An interesting thing is happening to me at the moment. I have a standing bug bounty policy for my first authored scientific work. That means, I've committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT-6 Astra came out, I'm now getting several bug reports daily.

📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...

The Department of Psychology at University of Minnesota seeks an Assistant Professor working on computational approaches related to cognition and/or perception (broadly). This would be in my area of the department and I’m happy to answer any questions. Posting : hr.myu.umn.edu/psc/hrprd/EM...

Careers

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Computational Approaches to Perception and/or CognitionDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of Minnesota, College of Liberal ArtsThe Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities announces a search for an outstanding scholar to fill a tenure-track assistant professor position focused on computational approaches to perception and/or cognition. This full-time position in the Department’s Cognitive and Brain Sciences (CAB) Training Program will begin in Fall 2027.Applications are invited from researchers who would extend or complement our historic strengths in combining experimental and computational approaches to perception and cognition. Examples of desired research topics include, but are not limited to, computational approaches in human and/or non-human animal models to study perceptual function and sensory loss, learning, motivation, emotion, and/or higher cognition. While we expect the primary appointment to be in our CAB area, there is  potential for cross-affiliation with other departmental areas.The appointment will be 100%-time over the nine-month academic year (late-August to late-May) and will be made at the rank of tenure-track assistant professor, depending on qualifications and experience and consistent with collegiate and University policy. Salary and start-up packages are competitive. The successful applicant should have and is expected to maintain a strong research program, advise graduate students from a variety of different backgrounds, and teach undergraduate and graduate courses, including core courses within the graduate training program. A strong record of teaching and mentorship is desired. The individual will also be expected to contribute to the service needs of the department, college, university, and profession.A successful candidate's application will demonstrate scholarly distinction, a record of publications, teaching commitment and, if applicable to the research program and the candidate’s career stage, evidence of success in securing and/or pursuing extramural funding.Applicants are invited to review the Workload Principles and Guidelines for Regular Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts, as well as the Standards for Promotion and Tenure in the Department of Psychology.

google.com

UM-MIND is hiring! We are recruiting several tenure-track neuroscience faculty members, preferably at the Assistant Professor level, to join our institute at the University of Maryland School of Medicine here in Baltimore, MD. Learn more here: umb.taleo.net/careersectio... @medschool.umaryland.edu

I gave a talk in our ISRC CN3 summer school yesterday on computational modelling of learning and memory, at the end I threw in a list of what I consider the big open questions in the the theory of learning in neural circuits. What did I miss??

I'm pleased to belatedly announce the successful thesis defense of Dr. Ian Griffith. His thesis “A Computational Framework for Auditory Selective Attention” is landmark work, and he gave a great defense talk. Stay tuned for some pretty cool additional papers to come.

New preprint! Have you ever wanted to measure psychometric functions in high-dimensional stimulus spaces, but realised that this is infeasible? We present and validate a technique to adaptively estimate psychometric functions for stimulus spaces up to 50 dimensions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Adaptive experiments in high-dimensional feature spaces: A particle filtering approach

Behavioral experiments are often infeasible when stimulus spaces have many dimensions or when testing time is limited. One way to address this challenge is adaptive stimulus selection, where informati...

biorxiv.org

If at CCN, please check out three posters from our lab today. In the morning session: A62 - Deep Learning Models of Attention Reveal Peripheral Encoding as a Bottleneck for Selective Listening Through Cochlear Implants, by Annesya Banerjee

The Neuroscience Department at UC Berkeley is hiring an Asst Professor in Computational Neuro. All areas of computational/theoretical neuro are welcome. Deadline Oct 30. Join our neuroscience community! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05446 #AcademicJobs #Neuroscience #NeuroJobs

Assistant Professor - Computational Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

I've seen a lot of info for specialized audiences (e.g. scientists, non-profits) on how to comment on the proposed OMB rule change for grants, but less for the general public. So I made this one-pager that can be shared more widely. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

SANE 2026 will be held on Friday October 30, 2026 at MIT, in Cambridge, MA. Confirmed speakers so far include Berrak Sisman (JHU) @berraksisman.bsky.social, Bryan Pardo (Northwestern), Henry Li (Google), and Ruohan Gao (UMD). More details + registration instructions at www.saneworkshop.org/sane2026/

SANE 2026 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast

SANE is a series of workshops gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent.

saneworkshop.org

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...

pnas.org

Russell Vought, Director of the OMB, has issued a set of proposed changes that would dramatically alter federal grant funding. However, we can each take action to prevent these from taking effect. Here's how, a 🧵 🧪 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...

White House seeks to tighten political oversight of grantmaking

Sweeping proposed rule, now open for comments, would also restrict foreign collaborations and remove federal funding for open-access fees

science.org

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

Job opening at MIT for a research methodologist to facilitate open science practices and data management across all areas of neuroscience and cognitive science. PhD and some postdoctoral experience required. Please circulate to your networks. careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Neuroscience Research Methodologist

MIT - Neuroscience Research Methodologist - Cambridge MA 02139

careers.peopleclick.com

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

Language, Intelligence & Thought lab is looking for a lab manager! This is a 2-year postbac position that will allow you to gain experience in human neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research prior to applying to PhD programs. Express interest here: forms.gle/npXEGUjGUbp5...

Excited to announce a new paper from our lab, by Ian Griffith @iangriffith.bsky.social with help from Preston Hess @phess2.bsky.social, introducing a model of attentional selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @mitbcs.bsky.social @mitscience.bsky.social Here is a summary. (1/n)

Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening - Nature Human Behaviour

Griffith et al. show that human-like auditory attentional strategies naturally arise from the optimization of feature gains for selective listening.

nature.com

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

Now published in Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social)! Schulz-Hildebrandt, H. (2026). When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion. Perception, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion - Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt, 2026

In this paper, an optical illusion is described in which purple elements are perceived as purple at the point of fixation, while surrounding elements of the sam...

doi.org

Pascal Mamassian@mamassian.bsky.social · 12mo ago

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

nature.com

Why do children struggle to recognise objects in cluttered scenes more than adults? Our new paper looks at the development of visual acuity and crowding across childhood, and the way the visual system fine tunes our ability to see detail: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

Two more posters from our lab at ARO today: T152 A Model of Speech Recognition Reproduces Signatures of Human Speech Perception and Reveals Mechanisms of Contextual Integration, by Gasser Elbanna T171 Hearing-Impaired Deep Neural Networks Predict Real-World Hearing Difficulties, by Mark Saddler

If at ARO today, check out the presentations from our lab: talk at 3:15pm: Optimized Models of Uncertainty Explain Human Confidence in Auditory Perception, by Lakshmi Govindarajan poster 28: In-Silico fMRI Experiments Enable Comparisons of Speech Models to Human Auditory Cortex, by Gasser Elbanna

If at ARO, please check out four posters from our lab today: SA53 A Deep Learning Framework for Understanding Cochlear Implants, by Annesya Banerjee SA189 Robustness to Noise Reveals Cross-Culturally Consistent Properties of Pitch Perception for Harmonic and Inharmonic Sounds, by Malinda McPherson

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience

Enlightening the brain

medium.com

This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth... ...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex. This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory: www.richardgregory.org/experiments/

If you are at NeurIPS I encourage you to check out Gasser's poster showing his ongoing work on models of speech perception.

Gasser Elbanna@gelbanna.bsky.social · 10mo ago

If you’re still at #NeurIPS2025, come say hi at our poster at @unireps.bsky.social in Ballroom 20D! I'm presenting work co-led by Ivy Brundege and me, with @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social, showing that in silico fMRI experiments of speech models reveal notable discrepancies with human auditory cortex.

Excited to announce that our latest paper is now out: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Here we uncover a simple cortical code for loudness and leverage it reverse sound hypersensitivity disorders in mice. #neuroskyence

Cortical PV interneurons regulate loudness perception and sustainably reverse loudness hypersensitivity

Noise damages the cochlea, triggering maladaptive plasticity in the auditory cortex (ACtx) that makes moderate-intensity sounds seem uncomfortably loud. Clayton, Awwad, McGill, et al. show that brief ...

cell.com