Excited to be at #CCN2026 in New York to present brand-new work with @kathadobs.bsky.social 🥳 By testing hundreds of categories, we found striking differences in functional specialization between visual cortex and DNNs 🧠 Come find me at poster F81 on Thursday 1:45-3:30 p.m. Happy to chat!

VPNL is at #CCN2026 !! Check out our lab members' presentations this week :)

While I'm sad to miss #CCN2026, you don't have to miss out on the cool work coming out of the lab. 😊 Super proud of the diversity of projects this year—from category and unit specialization to inversion effects, shape bias, and memorability in brains and DNNs! Stop by and check them out! #NeuroAI

Excited to share our review in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with @lauriebayet.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! We describe how implementing principles from child development can advance the mechanistic plausibility and capacities of AI models We packed A LOT into this review, here's a quick 🧵

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 2w ago

Excited to share that our paper is now out in #JNeurosci! We propose a multidimensional framework of high-level visual cortex that reconciles a longstanding debate. Thanks to @kathadobs.bsky.social, @martinhebart.bsky.social, and everyone else for the great discussions along the way. More to come 🧠🌈

Multidimensional feature tuning in category-selective areas of human visual cortex

Two prominent accounts describe the functional organization of human high-level visual cortex. A categorical view emphasizes category-selective areas, while a dimensional view highlights continuous fe...

doi.org

SfN Journals@sfnjournals.bsky.social · 3w ago

#JNeurosci: Using a data-driven analysis of fMRI responses to natural images, @levandyck.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social identified interpretable dimensions that explain activity in face-, body-, & scene-selective areas https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0038-26.2026

Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!

Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

nature.com

It's #VSS2026 time! We're super excited to be back and presenting some exciting, ongoing projects in the lab. Come by and say hi! 🤗

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by @binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL) 🤖🧵👇 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462 🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1

Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment

Determining whether AI systems process information similarly to humans is central to cognitive science and trustworthy AI. While modern AI models can match human accuracy on standard tasks, such parit...

arxiv.org

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the brain's responses to sight, sound & language. 📄 Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... ▶️ Demo: aidemos.atmeta.com/tribev2/ 💻 Code: github.com/facebookrese... 🤗 Model: huggingface.co/facebook/tri...

Category selectivity vs. behavioral relevance in visual cortex? 👁️🧠 @levandyck.bsky.social and I really enjoyed diving into this piece and appreciated the authors’ thoughtful response. We're curious to see how the field moves forward from here! ➡️

J. Brendan Ritchie@jbrendanritchie.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

What behavioral relevance is (not)

We are thankful for the thoughtful commentaries of our colleagues. In our discussion article, we argued for a course correction to how the field approaches the organization of visual function in oc...

tandfonline.com

How segregated vs. integrated are face and body representations in human visual cortex? In this new preprint with @kathadobs.bsky.social, we use DNNs and fMRI to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroskyence 🧵 1/n

🚨 Jewelia’s new preprint! We report the first pRF mapping in teens + reveal functional fingerprints of category regions in high-level visual cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🔥 We have a new preprint! 🔥 It's really nice, I recommend reading it Here's a summary question: Can FFA activation predict RT to faces? ⏬ Check out the answer below ⏬ @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧨 Preprint alert Is it easier to find a ball than a shoe? The answer lies in how variable we think these objects are in the real-world. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... w/ the amazing @dkaiserlab.bsky.social & @luchunyeh.bsky.social 🦄 🧵1/8

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Human visual cortex representations may be much higher-dimensional than earlier work suggested, but are these higher dimensions of cortical activity actually relevant to behavior? Our new paper tackles this by studying how different people experience the same movies. 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

High-dimensional structure underlying individual differences in naturalistic visual experience

Han and Bonner reveal that individual visual experience arises from high-dimensional neural geometry distributed across multiple representational scales. By characterizing the full dimensional spectru...

cell.com

What should academics be doing right now? I have been writing up some thoughts on what the research says about effective action, and what universities specifically can do. davidbau.github.io/poetsandnurs... It's on GitHub. Suggestions and pull requests welcome. github.com/davidbau/poe...

Now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: our short response to @neurosteven.bsky.social & Edward de Haan's recent paper on the binding problem. We argue that the binding problem arises because of tradeoffs faced by any information processing system, including the brain and DNNs. shorturl.at/RGXzt

Our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.

SfN Journals@sfnjournals.bsky.social · 7mo ago

#JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Han and Epstein explored how people integrate different kinds of views to form mental maps of places, revealing two sets of brain regions involved in integrating views of landmarks into existing mental maps of a virtual city. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0187-25.2025

Now in press at Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Check it out if you are interested in category selectivity, the organization of visual cortex, and topographic models!

Davide Cortinovis@davidecortinovis.bsky.social · 12mo ago

New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

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...

New Correspondence with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social in Nat Rev Neurosci. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here, we critique a recent paper by Rosas et al. We argue that "Bottom-up" and "Top-down" neuroscience have various meanings in the literature. PDF: rdcu.be/eSKYI

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

Dan Levenstein@dlevenstein.bsky.social · 9mo ago

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

Really looking forward to #CCN2025! On Tuesday, I'm presenting new work with @kathadobs.bsky.social on segregated vs. integrated face & body processing in visual cortex 😊🧍🧠 Using DNNs & fMRI, we test competing hypotheses, finding both distinct & shared selectivity. Come by Poster A64 for more.

Very much looking forward to #CCN2025! Would love to see you at our lab's talks and posters, and meet me at the panel discussion in the Algonauts session on Wednesday!

New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

Investigating action topography in visual cortex and deep artificial neural networks

High-level visual cortex contains category-selective areas embedded within larger-scale topographic maps like animacy and real-world size. Here, we propose action as a key organizing factor shaping vi...

biorxiv.org