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.
Hands holding a copy of "Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language" by Gregory Hickok on a plain background. The cover features a image of the brain.
Essential reading on how the brain makes language possible, @gregoryhickok.bsky.social's "Wired for Words" provides a critical synthesis of over 150 years of research to build a new understanding of the neural architecture of the brain’s language system: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255341...
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.
Excited to share our new paper in Imaging Neuroscience!
doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
#neuroscience
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Alexis Kidder, Tijl Grootswagers, et al:
Mapping object space dimensions: New insights from temporal dynamics
doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
#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
Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
Now in press at Nature Communications!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Check it out if you are interested in category selectivity, the organization of visual cortex, and topographic models!
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...
**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited
for cognition?**
That goes to the top of the list!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social
Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Investigating 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
New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
1. 🧵 Thread: What happens to the visual brain after early transient blindness?
Our new Nature Communications paper examines a rare population: people born with dense bilateral cataracts—a short blindness occurring during a critical window of visual development.
🔗 rdcu.be/eQjMH
Our new preprint on the FOODEEG open dataset is out! EEG recordings and behavioural responses on food cognition tasks for 117 participants will be made publicly available 🧠 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
“Revealing Key Dimensions Underlying the Recognition of Dynamic Human Actions”
New work led by Andre Bockes and Angelika Lingnau - with some small support from me - on dimensions underlying the mental representation of dynamic human actions.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe
1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684
🧵
@annabavaresco.bsky.social and
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...
Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1
New findings from my lab in Nature Communications suggest that racial stereotypes can lead the brain's perceptual system to temporarily "see" weapons where they don't exist.
Led by: @dongwonoh.bsky.social
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(1/6)
The myth of optimality in human movement science
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
New in #JNeurosci: People share the same brain responses to different colors, and Bannert and Bartels predicted what color a person is looking at by using the brain activity of others. @unituebingen.bsky.social https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025
🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Excited to share my latest work with @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @andpru.bsky.social!
We asked: How does the motor cortex account for arm posture when generating movement?
Paper 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/10
"Assuming that functional specialisation necessarily implies an ‘encapsulated module’ is a widely recognised error even in evolutionary accounts."
Shared texture-like representations, not global form, underlie deep neural network alignment with human visual processing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.29.673066v1
Can self supervised learning help understand how the brain learns to see the world?
Our latest study, led by Josephine Raugel (FAIR, ENS), is now out:
📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18226
🧵 thread below
Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social
