Franch et al. show that human hippocampal neurons encode the meanings of the words we hear through distributed, context-sensitive population activity that mirrors some features of large language model...

Bicanski proposes an algorithm and neural mechanisms for the iterative construction of abstract cognitive maps via non-local inference. Map positions are triangulated and memorized by a set of extant ...

Vision science has demonstrated considerable success in characterizing early- and mid-level visual processes through reductionism and tightly controlled experiments. However, an understanding of high-...

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...

Chericoni et al. show that neurons in the human hippocampus track the positions of multiple agents in a simple pursuit-based video game. They identified place codes for each agent and for gaze. The co...

Rapid learning, memory, and generalization are often attributed to circuits of the neocortex and hippocampus, but their specific role remains unclear. To examine these cognitive abilities together in ...

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

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

Are you interested in understanding how attention shapes what we see? Would you like to combine behavioural experiments, psychophysics, and eye tracking to uncover how the brain selects and prioritise...

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

A large analysis of MRI studies in five psychiatric disorders reveals that maps of brain volume differences in psychiatric illness are rarely reproducible, highlighting the need for alternative approa...

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...

Memory routinely transforms continuous experience into discrete episodes that support flexible retrieval. We propose that these structured representations are established via rapid neural reactivation...

Behavioral experiments are often infeasible when stimulus spaces have many dimensions or when testing time is limited. One way to address this challenge is adaptive stimulus selection, where informati...

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

Mental representations are the explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences, but there is no widely accepted characterization of how they cause behavior. Visual representational geometry can be quantified by similarity scores, but almost all methods require an explicit judgment. To examine how representations cause behavior by varying task demands, observers must perform different tasks while continuously reporting similarity, leading to dual-task interference. This study develops scanpaths as an implicit similarity measure, and uses representational similarity analysis to validate it. Observers searched for a target; fixations on distractors may reveal similarity. Similarity was also quantified by an odd-one-out task in the same participants, and ratings from different participants (Jiang et al. 2022). Representational geometries between tasks correlated. A generative model predicted first fixations in novel data. This double validation of the scanpath method opens the door to examining the causality of representations by determining if and how they vary with task demands. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Hippocampal ripples are considered a key mechanism of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. In humans, however, their direct investigation has relied on invasive recordings from patients with epilepsy...

A central challenge in consciousness research is determining whether people truly experience a stimulus. Here, the authors show that context biases traditional detection measures, whereas continuous r...

Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...

Author summary Vision doesn’t happen instantaneously, but unfolds over time. While we understand a lot about how the brain processes visual space, understanding how the brain processes information ove...

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Gaze behavior and brain activity are tightly coupled during perception and mental imagery. Whether this coupling extends to eyes-closed states remains largely unknown, primarily because measuring eye ...

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.