Dan Feuerriegel

Hippocampus a ‘general-purpose statistical learning machine’ New cross-species findings may help settle a long-standing debate about whether the hippocampus is required for passively learning information.

Whether the hippocampus is involved in unrewarded learning has been a controversial question. A new preprint finds that it may be critical for passively learning information.

By @natmesanash.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/memory/hippo...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

A Movement-Independent Signature of Urgency During Human Perceptual Decision Making - PubMed How does the brain adjust its decision processes to ensure timely decision completion? Computational modelling and electrophysiological investigations have pointed to dynamic 'urgency' processes that serve to progressively reduce the quantity of evidence required to reach choice commitment as time e …

Check out our new paper which isolates a human brain signal that specifically tracks the growing urgency to commit to a choice pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41611534/. This one was a long time coming! Sterling work from @harveymccone.bsky.social and a bunch of past lab members!

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 09 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02371-7Vaziri et al. examined how humans detect changes in auditory pitch, revealing that listeners rely on correlations in sound intensity over frequency and time, processing that is reminiscent of visual motion detection.

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch

The Self-Evidencing Agent What is it to be a human individual, an agent? According to Jakob Hohwy, it is to “self-evidence,” to actively seek out sensory evidence for one&...

"The Self-Evidencing Agent" - my new book - is out now with @mitpress.bsky.social

Can be purchased, or just download the whole thing for free, via the 'Open Access' option.

I'm grateful to @anilseth.bsky.social and Karl Friston for the generous endorsements.

mitpress.mit.edu/978026255389...

Sensory adaptation supports flexible evidence accumulation during perceptual decision making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.03.703553v1

"Repetitions lead to better memory." Sure - but how? Our new paper led by former lab member @philippmusfeld.bsky.social shines new light on this question, and challenges some longstanding assumptions. Now published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

📢Maths in the Brain Workshop 2026 in Melbourne.

We will bring together researchers across Australia with a shared interest in understanding the brain from a quantitative perspective.

This year's keynote is delivered by Professor James Cole, University College London.

1/4🧵

Preventing data leakage in neural decoding - "for autocorrelated neural time series, standard k-fold cross-validation can dramatically overstate performance." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Yes I'm a sucker for punishment and do almost all of my 1-1 meetings (1 hr each) on Wednesdays. The lab meeting gives me a useful preview of conversations to come. I do honours meetings as a group usually.

My lab is busy this year. We are about 10 members including me!

I'm trying to decide whether to start having lab meetings (as well as 1-1 supervisions) this year. We're a small group (5 students).

Keen to hear what works for you all?!

Possible formats:
- roundtable brief progress reports
- longer project update talks
- journal club
- skill share sessions
-...?

Round robin can help people feel like they aren't just working on a project alone, and it's a nice opportunity to celebrate the small (and larger) wins. But depends on the social dynamic of the lab!

We also do journal clubs, project updates, or visitor talks (much shorter round robin for those meetings).

We currently do a weekly lab meeting in the morning (before the 1-1 meetings). Quick round robin where people can talk about what they have been working on, and any challenges they are facing. And some time for announcements and discussion of lab related matters.

Part 1: How do LLMs work? YouTube video by Andrew Perfors

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Most popular decision-making models assume that cognitive processes are static over time. In our new paper in Psych Review, we offer a simple extension to evidence accumulation models that lets researchers account for systematic changes in parameters across time 📈

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap.
dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D...

Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

We said the season was over – but for Prof Alison Gopnik, we made an exception. In this bonus PsychTalks episode, Nick and Cassie had a conversation with one of the world's most influential developmental psychologists about how our minds change across our lives.

Listen here: go.unimelb.edu.au/3axe

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Holly Schofield, Matthew J. Brookes, et al:

Towards a 384-channel magnetoencephalography system based on optically pumped magnetometers

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

happy that our article about mu & alpha rhythm waveform shape in development is now finally out in the open: doi.org/10.1162/jocn...

oscillation frequency changes across development (one of the most robust findings in the oscillation world). in this work, we also look at waveform shape changes.

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.”

In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes.

rdcu.be/eUPO8
funds @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence 🧵:

And it's out now in Cortex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Summary below 🧵

New paper in Psych Review on a model of false recognition in Deese-Roediger-McDermott DRM task.

Not just recognition responses, but also associated RTs!

And not just the semantic task, but also the structural task - where words overlap in orthography/phonology!

A thread!

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Dominic M.D. Tran, Nicolas A. McNair, Alexis E. Whitton, Thomas J. Whitford & Evan J. Livesey:

Prediction-based sensory attenuation is related to prediction-based motor attenuation

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning Nature Human Behaviour - In this study, Collins proposes an alternative dual-process (working memory and habit) model of reinforcement learning in humans.

My paper is out!
Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets.
rdcu.be/eQjLN

@violetchae.bsky.social and Lauren Fong showcasing neural correlates of evidence accumulation for dietary and voluntary decisions at #ACNS2025 @acnsau.bsky.social

@jie-sun.bsky.social taking us through his joint modelling of neural and behavioural data in recognition memory tasks @acnsau.bsky.social #ACNS2025

Here’s what Black Friday sales shopping does to your brain Black Friday is a psychological event, carefully designed to take advantage of how your brain makes decisions. But you can stay one step ahead this sales season.

In advance of the Black Friday sales, @tgro.bsky.social and I highlight the tactics that retailers use online. Including tips to help you keep your cool during the shopping frenzy.

theconversation.com/heres-what-b...

@psychunimelb.bsky.social @unimelb.bsky.social

Here’s what Black Friday sales shopping does to your brain Black Friday is a psychological event, carefully designed to take advantage of how your brain makes decisions. But you can stay one step ahead this sales season.

In advance of the Black Friday sales, @tgro.bsky.social and I highlight the tactics that retailers use online. Including tips to help you keep your cool during the shopping frenzy.

theconversation.com/heres-what-b...

@psychunimelb.bsky.social @unimelb.bsky.social