iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Rob Mok @robmok.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Ended on a great panel discussion on AI and neuroscience with Kenji Doya, Wilma Bainbridge, Andrew Lampinen myself and John Duncan. Hosted by Shigeru Kitazawa. #cinetconference #neuroskyence 🧠📈

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duncanlabuoft.bsky.social @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Please spread the word: We’re recruiting a postdoc! 📣 We study how shifting brain & attentional states shape memory and how people experience their worlds. fMRI/iEEG + a fun, supportive lab community + space to pursue your own ideas. 📅 Apply by Aug 15 tinyurl.com/fx5k7teb

tinyurl.com

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Hannah Tarder-Stoll @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Interested in memory updating, exploration, structure learning, & reward? @asinclair.bsky.social & I are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University, with the opportunity to work at Rice too. Contact Allie or me for details! #PsychJobs

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

How can aesthetic pleasure be shaped by so many visual attributes: prototypicality, fluency, complexity, symmetry, and self-relevance? I argue that aesthetic pleasure emerges from a balance between categorization-based rewards and metabolic costs of neural activity. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Perceptual reward as the result of multiple micro-rewards along the visual processing hierarchy. Micro-rewards may arise, for instance, from the processing of orientation in area V1, motion in the Medial Temporal area (MT), simple shapes and grouping rules in V4, objects in the Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC), faces in the Fusiform Face Area (FFA), scenes in the Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA), or the processing of abstract categories in Prefrontal Cortex (PFC).

Aesthetic liking as a trade-off between perceptual reward from categorization and metabolic cost. a. The experienced pleasure from a stimulus (thick black line) is derived from the combination of perceptual reward (thin black line) and metabolic cost (dashed line), resulting in an inverted U-shaped curve.

Expertise moves this curve (solid line) to the right (dotted line), fatigue to the left (dashed line). Stimuli that are enjoyed in the baseline condition (circles) are enjoyed less when fatigued because they would overwhelm the visual system. Simple stimuli that are enjoyable when fatigued (triangles) are liked less in the baseline condition because they are boring and do not provide sufficient perceptual reward. Experts would not draw much pleasure from stimuli enjoyed in the baseline condition (circles) but appreciate more complex stimuli (squares), which would be too overwhelming in the baseline condition.

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Catalina Yang @catalinayang.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

New paper out w/ Katherine Duncan and Morgan Barense! Why do some memories update when our expectations are violated, while others remain stable? What matters most is the strength of a memory at reactivation—not how old it is. And, I designed the cover! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

royalsocietypublishing.org

Memory strength at reactivation, not memory age, governs prediction error-driven updating of naturalistic event memory

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

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Peter Kok @peterkok.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

royalsocietypublishing.org

Volume 381 Issue 1954 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

New work on agency and memory by @xianl-explorer.bsky.social, Janice Chen, myself and others! Using choose-your-own-adventures, we found that agency doesn’t always improve memory. Instead, agency personalized memory ❄️ ❄️ — even when people read the same text. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A schematic image of all story paths in a choose-your-own-adventure story. Two paths are highlighted, diverging in the beginning my and end, but overlapping in the middle portion of the story.

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Tess Forest @tessforest.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I'm starting a lab at the University of Notre Dame! 🎉🍀🧠 Doors open Jan 2027. I'm most excited to meet my future students (recruiting psych grad students for 2027!), help grow a budding neuroscience area, and head home to the midwest after many years away. Please reach out! @notredame.bsky.social

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Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Happy to announce this work has been published www.nature.com/articles/s44... People can view the same event and recall it differently. Here we asked if two participants recall events similarly, where in the brain do they share event representations both at encoding and recall?

nature.com

Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding and retrieval - Communications Psychology

This study shows that greater similarity in recalled content was associated with stronger shared activation patterns at encoding and retrieval in prefrontal and temporal cortices.

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Rob Mok @robmok.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Interested in a Postdoc on how brains/ANNs learn and represent visual/semantic concepts in Osaka, Japan? Check out the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowships (up to 2 yr). I'd be happy to host postdocs to come work in my lab at CiNet, Osaka! Info🧵👇 Please repost! #neuroskyence #psychscisky #mlsky 🧠💻 /1

jsps.go.jp

About the Program (Standard)｜Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research in Japan｜Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research in Japan

Official Website of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)

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Nichole Bouffard @nicholebouffard.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 I’m excited to share the first paper from my postdoc. We found age differences in the timescales of neural activity in the hippocampus during movie viewing 👀 These timescales were related to memory specificity in an interesting way (spoiler: the hippocampus may not be special!?)

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Rob Mok @robmok.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by @binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL) 🤖🧵👇 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462 🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1

arxiv.org

Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment

Determining whether AI systems process information similarly to humans is central to cognitive science and trustworthy AI. While modern AI models can match human accuracy on standard tasks, such parit...

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Our brains cling to stability: when scenes slowly change, people still see the original for longer than expected. This AI-image study shows that perception lags behind reality -our minds favor continuity over constant reprocessing. doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

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Rayna Tang @raynatang.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Stop by Poster E73 tomorrow to learn about: 🧠 an LLM pipeline for automated recall scoring, and 📖 how we (@atabk.bsky.social @nicholebouffard.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social) use it to understand whether compressed memories can be unfolded to recover details #CNS2026

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Asaf Gilboa @agilboa.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Come see our posters #CNS2026. All three are on session D Monday morning. Fantastic works from Xuan Zhang with @brianlevine.bsky.social, Dr. Erik Wing with @drjenryan.bsky.social and Dr. Lei Zhang with Dr. Claude Alain.

Xuan Zhang D52, the effects of event segmentation on temporal organization of free recall using staged events. Erik Wing D83 Environment and expertise shape spatiotemporal variation in conceptual knowledge. Lei Zhang D79 Theta-mediated conceptual reinstatement in vmPFC precedes perceptual reinstatement in ventral visual cortex during memory recall.

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duncanlabuoft.bsky.social @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Our lab will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference this year #CNS2026! Learn more from our graduate students in their sessions! @catalinayang.bsky.social and @matthewdougherty.bsky.social

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

🧠 The MackLab (@drmack.bsky.social) will be presenting at #CNS2026! Stop by our posters to chat about learning, insight, and hippocampus!

MACK LAB IS PRESENTING AT CNS 2026!

YONGZHEN (DORY) XIE, LINDA HE, & MICHAEL L. MACK
Mnemonic effect of category exception learning as a function of prediction error type
B71, SUNDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM

LINDA HE & MICHAEL L. MACK
Exploring the effects of self-generated and induced insight on incidental memory and pupil dilation
B126, SUNDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM

JESSIE SONG, FRIDA PRINTZLAU, SAGANA VIJAYARAJAH, DANA HUANG, STEPHANIE CARDILLO, MARGARET L. SCHLICHTING, & MICHAEL L. MACK
Category learning in adults but not children benefits from delayed introduction of exceptions
C51, SUNDAY, 5:00 - 7:00 PM

SAGANA VIJAYARAJAH, MICHAEL L. MACK, & MARGARET L. SCHLICHTING
Delaying exception introduction enhances children's hippocampal engagement during category learning
C54, SUNDAY, 5:00 - 7:00 PM

MADELINE BLOOMBERG & MICHAEL L. MACK
Novelty-driven attentional shifts during concept
learning
D8, MONDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM

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Matt Dougherty @matthewdougherty.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Super excited to present my new research at CNS next week! Ever wondered why memory is so inconsistent? This project explores how shifts in attention heavily contribute to this inconsistency 👀 Come see me at Data Blitz Session 1 (Talk 5, Saturday @ 10:30am) and Poster Session D (#53, Monday 8-10am)!

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Frida Printzlau @fridaprintzlau.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

🎉 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

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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions? To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Ryan Panela @ryanapanela.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Building Bridges in Brain Data. The event will focus on open science practices, innovative methods, and community in the neurosciences, with opportunities to engage in collaborative projects or explore new tools. No prior expertise is required. Registration for BrainHack 2026 is still open!

eventbrite.com

BrainHack Global Toronto 2026 ( Jan 19-21) - Building Bridges in Brain Data

BrainHack Global Toronto 2026 ( Jan 19th-21st) -https://brainhackto.github.io/brainhack-toronto-01-2026/

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

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

(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.

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Bridges can anchor communities as landmarks and even tourist destinations, blend into their environment unnoticed, or they can be eyesores. What determines the aesthetic quality of bridges? Mei Yang, @damianoc.bsky.social, Paul Gauvreau, and I explore this question here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

doi.org

Empirical aesthetics of bridges

Bridges are works of public infrastructure designed to perform a practical function. They are unique among works of engineering in that they also have a significant aesthetic dimension. At their best,...

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! Strong evidence in silico and humans, out in PNAS Nexus: tinyurl.com/3kbu8xw4 With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

Conceptual Roadmap of the present study. To examine the relationship between the metabolic costs of visual processing and aesthetic pleasure, we used both computational and physiological measures to quantify metabolic costs during visual processing: 1. Model-derived estimates of metabolic costs based on the activation of a deep neural network; 2. Metabolic activity of human brains, specifically in the visual processing areas. We found that both measures were inversely related to aesthetic pleasure.

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Bradley Love @profdata.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2

elifesciences.org

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

🥳 Congrats on your first preprint! 🧠🧠🧠

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Sophie(Xing) Su @sophiexingsu.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Excited to share that our new paper, “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,” is now out in JEP: General! 🧠 We examined how people’s eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions. 👇

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Tess Forest @tessforest.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

The Budding Minds Lab at the University of Toronto is hiring a Postdoc in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory 🧠 🫧 This is (one of) my graduate labs and I can't recommend the department's people, resources, location, or culture strongly enough! see buddingmindslab.utoronto.ca for more

buddingmindslab.utoronto.ca

Budding Minds

We are a developmental cognitive neuroscience lab located on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. Our research aims to understand how we form and recall memories, and how we can use...

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Gaeun Son @songaeun.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I'm pleased to share our new paper, "Attention to complex scene features", now published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics! We investigated how well traditional attention theories generalize to complex scene features, using AI-generated stimuli. Check out the paper here: rdcu.be/elLFK

rdcu.be

Attention to complex scene features

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

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Lauren Homann @laurenhomann.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed: “Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity” See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Matt Dougherty @matthewdougherty.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

Super excited to share the preprint we've been working on, "On a roll: Recent familiarity primes the brain to retrieve other memories via dopaminergic nuclei responses"! Check it out, and come see us at CNS if you're around this afternoon! drive.google.com/drive/u/0/fo...

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Jeff Zacks @jzacks.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

New preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)! "Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure" osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

#CNS2025 If you are curious about how hippocampal subfields distinctively support the learning of surprising exceptions to category knowledge, come check out my poster at Session C tomorrow between 5 and 7 pm!

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Catalina Yang @catalinayang.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Curious about how individual differences in episodic memory traits relate to changes in memory performance over time? Come check out my poster on Sunday, 5-7pm, poster session C, board 66. #CNS2025

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! We find strong evidence in silico and human observers! osf.io/preprints/ps... With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

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Jeremy Manning @jeremyrmanning.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

New starter pack: people doing science with narratives, naturalistic memory, natural conversations, and using language models for psych/cog sci 📖💻📚 (Reply with 🙋 if you'd like to be added!) go.bsky.app/LGRYMvQ

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

People like round contours better than angular contours. Where and how is curvature represented in the brain? With indoor architecture we found a neural dissociation between subjective curvature and computational curvature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Norman Lab @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

Excited to share a new preprint with Elizabeth McDevitt, Ghootae Kim, and Nick Turk-Browne investigating the role of REM sleep in neural differentiation of memories in the hippocampus! URL: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202… (1/9)

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 16/05/2024

Looking forward to presenting my work on exception learning at #VSS2024! Come see my poster in the morning of May 18 to discuss how prefrontal, hippocampal, and visual areas can distinctively support the learning of complex visual categories with exceptional items!

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Brian Levine @brianlevine.bsky.social · 02/05/2024

#TAMeG2024 is coming! May 7 2024 @YorkUniversity 🎯 27 talks 🎯 @tyrellturing.bsky.social keynote 🎯panel on epi mem and AI @aronowitz.bsky.social @WilCunningham @tyrellturing.bsky.social & @morganbarense 🍻 reception (cash bar!), awards, powerpoint karaoke! tameg.ca

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 19/04/2024

🎉 My first first-author paper is now published in PBR! @drmack.bsky.social and l used novel computational modeling & behavioral approaches to show how selective pattern differentiation and integration support learning and generalization of category exceptions! link.springer.com/article/10.3...

link.springer.com

Reconciling category exceptions through representational shifts - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Real-world categories often contain exceptions that disobey the perceptual regularities followed by other members. Prominent psychological and neurobiological theories indicate that exception learning...

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Dirk Bernhardt-Walther @dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 18/04/2024

We are looking for candidates for a unique postdoc opportunity to work on the role of perceptual grouping in human and computer vision with Sven Dickinson, Kaleem Siddiqi, Zygmunt Pizlo and me. www.bwlab.org/postdoc-posi... Please repost.

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Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · 13/04/2024

Come check out our lab's posters at #CNS2024 Featuring work from @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social , June-Kyo Kim, and Marcus Meng

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Yongzhen Xie @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social · 13/04/2024

I will be presenting my poster on Sunday at 5-7pm. Come to chat about edge functional connectivity and how it can be applied to study the neural dynamics in narrative event processing! #CNS2024

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Asaf Gilboa @agilboa.bsky.social · 11/04/2024

Check us out at #cns2024: Sat.: Erik Wing shows how experts’ schemas (🦆) accelerate training-induced functional & structural (!) cortical plasticity. Keela Thomson on how kids (👶) see the world differently (literally!). Hannah Marlatte on youths’ PTSD symptoms & its impact on scene construction (🎑)

Saturday blitz session 2 is Erik Wing, and session 4 is Keela Thomson. Poster session A is Hannah Marlatte. Sunday Poster session C is Erik, Xuan Zhang and Prateek Dhamija. Monday Poster session E is Marya Nurgitz, Ariana Giuliano and Keela Thomson

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