Martin Hebart
@martinhebart.bsky.social
Proud dad, Professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, author of The Decoding Toolbox, founder of http://things-initiative.org our lab 👉 https://hebartlab.com
New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNAS
Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...
pnas.org
Science isn’t only about solving problems, it’s also about the random process of coming up with new ideas while working on a problem. By solving math problems for us, AI takes away this random element and the theory-building process that happens behind the scenes. 1/3
Come and join our replication initiative in visual neuroscience! Low bar for entry, ideal for anyone from a Master’s student looking for a thesis to faculty who want to get back to the bench. 🤓 re-vision-initiative.org
re:vision | Replication Initiative for Visual Neuroscience
Test whether published visual-neuroscience findings (NSD, THINGS, etc.) generalize to broadly-sampled natural images using the LAION-fMRI (LfMRI) 7T dataset.
re-vision-initiative.org
@re-vision-init.bsky.social · 4d ago(1/6) Do our visual neuroscience findings actually replicate? And do they generalize beyond the datasets they were found in? We've lauched re:vision, a community-driven initiative to answer these questions, and we are looking for scientistis to participate. re-vision-initiative.org
1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.
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
Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8
Brain-wide gaze-dependent activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep
Gaze behavior and brain activity are tightly coupled during perception and mental imagery. Whether this coupling extends to eyes-closed states remains largely unknown, primarily because measuring eye ...
biorxiv.org
Researchers explore how the brain makes sense of ambiguous images. Even when an image is unclear or incomplete, we often end up recognizing what we are seeing 🧵👇 @martinhebart.bsky.social @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social
How Does the Brain Resolve Ambiguous Images?
Investigadores/as del Centro de Investigación Mente, Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC) de la Universidad de Granada, en colaboración con Martin N. Hebart (Justus Liebig University Giessen y el Max Pla...
cimcyc.ugr.es
🚨New dataset just dropped🚨 Introducing Places in the Wild: 67,000 RAW-format photographs (45 mpix) densely sampled from 810 places (260 basic-level categories). This is 11x the number of pixels in ImageNet! Preprint is here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.02481 1/
Places in the Wild: A Large, High-Resolution RAW Photograph Dataset for Ecologically Valid Vision Research
Large image datasets have accelerated progress in cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. However, most datasets are low-resolution, internet-sourced JPEGs with unknown capture conditions and limi...
arxiv.org
Looks like geons are alive and well: this paper was rated among the top 1.8% of all papers at CVPR: bardofcodes.github.io/superfit/
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
Our multiverse analysis of associations between skin conductance and acute pain is published! >550 participants x 18 SCR pipelines = 1 winning approach to SCR analysis! (Ledalab + artifact detection). thread below. We hope others find this useful! Please RT :) journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex...
Lauren Atlas@laurenatlas.bsky.social · 8mo agoI am so excited to share our newest preprint, inspired by @tinalonsdorf.bsky.social, “A multiverse approach to heat-evoked skin conductance analysis: Evaluating the influence of analytic pipeline on associations between skin conductance and pain osf.io/preprints/ps...
This was a fun collaboration with a great team, and I was happy to play a small part in it!
Philip Sulewski@psulewski.bsky.social · 2mo agoNow 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. 🧵
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? 🧵
Last day at #VSS2026! Come to the Pavilion where @felenitaribeiro.bsky.social shows how you can scale up her deepRetinotopy toolbox to predicting retinotopy in >11,000 individuals in the ABCD dataset, with fascinating individual differences. Poster 477, happening right now!
Our work is now available as a reviewed preprint in eLife, and we received fantastic feedback! Stay tuned for the next version, with toolbox updates that I hope will make it even better 🤩 elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Predicting functional topography of the human visual cortex from cortical anatomy at scale
elifesciences.org
Fernanda Ribeiro@felenitaribeiro.bsky.social · 8mo agoInvestigating 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
Today at #VSS2026 we are introducing re:vision, a community driven replication/generalization initiative based on our newly released LAION-fMRI dataset. Come to the satellite at 2pm to learn more about it & why you may want to participate! The room Blue Heron is in the upstairs region of the lobby.
This morning at #VSS2026, our lab has two poster presentations. Come and pay us a visit! One poster is by @tonghezhuang.bsky.social on what we term representational relevance: can we quantify how important different stimulus contents are in our mental representations? Poster 315 in the Breezeway…1/2
I'm proud to say we are releasing LAION-fMRI, a densely sampled 7T fMRI dataset of natural images, with very broad stimulus sampling for testing countless hypotheses and for deeply exploring brain representations. The dataset is now available at laion-fmri.hebartlab.com What does LAION-fMRI offer? 🧵
LAION-fMRI - a 7T fMRI dataset of human vision
LAION-fMRI (LfMRI / LAION MRI dataset): 5 subjects, 25,052 launch-release natural images, 165 acquired 7T fMRI sessions with single-trial GLMsingle betas, retinotopy, localizers, and diffusion.
laion-fmri.hebartlab.com
Today’s a new day at #VSS2026! Come to the poster of @lucakaemmer.bsky.social at the Pavilion, poster # 439. He finds a high-level predictive signal of upcoming fixation targets, indicating that content-specific visual processing of upcoming visual input starts before the eye lands.
Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!
Today is going to be an exciting day at #VSS2026! One of the things I’m very excited about is Sander’s talk at 3:30! @sandervanbree.bsky.social will tell us about how he combined two large-scale human and monkey datasets to reveal shared and unique measured representations, with intriguing results!
Sander van Bree@sandervanbree.bsky.social · 3mo agoAre you attending #VSS2026? Come check out my talk on cross-species alignment for finding shared and distinct representational geometries in primate IT. Saturday, May 16, 2026, 3.30pm, Talk Room 1
EXCITED to travel to #VSS2026 to contribute 2 talks and 2 posters from our lab! Me and @niklasmuller.bsky.social will talk scene encoding models on Fri & Sat, @sargechris.bsky.social and @annewzonneveld.bsky.social will discuss their cool work on video models on Tue (schedule👇for exact times).
Are you attending #VSS2026? Come check out my talk on cross-species alignment for finding shared and distinct representational geometries in primate IT. Saturday, May 16, 2026, 3.30pm, Talk Room 1
Can’t wait to see everyone at #VSS2026! We hope you can make it to our lab’s presentations! (see below) Come and visit us at the talks and posters, and make sure you come to our workshop about the community replication initiative re:vision. Low bar for entry! Details on the day of each presentation!
Just in time for my PhD defense, the work I started during my visiting PhD in the lab of Martin Hebart at Giessen University is available as a preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.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've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...
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
