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

Our latest work indicates that when we have to choose how to act to reach our goals, we do not just select the correct motor commands; we select between integrated representations of goals, actions, and expected sensory outcomes. Our results invite us to rethink how the brain controls action!

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last wk.

Goal-directed action selection relies on conjunctive representations that bind goals, actions and expected sensory outcomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.24.740508v1

Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Progression without progress

Progress in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance scientific discovery has made it increasingly realistic to envision automated “end-to-end science” (ETES) systems: integrated pipelines t...

science.org

It's been a long time coming, but I'm very happy this work has finally come to fruition!

Freek van Ede@freekvanede.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Our latest findings: bringing together the core insights so far from our NWO-funded project on "Externally driven internal attention", led by @annavanharmelen.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’m building a foundational reading list for our lab (systems & circuit neuroscience, compneuro, modeling, neuromodulators, population coding etc.). I’d like to crowdsource recommendations. Which review(s) would you consider mandatory reading for the next generation of researchers?

📢 New paper in Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with my co-authors: Freek van Ede @freekvanede.bsky.social, Chris Jungerius @cjungerius.bsky.social, and Heleen A. Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social. Grateful to have collaborated with you on this work: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... [1/5]

Grounding distractor inhibition in action control: Implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent

Spatial selective attention is typically thought to act as a sensory filter: prioritizing the processing of relevant information at a particular locat…

sciencedirect.com

What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Do goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6

Excited for #CCN2025! If you're interested in the role of integrated neural representations during goal-directed action, come check out poster C78 on Friday 2-5 pm!