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Christopher Honey

@chrishoney.bsky.social
1.3K followers 509 following 55 posts

Associate Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. theoretical neuroscience; open-ended cognition; memory

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Reposted by Christopher Honey
Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What is the nature of universal representations in AI models, and what determines whether they emerge? Our paper accepted at #neurips2026 led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @rothj.bsky.social addressed these questions comparing 162 vision models, with intriguing results. arxiv.org/abs/2605.13675 🧵
arxiv.org
Characterizing Universal Object Representations Across Vision Models
Deep neural networks trained with different architectures, objectives, and datasets have been reported to converge on similar visual representations. However, what remains unknown is which visual prop...
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Rik Henson @rhens.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
So thankful to the University of Cambridge for enabling a new chapter in the long history of the APU/CBU (since MRC decided to close all its units…)
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Doeller Lab @doellerlab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Join us at @mpicbs.bsky.social as a fully funded 3-year PostDoc (m/f/d). Your project will focus on how cognitive maps shape learning, memory, and decision-making. Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by September 30: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58460
postdocprogram.mpg.de
The role of cognitive maps in learning, memory and decision making | Max Planck Postdoc Program
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Stephanie Chan @scychan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What does the *empirical evidence* tell us about work and wellbeing? And what does that imply for AI futures? arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 We reviewed studies of populations across the world, including the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, and financially dependent spouses. Major takeaways:
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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
very cool! Once their world extends beyond primary colors & shapes in a matrix to one w/ realistic scenes and situations incl social dynamics, will be esp cool to see how they extend meanings in new contexts, and ultimately develop a full range of constructions, almost as if they don't need UG
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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
How do keep a narrative active in our mind despite interruptions? The default mode network can maintain a representation of an interrupted story over a delay, even when the delay is filled with a demanding task. This representation is strikingly transformed from the initial experience!
biorxiv.org
Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity
How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We prop...
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Federico Rossano @federicorossano.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
UCSD Cognitive Science Department is hiring an Assistant Professor incorporating novel computational approaches in the study of biological and/or artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working in this department for 10 years and the intellectual environment really is unique. 1/3
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Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.
A schematic figure showing an evolving timeline of mental context during an interrupted narrative.
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Johns Hopkins Arts & Sciences @jhuartssciences.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Meet Zeus. ⚡ Hopkins’ new recycling machine turns packaging foam into dense plastic blocks that become park benches and picture frames, keeping it out of the landfill. ♻️ hub.jhu.edu/2026/09/11/f...
hub.jhu.edu
Foam recycling now available at Johns Hopkins
A new recycling machine in a parking lot at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center takes airy chunks of foam and churns them into dense plastic cubes that can be made into park benches, picture frames, ...
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SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
The crank doesn't actually do anything, but it makes the humans happy. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/crank PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com
4-panel SMBC comic update. A man is looking down, saying "I worry intellectuals like me are useless now that machines are so good at everything." A yellow robot behind him says "no, no, don't feel bad. You can still contribute to new discoveries!" The robot then gestures to metal boxes with a crank sticking out of them, with the words "math," "physics," "CS" and "philosophy" written on each box. The robot asks "now, would you like to turn the mathematics crank of the physics crank today?" The man defiantly states "no! I reject all this! I shall be a pure aesthete, concerned only with my own beautiful creations!" Shortly after, the man is scene turning the crank on a box marked "poetry" in a beautiful font as he says to himself "so... Self-actualized..."
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Alana Darcher @alanadarcher.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵
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Kate Devlin @drkatedevlin.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
The UK AI pushback: 42% of people are deliberately limiting their AI use and 70% of people think it would be difficult or impossible to avoid being exposed to AI even if they wanted to. New report from us at @kings-dfi.bsky.social : www.kcl.ac.uk/news/over-40...
kcl.ac.uk
Over 40% of people are limiting AI use, as popularity starts to wane | King's College London
People are increasingly choosing to limit or reject the use of AI tools, according to a new report published today by the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London and Responsible AI UK.
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.
nature.com
Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience
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...
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Ishan Singhal @singhal.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
If our experiences unfold like a stream over time, how would this stream unfold in other animal species? Together with @birchlse.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social, a review of temporal illusions and a path for temporal phenomenology in animals! a 🧵/n www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️
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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...
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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵
Bar chart titled "Positive feeling toward AI varies by experience, not by party," showing the percentage who feel positive about AI overall. By experience using AI: never used AI 12%, tried it a few times 24%, use it weekly 50%, skilled daily user 80%. By political party: Republicans 39%, Democrats 36% (nearly identical).
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Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
📢 We are recruiting a full-time lab manager/RA joint between our lab and @marinabedny.bsky.social 's lab. A great opportunity for a recent grad interested in gaining more research experience in cognitive neuroscience. Details and apply here: hiring.jhu.edu/careers/job/...
hiring.jhu.edu
Research Assistant (KSAS - Cognitive Science) | Johns Hopkins University
We are seeking a Research Assistant who will work jointly in the Isik and Bedny labs on projects involving neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), behavioral testing, and computational approaches. The position is p...
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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵
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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool. arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747
arxiv.org
Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze
Hippocampal neurons track positions of self, others, and gaze direction. However, it is unclear how their respective neural codes differ enough to avoid confusion while allowing for abstraction. We re...
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!
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Jeremy Manning @jeremyrmanning.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term! Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/ I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.
context-lab.com
Models of Language and Communication - PSYC 51.17
Course materials for PSYC 51.17: Language Models from Scratch - Dartmouth College
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Daeyeol Lee @ungteoriz.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Some exciting opportunity for NeuroAI research at Johns Hopkins!
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Alexander Huth @alexanderhuth.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
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!
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Gabe Waterhouse @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The “Crowd Size Illusion” and the Relativity of Number Perception
When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set...
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Rolando Masís-Obando @xrmasiso.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
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.
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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that! Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
cell.com
Studying memory narratives with natural language processing
Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...
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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory! We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵1/9
doi.org
Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications
When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...
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Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS
Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...
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Alexander Huth @alexanderhuth.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.
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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
The House committee for NSF/NASA/NOAA is meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) at noon ET. Now would be a good time to call anyone on this list & tell them to keep science funding at full 2025 levels. You can remind them that 75% of voters want tax-funded science and they're concerned about the impact of cuts.
    Hal Rogers, Kentucky, Chair
    John Carter, Texas
    Ben Cline, Virginia
    Tony Gonzales, Texas
    Andrew Clyde, Georgia
    Mark Alford, Missouri
    Dale Strong, Alabama, Vice Chair
    Riley Moore, West Virginia
    Grace Meng, New York, Ranking Member
    Glenn Ivey, Maryland
    Joe Morelle, New York
    Madeleine Dean, Pennsylvania
    Frank J. Mrvan, Indiana
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Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
Excited to share my new lab website! The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social www.sinclairlab-rice.com
sinclairlab-rice.com
Sinclair Lab
The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair
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Jamal A. Williams @jayneuro.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Music-evoked reactivation during continuous perception is associated with enhanced subsequent recall of naturalistic events
Music is a potent cue for recalling personal experiences, yet the neural basis of music-evoked memory remains elusive. We address this question by using the full-length film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to examine how repeated musical themes reactivate previously encoded events in cortex and shape next-day recall. Participants in an fMRI study viewed either the original film (with repeated musical themes) or a no-music version. By comparing neural activity patterns between these groups, we found that music-evoked reactivation of neural patterns linked to earlier scenes in the default mode network was associated with improved subsequent recall. This relationship was specific to the music condition and persisted when we controlled for a proxy measure of initial encoding strength (spatial intersubject correlation), suggesting that music-evoked reactivation may play a role in making event memories stick that is distinct from what happens at initial encoding. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, https://ror.org/01cwqze88, F99 NS118740, R01 MH112357
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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out. I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines". You can download the entire book for free: library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...
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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
I just signed the Bethesda Declaration and urge you to do the same today, so that we all stand with NIH researchers as Battacharya appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee tomorrow.
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Paul Bogdan @pbogdan.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
Thrilled to see a news piece by @science.org on my recent paper. By analyzing p-values across >240k papers, the study suggests that the rate of statistically questionable findings in psychology has declined since the replication crisis began www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
‘A big win’: Dubious statistical results are becoming less common in psychology
Fewer papers are reporting findings on the border of statistical significance, a potential marker of dodgy research practices
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Michael C. Anderson @memorycontrol.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
How does the brain stop thoughts? Find out in my article in @natrevneuro.nature.com with Subbu Subbulakshmi & Maite Crespo-Garcia www.nature.com/articles/s41... that integrates 25 yrs of psychology and neuroscience on this vital function.@mrccbu.bsky.social sky.social #neuroskyence #neuroscience
nature.com
Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
The capacity to prevent unwanted thoughts is important for cognitive function and mental health. Anderson et al. describe insights into the neural mechanisms of the inhibitory control of thought that ...
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Lisa Schmors @lisaschmors.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
🧠🤖 Computational Neuroscience summer school IMBIZO in Cape Town is open for applications again!   💻🧬 3 weeks of intense coursework & projects with support from expert tutors and faculty   📈Apply until July 1st! 🔗https://imbizo.africa/
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Qihong (Q) Lu @qlu.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
FINALLY. Some gumption from the President of Harvard today:
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
BTSP, but not STDP, can account for place field changes in hippocampus, out in Nature Neuroscience today: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪
nature.com
Synaptic plasticity rules driving representational shifting in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTS...
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megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
cool!
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Nature @nature.com · 04/04/2025
Nature research paper: Mastering diverse control tasks through world models go.nature.com/3YigkQB
go.nature.com
Mastering diverse control tasks through world models - Nature
A general reinforcement-learning algorithm, called Dreamer, outperforms specialized expert algorithms across diverse tasks by learning a model of the environment and improving its behaviour by imagining future scenarios.
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Chris Baldassano @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
For anyone at #CNS2025 - check out @xrmasiso.bsky.social's talk tomorrow afternoon, showing that we can use fMRI to predict which (VR) locations will be good anchors for creating *future* memories! www.cogneurosociety.org/talk/?id=5579
cogneurosociety.org
Symposium Talk - Cognitive Neuroscience Society
March 29-April 1  |  2025 Submit a Symposium Submit a Poster Latest from Twitter
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Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow: elifesciences.org/articles/106... elifesciences.org/articles/106... elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org
Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond
Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.
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Chris Summerfield @summerfieldlab.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.
nature.com
Deep reinforcement learning can promote sustainable human behaviour in a common-pool resource problem - Nature Communications
Koster et al introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism designed to manage common-pool resources successfully encourages sustainable cooperation among human participants by dynamically adj...
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Matteo Saponati @matteosaponati.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
fantastic post, and tasty food for thoughts. shamelessly adding here that many different types of STDP come about from minimizing a prediction of the future loss function with spikes :) hopefully another case of successful predictions. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Sequence anticipation and spike-timing-dependent plasticity emerge from a predictive learning rule - Nature Communications
Prediction of future inputs is a key computational task for the brain. Here, the authors proposed a predictive learning rule in neurons that leads to anticipation and recall of inputs, and that reprod...
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