #psychologie #AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKjh...

Lezing | Een wereld vol denkers: mens, dier, plant en AI | Sebastiaan Mathôt & Micha Heilbron

YouTube video by Studium Generale Maastricht University

youtube.com

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)

Ik heb er zin in! Morgen zijn @mheilbron.bsky.social en ik bij @maastrichtu.bsky.social voor een avond vol #wetenschap, #biologie, #psychologie en #AI! 🧠🐝🌿🤖 Meld je aan via www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/events/ee... #maastricht

Sebastiaan Mathôt@cogsci.nl · 6mo ago

23 april geven @mheilbron.bsky.social en ik een lezing in het mooie #Maastricht over Een wereld vol denkers. Een avond vol verhalen over het denken en doen van mens, dier, plant en AI! 🧠🐝🌿🤖 Ik hoop jullie daar te zien! www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/events/ee... #wetenschap #psychologie #biologie

Nijmegen friends: Tomorrow (10–12) I'll be debating Pim Haselager at a Donders Session on the thesis: "Artificial neural network models are adequate mechanistic models of the mind" I'm defending, he's opposing. Should be fun. Come join us! www.ru.nl/en/donders-i... @dondersinst.bsky.social

Donders Session - 16 April | Radboud University

Donders Debate with Micha Heilbron and Pim Haselager: Artificial neural network models are adequate mechanistic models of the mind

ru.nl

23 april geven @mheilbron.bsky.social en ik een lezing in het mooie #Maastricht over Een wereld vol denkers. Een avond vol verhalen over het denken en doen van mens, dier, plant en AI! 🧠🐝🌿🤖 Ik hoop jullie daar te zien! www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/events/ee... #wetenschap #psychologie #biologie

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

Classic predictive coding: V1 predicts low-level features, higher areas high-level. But recent studies + AI models suggest prediction happens at higher levels of abstraction. Who's right? In new work w/ @wiegerscheurer.bsky.social we find that both are – distinct regimes across the visual field

Wieger Scheurer@wiegerscheurer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New preprint! w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social We found that, even during simple natural scene viewing, human visual cortex predicts—hierarchically in central vision and at higher levels peripherally—reconciling classical predictive coding with recent evidence from animal models and AI (e.g. JEPA) (1/10)

New preprint! w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social We found that, even during simple natural scene viewing, human visual cortex predicts—hierarchically in central vision and at higher levels peripherally—reconciling classical predictive coding with recent evidence from animal models and AI (e.g. JEPA) (1/10)

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

Protect Academic Life in Iran

We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

sites.google.com

Interested in pursuing a PhD in NLP/cog-sci? Studying language learning in LMs from the perspective of human language acquisition? Few more days to apply!!

micha heilbron@mheilbron.bsky.social · 7mo ago

📢 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

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the brain's responses to sight, sound & language. 📄 Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... ▶️ Demo: aidemos.atmeta.com/tribev2/ 💻 Code: github.com/facebookrese... 🤗 Model: huggingface.co/facebook/tri...

📢 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 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

Job update: Next week I start as a group leader at the Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen @mpi-nl.bsky.social 🧠 Building the Language and Predictive Computation group -- using LLMs to model language in the mind/brain, and vice versa. Hiring soon!

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Memorization vs. generalization in deep learning: implicit biases, benign overfitting, and more

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the memorization

infinitefaculty.substack.com

Interesting convergence: The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1 Now published: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Higher-level spatial prediction in natural vision across mouse visual cortex

Author summary How does the brain make sense of the constant stream of visual information? A popular theory suggests the brain is not a passive receiver but an active predictor, constantly generating ...

journals.plos.org

micha heilbron@mheilbron.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint, w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social ! we've found that visual cortex, even when just viewing natural scenes, predicts *higher-level* visual features The aligns with developments in ML, but challenges some assumptions about early sensory cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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 · 9mo 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...

🚨New Preprint! How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715 + @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social 🧵 1/14

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex

Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

arxiv.org