Congratulations to @moazshoura.bsky.social on successfully defending his PhD! Thanks to @ccnlab.bsky.social, Kang Lee, @drmack.bsky.social, Jon Cant and @dirkbwalther.bsky.social for their thoughtful questions and feedback. Pictured here with Jon Cant and @drmack.bsky.social after the defense

Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

nature.com

The first preprint of the UNSTOPPABLE @mahveenmubarak.bsky.social ! What an “unpredictable” ride it has been and I’m excited (and a bit scared) for what she is gonna discover when she “starts” her graduate program this fall!

Mahveen S Mubarak@mahveenmubarak.bsky.social · 4w ago

What if simply predicting an event could trick your brain into remembering it as real, even when it never happened? 🧠 Very excited to share my very first preprint with @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, born from a question that seemed almost too counterintuitive to be true🧵 1/7 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I'm starting a lab at the University of Notre Dame! 🎉🍀🧠 Doors open Jan 2027. I'm most excited to meet my future students (recruiting psych grad students for 2027!), help grow a budding neuroscience area, and head home to the midwest after many years away. Please reach out! @notredame.bsky.social

How can aesthetic pleasure be shaped by so many visual attributes: prototypicality, fluency, complexity, symmetry, and self-relevance? I argue that aesthetic pleasure emerges from a balance between categorization-based rewards and metabolic costs of neural activity. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

“Design can be informed by user preferences, and research can benefit from more ecological validity, from actually being in a space,” says @dirkbwalther.bsky.social @utoronto.ca. “This is potentially game-changing.” 🗼 www.psych.utoronto.ca/news/neurosc...

Hey there #visionscience and #psychscisky friends! I wanted to take a moment to (finally) do a proper promo 🧵 about my new textbook: Practical Vision Science, which is now available from Routledge books. <1/n> www.routledge.com/Practical-Vi...

Practical Vision Science: Learning Through Experimentation

This workbook provides a collection of experiments and observations that use physical materials (rather than digital displays or resources) to reveal fundamental properties of the human visual system....

routledge.com

We are excited to open the re:vision initiative, a community-driven initiative for replicating and generalizing findings in visual neuroscience, based on the LAION-fMRI dataset. re-vision-initiative.org Why this initiative and why would you want to participate? 🧵

For the first time in many years our lab won't attend @vssmtg.bsky.social. We don't feel safe and welcome traveling to the USA at the moment. We are attending CSBBCS and @ecvp.bsky.social instead. We are sorry to miss our friends and colleagues at VSS! Hope to see you in Seattle next year!

Day 1 at @iaea-jena2026.bsky.social has been a blast! 3x talks from our group - facial aesthetics, a new inclusive measure of aesthetic engagement, and harnessing the power of AI to assess qualitative responses. Today - catch @hannahmerseal.bsky.social’s talk in the “Aesthetic Brains” session 🧠🎨

TASC 2026 was a big success! Thanks to invited speakers Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva @psych.ubc.ca and Gerald Cupchik @utsc.utoronto.ca for their interesting presentations and David Rokeby @utoronto.ca for the Voice Scroll installation. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

Dozens of scientists, scholars, and artists came together last week at the University of Toronto&#39;s University College for the second edition of the Toronto Aesthetics Sciences and Creativity… | Un...

Dozens of scientists, scholars, and artists came together last week at the University of Toronto's University College for the second edition of the Toronto Aesthetics Sciences and Creativity Conferenc...

linkedin.com

Creativity and aesthetics have long been studied as two independent topics, and yet there is growing recognition of the reciprocal ties that bind them together. A new Research Topic aims to advance a scientific understanding of the interconnections. www.frontiersin.org/research-top... Please repost!

Frontiers | Exploring the Connections Between Creativity and Aesthetics

Creativity and aesthetics have long been studied as two largely independent fields. Despite this separation, there is growing recognition of the reciprocal t...

frontiersin.org

Our brains cling to stability: when scenes slowly change, people still see the original for longer than expected. This AI-image study shows that perception lags behind reality -our minds favor continuity over constant reprocessing. doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

#UofTArtSci psychologist Katy Tam has found that smartphones actually create more boredom. Tam's Life Hacks Research Lab provides evidence-based advice to those struggling with digital distraction. Read more: bit.ly/47qGup6

10 PhD positions at JLU Giessen in the new Research Training Group "PIMON"! We will explore how humans perceive and interact with materials and objects in natural environments. More information on the project, the PIs, and how to apply here: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns... Please share!

New paper from our team led by the incredibly talented Dr. Erik Wing (with Jordan Chad, Geneva Mariotti and @drjenryan.bsky.social). www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

The tuned cortex: Convergent expertise-related structural and functional remodeling across the adult lifespan

Neuroplasticity is a defining property of the brain. Structural and functional brain changes arise soon after learning and are particularly evident following years of practice that underpin expert per...

jneurosci.org

**Postdoc position in human category learning** @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social. www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

Excited that this work with @serences.bsky.social and @timbrady.bsky.social is now out! Our Gabor-wavelet model better predicted voxel responses in scene regions than 3D models. Does this mean that scene areas aren’t “for” processing 3D scene structure? NO, we argue. 1/ dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

A 2D Gabor-wavelet baseline model out-performs a 3D surface model in scene-responsive cortex

Author summary To gain a more complete picture of human visual processing, it is critical to understand the precise format of representations of naturalistic visual scenes. Recent work has approached ...

dx.plos.org

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience

If you are a current Barnard College employee, please use the internal career site to apply for this position. Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience The Barnard Visua...

barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Population receptive field size in scene-selective visual cortex is related to the anterior-posterior organization. Spatial frequency preference is NOT related to pRF size! New results by Charlotte Leferink and @damianoc.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social @utoronto.ca

Imaging Neuroscience@imagingneurosci.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Charlotte A. Leferink, Claudia Damiano, and Dirk B. Walther: Population receptive field size does not correspond to spatial frequency processing in scene-selective cortex doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Charlotte A. Leferink, Claudia Damiano, and Dirk B. Walther: Population receptive field size does not correspond to spatial frequency processing in scene-selective cortex doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

❕Job opening alert❕We are looking for a new post-bac Research Assistant to join the Visual Attention Lab! See the link for job description and how to apply search.bwh.harvard.edu/new/staff_fi...

❗New Paper❗Is children's attention more like a spotlight that darts across time, or one that diffuses across many things at once? How might children's immature attention help their learning? Our Dev Sci Paper has answers! 🧵🎯 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549519/

a woman stands in front of a crowd on a stage with a lot of lights

ALT: a woman stands in front of a crowd on a stage with a lot of lights

media.tenor.com

I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

What determines the perception of orientations in visual cortex, sharp contours or oriented spatial frequencies? It's the contours, the building blocks for shape. Brilliant paper by Seohee Han out in Scientific Reports: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

Wonderful article about our recent paper in @pnasnexus.org! Thanks, @sachapfeiffer.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! @yikai-tang.bsky.social @uoftpsychology.bsky.social @artsci.utoronto.ca @utoronto.ca

Sachin Rawat@sachinxr.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Why do we find some scenes more aesthetic than others? For my first in @sciencenews.bsky.social, I wrote about a new study that suggests that our aesthetic preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts. 🧠🧪 www.sciencenews.org/article/brai...

🚨 Last publication alert of 2025! Why is scene understanding easier and faster for some scenes than for others? Here, we explore whether scenes with too much information slow visual processing. 1/

Bridges can anchor communities as landmarks and even tourist destinations, blend into their environment unnoticed, or they can be eyesores. What determines the aesthetic quality of bridges? Mei Yang, @damianoc.bsky.social, Paul Gauvreau, and I explore this question here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Empirical aesthetics of bridges

Bridges are works of public infrastructure designed to perform a practical function. They are unique among works of engineering in that they also have a significant aesthetic dimension. At their best,...

doi.org

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position

Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change

lindsay-lab.github.io

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...