The whole Fleming lab is stoked to be here at #ECVP2026 in Bournemouth - come say hi and check out everyone's awesome presentations if you're interested!

Happy to announce that MRD got accepted by the Journal of Vision (marks the first submission of my phd). Thanks to all editors and reviewers making the paper better over time. If you don't want to wait for the official JoV version, I updated the preprint & repo with the latest code and results.

Ben Beilharz@engramm.ing · 7mo ago

Sorry for the wait (been to China for 4 weeks between the years), but I finally managed to update the pre-print with more results and the code is now also available on: github.com/ag-perceptio... If you run into issues, let me know.

🚨Out now in J Neurosci! 🧠 Using fMRI and EEG, we mapped where and when contextual knowledge of real-world objects emerges within the visual system - even when those objects are viewed in isolation. @dkaiserlab.bsky.social @peelen.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...

Spatiotemporal Representations of Contextual Associations for Real-World Objects

In the real world, objects always appear in context. Many objects are reliably associated with a certain scene context (e.g., pots appear in kitchens) and other objects that appear in the same context...

jneurosci.org

🔭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

Happy to be serving as editor for MMB. Excited about what is to come.

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

👀 Can a visual effect make something feel sticky? 🖐️ As participants pulled their fingers apart, a deforming region stretched before breaking. 📈 The farther it stretched, the stickier it was perceived to be—even without any physical resistance. Full paper doi.org/10.1177/2041...

Excited to share that our paper has been accepted for a talk at #CogSci2026: Path Integration and Object-Location Binding Emerge in an Action-Conditioned Predictive Sequence Network Linda Ariel Ventura, Victoria Bosch, Tim C. Kietzmann, and Sushrut Thorat. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2602.03490. ⛓️

Path Integration and Object-Location Binding Emerge in an Action-Conditioned Predictive Sequence Network

Adaptive cognition requires structured internal models of objects and their relations. Predictive neural networks are often proposed to learn such world models, but how these are instantiated and how ...

arxiv.org

How do human minds make sense of big, messy problems? 😵‍💫🌀 How do we distill complexity into something simple enough to solve? 🤔💡 We’ll be tackling these questions (and more!) at two workshops on task representations, abstractions, and construals #CogSci2026 #CCN2026 🧵 framing-the-problem.github.io

Framing the Problem — Workshop Series

A workshop series on representation construction in cognitive science and AI. CogSci 2026 (Rio) and CCN 2026 (NYU).

framing-the-problem.github.io

Online planning of sequential actions Review by Jörn Diedrichsen (@diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social), Mehrdad Kashefi (@mkashefi.bsky.social), Amin Nazerzadeh, & J. Andrew Pruszynski (@andpru.bsky.social) tinyurl.com/2p9nbnbx

The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join us at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig as a fully funded 4-year postdoc position (m/f/d) in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (Area: Social Cognition). Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by 13 July: recruitingapp-5218.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/44...?

What is the minimal machinery needed for complex, cognition-like behavior? With @lostintheswarm.bsky.social, we show how self-sustained calcium oscillations, diffusion, and mechanics may be enough to coordinate behavior across a single cell with no nervous system. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand - Nature Neuroscience

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

nature.com

Folks at #VSS2026, stop by my poster this morning to hear about my work with Roland Fleming on these little guys and their navigational affordances! "Automatically perceiving paths through a scene", poster 53.348, Banyan Breezeway 8.30-12.30

What do we look for when searching for objects in our daily-life environments? Very happy that I can now share this review, together with @suryagayet.bsky.social , @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social🥳 A brief thread below!

Trends in Cognitive Sciences@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Online Now: Attention in the wild: balancing flexibility and stability

Fantastic work by my labmates, asking people to draw non-existing objects to reveal the structure of our internal category representations!

Emily A-Izzeddin@emilya-izzeddin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

How would you categorise these images? What features would you use? Preprint just went live looking at how we make sense of things we’ve never seen before (i.e., drawings just like these!). If that sounds interesting, read on or check out the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

Tenure-track position in Denmark "with a particular focus on visual perception, including visual attention, working memory, and visual neuroscience" #neurojobs #neuroskyence #visionscience fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology

The Department of Psychology at the University of Southern Denmark invites applications for a full-time position as tenure-track Assistant Professor. The position is a six-year tenure-track appointmen...

fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com

Our postdoc Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has released "Its Complicated", a great software library that provides infrastructure to implement naturalistic, complex, interactive experiments in game engines. The toolbox supports peripherals and coding game logic for later analysis. gallantlab.org/Its-Complica...

𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 Great paper discussing the challenges of understanding brain representations and the models-brain correspondence #neuroskyence t.co/9l1VU6Pox1

Statistics of natural scenes shape contextual modulation in the visual cortex www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... - would be really interesting to do this right after eye opening!

Statistics of natural scenes shape contextual modulation in the visual cortex

How does visual context shape neuronal responses to local features? Fu et al. demonstrate that surround modulation in primary visual cortex neurons reflects how well context matches the optimal local ...

cell.com

How do humans adapt their behavior in natural, uncertain environments? Open PhD position in the collaborative DFG Excellence Cluster “The Adaptive Mind” (theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de) Apply: www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

How do neural circuits in the brain implement normalization? 🧠 In our new paper, we show that just normalizing sensory input isn't enough. Crucially, we must also normalize the error signals! 🧵👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.17676

Inhibitory normalization of error signals improves learning in neural circuits

Normalization is a critical operation in neural circuits. In the brain, there is evidence that normalization is implemented via inhibitory interneurons and allows neural populations to adjust to chang...

arxiv.org

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...

We believe visual neuroscience is undergoing a paradigm shift — and the Beyond Binding exchange in @TrendsCogSci makes it visible. Five papers, excellent critics, and a discussion that sharpened and nuanced our argument. Thread 👇

Congratulations to Ian Thornton and colleagues who published their Mainz-Linez illusion in i-Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social): the red dots appears to wave left and right when one looks at one of the black dots, but they actually move straight journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Found something potentially useful for the neural graphics folks: arxiv.org/abs/2603.08824 TL;DR: Package finds soft surrogates for otherwise non-differentiable functions. Has an implementation for Torch: github.com/a-paulus/sof... & Jax: github.com/a-paulus/sof...

SoftJAX & SoftTorch: Empowering Automatic Differentiation Libraries with Informative Gradients

Automatic differentiation (AD) frameworks such as JAX and PyTorch have enabled gradient-based optimization for a wide range of scientific fields. Yet, many "hard" primitives in these libraries such as...

arxiv.org

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

I'm looking for a skilled PhD student who doesn't want to work too hard but still do great science: unisc-cp.enquire.cloud/round/RND-00...

Excited to give a talk at #Cosyne2026 about my PhD work! We show that RNNs trained on visual search converge on brain-like solutions, producing primate-like behavior and neural representations. Happy to chat if you're at Cosyne! 📅 March 15, 2026 📍 Lisbon, Portugal www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...