it's out!
@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...
attending @cogneuronews.bsky.social 2026? Check out these posters from @jocn.bsky.social Travel Fellows:
Adithya Anil, Indian Institute of Technology
"Toward Translational Mechanisms of Learned Helplessness: Linking Behavior, Computation, and Neural Modulation"
D123 Mon am
I am glad to attend #CNS2026 in beautiful Vancouver🇨🇦! I will present my work on action planning in visual working memory. In this project, we focus on the factors leading motor planning such as selective attention, affordances and task requirements. Meet me at the Poster Session B (B38)!
I am happy to be attending #CNS2026 with the Yale Wu Tsai Institute travel award to present this paper👇🏻 as a poster - it’ll be on Monday from 2:30-4:30pm (session E), come check it out!
📣 Call for the 2026 Early Career Publication Awards
This award (€1000) recognizes outstanding publications by early-career researchers, with separate categories for PhD students and postdocs. The application deadline is 15 April 2026.
🔥 New preprint!
Excited to share Johannah's fantastic work -> a preregistered study with two replications showing how uncertainty shapes perceptual insight.
As always, it’s been a great ride working with Johannah and Carlos.
How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?
We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!
Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!
Experimental task. Trials began with variable fixation (500–1,000 ms) and placeholder (500–1,000 ms) intervals, followed by two spatial cues (100 ms) on opposite sides of the visual field to indicate the likely locations of both a subsequent near-threshold target and a salient distractor (100 ms). Cue validity was 70% for both cue types. Targets and distractors were presented after a variable delay (500–1,600 ms). Stimulus displays could include (i) both a target and a distractor, (ii) a target only, (iii) a distractor only, or (iv) neither a target nor a distractor. The number pad on a computer keyboard was used to indicate the presence of a target at the cued location, a target at a non-cued location, or no target.
Attentional resources vary rhythmically, but what about susceptibility to #distractors?@fiebelkornian.bsky.social &co show that theta & alpha phases modulate sensitivity & distractor impact, revealing rhythm-specific mechanisms shaping #attention & distractability @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4tU0vh4
New preprint! We mapped out how ‘diffuse’ predictions affect neural representations. We show predictions reshape the geometric layout of the neural representations by compressing the representational spread and stabilize the neural code by reducing the neural variance during memory encoding.
We are excited to announce that we will host WMS2026!
The tentative dates are July 14th-17th, and we are currently looking for a postdoc to join the WMS2026 organizer team.
If you are interested, please submit your application using the link below (Deadline: March 29th)
forms.gle/noqsuEja2tB8...
New preprint 🚨
Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
Check out our new preprint, which presents object-based retrieval processes in multisensory working memory. Here we show that unimodal feature probes incidentally reactivate untested tones and orientations of audiovisual objects. +
Briefly not attending something may help you remember it later 🪄: new paper led by phenomenal PhD student Frieda Born (not on Bsky) out now in Comms Psychology:
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
🎉 My first first-author paper was just accepted in JEP:HPP! We asked what “active” vs “passive” WM states do - do they protect against interference? Across 4 behavioural experiments we find no reliable protection. Updated preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.05.578913 @elkanakyurek.bsky.social
🎉 New preprint 🎉 with Olya Bulatova, @drmack.bsky.social & @keisukefukuda.bsky.social! We decode shapes in working memory from EEG and show that representations are task-dependent, flexibly integrating information about category and task during the memory delay
Here’s a thought that might make you tilt your head in curiosity: With every movement of your eyes, head, or body, the visual input to your eyes shifts! Nevertheless, it doesn't feel like the world does suddenly tilts sideways whenever you tilt your head. How can this be? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵 1/n
How does prior knowledge affect the way we experience the world?
In our new paper, we show that prior knowledge can both increase and decrease how often experience is segmented into events.
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Excited to share our NEWEST PREPRINT led by @rochellekaper.bsky.social!!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
We ask: How do people learn multiple layers of environmental structure – w/o feedback – & how well do they *know* they’ve learned? Turns out, stimulus familiarity matters more than we thought! 🧵👇
(a) Mean cross-validated R2 for each model, averaged across participants and shown separately for each visual area (V1–hV4) and across all ROIs combined. Error bars indicate ± 1 SEM. All pairwise differences were significant except between the Contour-Based and Line Drawing–Steerable Pyramid Models in hV4. (b) Mean R2 by population receptive field eccentricity. Eccentricities of voxels are binned up to 4.2 visual angle which was the extent of the image from the central fixation mark. (c) Left: Visual ROI on an inflated surface map in fsaverage space. Right: R2 difference surface map in fsaverage space. R2 from the Photo-Steerable Pyramid Model was subtracted from the Contour Model. Positive values indicate bigger R2 values from Contour compared to Photo-Steerable Pyramid Model.
What determines the perception of orientations in visual cortex, sharp contours or oriented spatial frequencies?
It's the contours, the building blocks for shape. Brilliant paper by Seohee Han out in Scientific Reports:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@uoftpsychology.bsky.social
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.
New preprint: Inference over hidden contexts shapes the geometry of conceptual knowledge for flexible behaviour.
In this pre-reg study, our core claim was that we don’t just learn stimulus-reward. We infer hidden context and that inference re-wires attention and neural state space on the fly.
1/8
New preprint alert! 📢 Event segmentation allows us to parse continuous experience into meaningful events. Working memory (WM) is suggested to play a key role in this process, but how?
osf.io/preprints/ps...
What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️
In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.
@shansmann-roth.bsky.social and I finally finished our paper confirming a unique prediction of the Demixing Model (DM): inter-item biases in #visualworkingmemory depend on the _relative_ noise of targets and non-targets, potentially going in opposing directions. 🧵1/9
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Many things in the world move, and can even move behind other things. When will the cat reappear? To predict this, remembering the cat’s speed will likely help. But... how do people remember something like speed, which is defined by displacement over both (🤯) space and time? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵1/n
Super excited to see this out in the world!
