Kohitij Kar

Our lab will be presenting two posters at #Cosyne2026 exploring neural population dynamics in the primate ventral stream and how well modern AI models capture them.

Led by amazing trainees: @sabinemuzellec.bsky.social, and Matteo Dunnhofer

If you’re at Cosyne, please stop by!

Applications are now open for 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 for the 𝐂𝐕𝐑 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 (June 8–12, 2026).

𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 but built around 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝.

📅 Apply by Feb 23, 2026

What I Wish I’d Known Before Starting Graduate Research in Neuroscience Every year, new students often enter neuroscience convinced they must already be brilliant, original, and technically fluent to “belong.”…

New students often ask me: When did you feel confident about a career in academia?Whats your motivation? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have lessons learned through experience. I wrote a short piece for anyone starting, or recalibrating, their neuroscience journey. medium.com/@kohitij_716...

This article is written to further elaborate my point of view as expressed in the recent Parliamentary briefing at Ottawa organized by @braincanada.bsky.social. The article, given the context, is Canada centric but I believe is broadly applicable to many countries. medium.com/@kohitij_716...

It was a real honour to be in Ottawa today at a Parliamentary briefing led by @braincanada.bsky.social on the urgent need to harness AI for brain and mental health research. Canada has a once-in-a-generation opportunity—and the time to act is now!

🌟New Preprint

Work led by @sabinemuzellec.bsky.social, in collab with
Yousif Alghetaa, and Simon Kornblith

We introduce a neurally validated strategy "MAPS" leveraging current ANNs and XAI tools to approximate human visual strategies. Also, validated against Bubbles!
arxiv.org/abs/2510.12141

🧠 New preprint!
Recognition-trained ANNs miss a key dimension of IT coding: memorability. Jointly optimizing for both recognition and memorability yielded more brain-like visual models.
Another step toward multi-goal modeling of the ventral stream.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Two new preprints from our lab!
@sabinemuzellec.bsky.social leads work on reverse(Brain➡ ANN) predictivity showing gaps in forward(ANN ➡ Brain) metrics shorturl.at/bnoFl
@marenwehrheim.bsky.social leads work on facial expression emerging from shared not segregated neural subspaces. shorturl.at/QAIl4

That will be great!

Thanks, Emalie 🤗

Thanks, Katha 🤗

Provincial recognition for York U early-career researchers - YFile Professors Eric Kennedy and Kohitij Kar have been recognized with Ontario’s Early Researcher Award for impactful work that will advance wildfire predictive services and understanding how those with au...

I am thankful to the Ontario Govt for awarding me Ontario’s early researcher award (ERA).The award supports us in advancing knowledge and building a strong team of trainees to develop future research leaders in Ontario. www.yorku.ca/yfile/2025/0...

Special thanks to my awesome lab!

We are excited to share our latest research at #vss2025 @vssmtg.bsky.social and learn about all things vision! Please come to our talks and posters. Looking forward to all your feedback!

I agree. But I doubt how much one’s intuition (perception) about how their brain functions to support their intelligence or how it evolved translates into scientific facts about those same questions.

In many conversations, I felt that people often have certain preconceived (largely unvalidated) notion of how intelligence should emerge. And because certain developments in AI dont fit that template—instead of re-evaluating their initial position— they are blindly critical of current AI!

Most concepts and ideas have levels and nuances — and taking the most extreme stance seems to be in fashion now.

Yeah, if current AI systems (vision, audio, language, multimodal) are not “intelligent”, I don’t know what is! There are many intelligent (biological) species that don’t run human like processing but can solve tasks, reason, and most importantly survive.

Our lab had a great time sharing our work at the NETI Workshop at @utaustin.bsky.social. Lots of new, exciting work is going on in systems neuroscience!

Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) on Simons Foundation

My lab is hosting undergraduates for the SURFiN program. If you want to come to @yorku-neurophys.bsky.social @yorku-cian.bsky.social in Toronto and work on a @simonsfoundation.org funded project on using brain-inspired AI for autism research please apply!
www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/shenoy...

Thank you Dr. John Reynolds from @salkinstitute.bsky.social
for a fascinating presentation.
@jdcrawford.bsky.social
@connectedminds.bsky.social
#neuroscience

If you are at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #cosyne2025 , please check out two posters from our lab today, one by Mualla (2-62), and the other by Jean de Dieu (2-127).

Join us on March 7 for this month's seminar. @jdcrawford.bsky.social @bjorges.bsky.social @connectedminds.bsky.social @yorkuniversity.bsky.social #neuroscience

Extremely sad news! Very sorry to hear this and a great loss for vision science

(3/3) Many ANN models of untrained IT show similar changes at the level of ANN-IT (which is typically not at the very end of the ANN hierarchy) with additional category training (implemented via varied learning approaches) that also generalize to category orthogonal representational shifts.

(2/3) Untrained animals can see objects but can’t attach labels—so we don’t expect ventral stream to reformat with learning. But does it change at all, or everything happens downstream? Trained vs. untrained monkeys show minor but robust IT changes -- not a complete reformat, but meaningful tweaks.

The effects of object category training on the responses of macaque inferior temporal cortex are consistent with performance-optimizing updates within a visual hierarchy How does the primate brain coordinate plasticity to support its remarkable ability to learn object categories? To address this question, we measured the consequences of category learning on the macaqu...

(1/3) 🌟New preprint with @lynnkasorensen.bsky.social and Jim DiCarlo

When animals learn new object discrimination tasks, how much does their IT cortex change?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This new article perfectly concludes my time & lessons in Jim’s lab.@JamesJDiCarlo and I propose +review SMART models of object recognition
✅ Sensory computable
✅ Mechanistic
✅ Anatomically Referenced
✅ Testable
Coming in Annual Reviews 2024
Preprint: bit.ly/3tk7u8D

Was at the launch yesterday at the Simons Foundation Social at #SFN2023! Very excited to see how this works and develops. Super cool idea (from my limited understanding)!