Our newest finding: tiny microsaccades are biased toward the location that is about to be attentionally suppressed. This suggests that attention briefly precedes suppression: before the system can suppress a location, it first appears to select it.

It has been such a pleasure to work on this paper! Beyond its intellectual breadth, what gives me great delight about this work is how the collaboration arose, thanks to @samversc.bsky.social. We read each other's papers, chatted about them on social media, and that eventually evolved into a paper!☺️

Sam Verschooren@samversc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

Directional elements: the preprints are out! 1/n Congratulations to our amazing team: biorxiv.org/content/10.6... biorxiv.org/content/10.6... biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We screened for principles governing global brain dynamics by developing a set of new methods: 1) conformal immersion microscopy;

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

Which factors are more vs. less important in predicting memory? We systematically investigated the contributions of image memorability, valence, arousal, attention, and test delay. Image memorability was the strongest predictor of memory. Proud of this work led by @hartwakeland.bsky.social!

And if you can't join us in person, you can still take a climate action! We have 248 people on the call and a goal of 400 U.S. or Canadian climate actions taken in the next hour. Click here for more: www.climateactionnow.com/can-action-c...

CAN Action Carousel - Climate Action Now

climateactionnow.com

Katharine Hayhoe@katharinehayhoe.com · 3mo ago

Happening now. Join us!

Long-term memory reorganization of navigational episodes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Long-term memory reorganization of navigational episodes - Nature Human Behaviour

In this Article, Iggena et al. show that memories of real-world navigational episodes do not simply fade but are continuously reshaped over decades through shifting contributions of episode-related sp...

nature.com

"AI’s sycophantic tendency to always complete an assigned task can result in code that runs but is wrong, many researchers say. Vibed code might, for example, make up missing data to help an algorithm run, or even smooth a graph to make it look as expected." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How to vibe code in science: early adopters share their tips

Using AI coding tools can speed up your work, but there are plenty of pitfalls.

nature.com

Yulu Hou and her partner experimented with using ChatGPT to automate marking of undergraduate assignments. Here’s what they learnt go.nature.com/3P2M9M5

Can AI tools assess coding assignments?

Yulu Hou and her partner experimented with using ChatGPT to automate marking of undergraduate assignments. Here’s what they learnt.

go.nature.com

The layer 6b theory of attention www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #neuroscience

The layer 6b theory of attention

Zolnik et al. propose that the long-overlooked neocortical layer 6b (L6b) supports a key circuit for attention and related cognitive functions. L6b integrates neuromodulatory and cortical feedback to ...

cell.com

This is really cool. Exposure to electromagnetic fields activates vestibular hair cells which leads to increased cFos in the dorsal hippocampus. The pigeon hippocampal map incorporates location info from the Earth's magnetic field. That's awesome. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A global screen for magnetically induced neuronal activity in the pigeon brain

How animals detect Earth’s magnetic field remains a mystery in sensory biology. Despite extensive behavioral evidence, the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms responsible for magnetic sensing re...

science.org

From MEG to low-density EEG: Reliable estimation of brain natural frequencies and their modulation across eyes-open and eyes-closed states https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.23.720415v1

Individualized cortical gradient and network topology reveal symptom-linked disruptions and neurobiological subtypes in schizophrenia | medRxiv www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super excited to (finally!) show our work on identifying cell types! Now in press www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We show how to identify cell types from ephys recordings *without* optotagging. This opens the study of not just individual cell types, but the interacting neural circuit during behavior

Fluid thinking about collective intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Fluid thinking about collective intelligence - Nature Machine Intelligence

Collectives exhibit intrinsically different operations, resources and limitations depending on whether their components are static or mobile. Werfel examines learning in mobile collectives and shows h...

nature.com

New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Constituent-constrained word prediction during language comprehension - Nature Neuroscience

Zou et al. reveal a key difference between human brains and large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategi...

nature.com

Regional topography of auditory and visual attention: An fMRI-based meta-analysis www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Regional topography of auditory and visual attention: An fMRI-based meta-analysis

More than three decades of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has gathered extensive evidence of auditory and visual attention effects in th…

sciencedirect.com

New preprint! 🧠 How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli? By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis "From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

📄Unlocking Dynamic Neural Networks for Bayesian Modelling with PyHGF Curious about new interplays between neural networks and Bayesian modelling? Check out our latest preprint on dynamic predictive coding networks 👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2410.09206 Code: github.com/ilabcode/pyhgf

"Development of non-spatial grid-like neural codes tracks inference and intelligence" spkl.io/63328A0iDj Yunzhe Liu & colleagues @cp-cell.bsky.social

🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉 What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

This is really cool!

Constantinople lab@constantinoplelab.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you to the conference organizers @cogneuronews.bsky.social for the wonderful CNS2026 experience! We were excited that @catalinayang.bsky.social and @matthewdougherty.bsky.social got to share their amazing work! Thank you to everyone who attended the sessions! #CNS2026 #UofT #psychology

@duncanlabuoft.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Our lab will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference this year #CNS2026! Learn more from our graduate students in their sessions! @catalinayang.bsky.social and @matthewdougherty.bsky.social

Scientists are always doing what's interesting to them, but I think that's the wrong approach. We should be going after all the stuff that bores us. Because it's actually not boring at all once you get into it, and it's precisely the things we think are going to be boring that open our minds.

🚨 New lab paper!🚨 A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour

Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

nature.com

On consciousness in animals and in artificial intelligence journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1... #neuroskyence #MLSky

On consciousness in animals and in artificial intelligence | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society

In recent years, numerous publications have emerged claiming that animals possess consciousness. Moreover, neurophysiological literature has discussed the possible existence of consciousness in artificial intelligence (AI). Both ideas stem from analyses of the behavior of animals and AI systems. Here, I argue that it is impossible to draw conclusions about animal consciousness based solely on their behavior. Addressing the question of animal consciousness requires an understanding of its neuronal mechanisms, and the challenge lies in whether these mechanisms can be understood. Views on this issue diverge widely, ranging from Cartesian dualism, which denies any neuronal mechanisms of consciousness, to the opposing position that consciousness is one of cognitive functions whose underlying mechanisms can be understood. Here, I support the latter view. In contrast, the problem of AI consciousness belongs to the field of computer science rather than neurophysiology. Even if artificial intelligence were to acquire consciousness in the future, it would be an AI-specific form of consciousness bearing little relation to human consciousness. Consequently, insights into the mechanisms underlying AI consciousness are unlikely to advance our understanding of human consciousness.

journals.physiology.org

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex

How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

science.org

How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠 Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵