Finding a "face neuron" in an ANN doesn't mean it encodes faces like we do. 🧵 In my first project with @apurvaratan.bsky.social, we show that category selectivity in ANNs ≠ category selectivity in brains. Details in thread + preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Feedback or questions welcome!

Category selectivity observed in the human brain is distinct from category selectivity observed in artificial neural networks

Category selectivity for images of faces, scenes, and bodies is among the most striking and reproducible findings in vision neuroscience. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained on visual tasks also...

biorxiv.org

Apurva Ratan Murty@apurvaratan.bsky.social · 2w ago

Excited to first share @alishdipani.bsky.social 's study. Alish asked a (deceptively) simple Q: Are category-selective units in ANNs actually like category-selective regions in the brain? (why is this imp? read until the end). #neuroskyence #neuroscience #brain #neuroai

Please share. Registration is live! Come join us to talk spatial memory, navigation, computation, and design at the next Conference for Research and Education in Navigation. Wonderful speakers+panelists, and we hope to see your work there too! @gt-neuro.bsky.social @gtsciences.bsky.social

🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior. We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior. 1/8

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

Glad to see my first-year project is out! In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations. 1/n

Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence

Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…

sciencedirect.com

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

Bria Long@brialong.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab! Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

arxiv.org

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

And that's a wrap! Thank you to @gtsciences.bsky.social and all of today's #GTFrontiers speakers for a thrilling day of neuroscience and AI. #Neuroscience #AI

How do different stimulus manipulations affect perceptual accuracy vs. confidence? In a new preprint, we show that 4 manipulations have remarkably similar effects, while a 5th one has qualitatively different effects than all other ones. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We are hiring a postdoc! We're looking for someone interested in perception, imagination & consciousness, and with experience in neuroimaging (the focus is fMRI but MEG/EEG is ok). Vision science, machine learning and philosophy nerds please apply! subjectivity.sites.northeastern.edu/research/hot...

The Subjectivity Lab

Interdisciplinary lab in Northeastern's Psychology Department researching perception, consciousness and introspection.

subjectivity.sites.northeastern.edu