Mick Bonner
@mickbonner.bsky.social
Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins. My lab studies human vision using cognitive neuroscience and machine learning. bonnerlab.org
(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
Super excited about this!
Vlad Ayzenberg@vayzenb.bsky.social · 2w agoExcited 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 🧵
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.
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
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990
Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos ...
arxiv.org
Vision Science's Christmas is almost here! Our lab will present work —including collaborations with the one and only @meganakpeters.bsky.social — on mental imagery & vividness, LLMs, advanced decoding of reality monitoring signals in fMRI, pupillometry of fake light & visual discomfort! #vss2026
It's #VSS2026! SO excited about the projects we've brought with us this year, and of course #phiVis to close things out. Come say hi, and don't forget to grab your lab 'merch' 👀 perception.jhu.edu/vss/
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!
Now out in Nature Machine Intelligence @NatMachIntell “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust and shape-based AI vision”: doi.org/10.1038/s422.... A wonderful case where brain inspiration improved AI. With @martisamuser.bsky.social, Radek Cichy and @timkietzmann.bsky.social .
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).
The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw
postdoc and PhD positions in visual cognitive computational neuroscience in my lab at the University of Cambridge kamilajozwik.com/join_lab.html
Kamila Jozwik - Join lab
kamilajozwik.com
Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro! www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/
Representation Biases: Variance Is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance
A central approach in neuroscience is to analyze neural representations as a means to understand a system's function, through the use of methods like principal component analysis, regression, and repr...
eneuro.org
Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯♂️ (With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
excited to share some recent work! neural networks trained on multi-view sensory data are the first to match human-level 3D shape perception we predict human accuracy, error patterns, and reaction time—all zero-shot, no training on experimental data arxiv.org/abs/2602.17650 1/🧠
Human-level 3D shape perception emerges from multi-view learning
Humans can infer the three-dimensional structure of objects from two-dimensional visual inputs. Modeling this ability has been a longstanding goal for the science and engineering of visual intelligenc...
arxiv.org
This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵
Deep learning in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into everyday tasks and work environments. However, its adoption in medical image analys…
sciencedirect.com
Infants organise their visual world into categories at two-months-old! So happy to see these results published - congratulations Cliona and the rest of the FOUNDCOG team.
Cliona O'Doherty@clionaod.bsky.social · 6mo ago1/7 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.
New paper from our lab on the behavioral significance of high-dimensional neural representations!
Kelsey Han@chihyehan.bsky.social · 6mo agoHuman 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...
I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
Vacancy — PhD Position in NeuroAI for Video Perception in the Human Brain
<p><span>Are you interested in using AI to unravel the mysteries of the brain? Do you want to perform cutting-edge NeuroAI research and leverage deep learning to understand human vision? Then check out the vacancy below and apply for a PhD position in this exciting research direction.</span></p>
werkenbij.uva.nl
Wonderful article about our recent paper in @pnasnexus.org! Thanks, @sachapfeiffer.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! @yikai-tang.bsky.social @uoftpsychology.bsky.social @artsci.utoronto.ca @utoronto.ca
Sachin Rawat@sachinxr.bsky.social · 7mo agoWhy do we find some scenes more aesthetic than others? For my first in @sciencenews.bsky.social, I wrote about a new study that suggests that our aesthetic preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts. 🧠🧪 www.sciencenews.org/article/brai...
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
Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science?
First post in a series on cognitive science and AI
infinitefaculty.substack.com
Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position
Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change
lindsay-lab.github.io
Prediction: task-based optimization will ultimately prove to have a relatively minor role in DNN models of the ventral stream. Although tasks (including self-supervised ones) are currently crucial, there are signs that a simpler approach is possible. A thread:
Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!
JHU Cognitive Science@jhucogsci.bsky.social · 8mo agoWe are seeking candidates for two tenured/tenure-track faculty positions: One in high-level vision, written language and/or conceptual representation apply.interfolio.com/178825 One in language apply.interfolio.com/178813 Please help us spread the word!
📢The UniReps x @ellis.eu speaker series is back! Come join us in our next appointment 18th December 4 pm CET with @meenakshikhosla.bsky.social and Raj Magesh Gauthaman🔵🔴
Now out in #JNeurosci -- we found changes in medial parietal cortex after manual exploration of everyday real-world objects doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... with Beth Rispoli, Vinai Roopchansingh & @cibaker.bsky.social
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...
