Join the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 01 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02573-7Tangible rewards are known to sharpen visual processing of associated objects. Tomić et al. show that an internal sense of confidence—acting as an intrinsic reward—similarly biases attention, revealing how the brain prioritizes limited resources.

The Pilot Presents Pavlov's Dogz

We studied the effects of prioritization in a two-step retrocuing task in which male and female humans hold two items in working memory, and the item not cued by the first cue cannot be dropped becaus...

Abstract. Visual working memory (VWM) guides attention via internal attentional templates, but whether this relies on a “single” or “multiple” templates and how awareness and VWM load regulate its…

Abstract. Space and time play a critical role in working memory formation and maintenance relative to other object features. Particularly, covert spatial attention spontaneously tracks object…

Abstract. A central question in consciousness research is whether perceptual awareness is primarily reflected in early posterior sensory activity or in later frontal processes associated with access…

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) announces the appointment of Professor Xiao-Jing Wang, a pioneer in theoretical and computational neuroscience, to its faculty as a Chair Professor. Professor Wang wi...

The Pilot Presents Pavlov's Dogz

Searching for objects of interest is an essential and pervasive activity in adaptive cognition. In everyday situations, we often search for relevant content in our surroundings and in mind at the same...

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Memory generalization allows individuals to extract and apply information from prior experiences to novel situations, supporting flexible learning and efficient decision-making. Theoretical models suggest that sleep should facilitate generalization, yet the literature examining its role in promoting …

About 11% of the population is left-handed, a significant minority of the potential participant pool for functional MRI (fMRI) studies. However, convention in fMRI research dictates these potential pa...

Behaviour of human participants in a prey-pursuit task reflects dynamic blending of goal-specific control policies, with hippocampus estimating latent states, anterior cingulate cortex orchestrating p...

Abstract. Goal-directed behavior relies on cognitive flexibility—the ability to rapidly adapt ongoing thoughts and behaviors while preserving task-relevant information. The performance monitoring…

The 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed a structural dependency that the neuroimaging community has rarely discussed openly.

Abstract. Prediction error during memory reactivation is posited to be a key driver of memory updating. However, prediction error leads to varied memory ou

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

Eye blinks are among the largest physiological artefacts in electroencephalography and are typically removed from the recordings. Yet their timing may carry information about cognition. Here, we asked...

Abstract. The goal-dependent use of temporal expectations enhances visual performance, even without concurrent spatial or motor predictions, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. To ide...

Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str

Abstract. The hippocampus is involved in learning predictive associations, responding to prediction errors as well as representing predictions of future in

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...