We rapidly distinguish familiar from novel objects, but how the brain learns this remains unclear. Using macaque inferotemporal cortex recordings and modeling, the authors show that familiarity learni...

Many of us have had that moment—seeing a flash of motion in the periphery, only to turn and realize there was nothing there. Eerily, these “false percepts” can occur without any visual evidence whatso...

Learning transforms prefrontal cortex activity from flexible, high-dimensional representations into compact, task-relevant and abstract codes, enabling efficient generalization of learned rules to new...

How do catecholamines, such as like noradrenaline, influence the role of prior expectations in perceptual decision-making? This study shows that pharmacologically increasing catecholamine levels reduc...

Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from hi…

ALT: a woman in front of a white board with the words take your time written on it

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Efficiency isn’t everything. The cognitive work of struggling with prose may be a crucial part of what drives scientific progress.

The noradrenergic system plays a diverse role in learning, from optimising learning behaviour to modulating plasticity. Work bridging across micro- and macroscale levels is revealing how noradrenaline...

High-resolution neuroimaging reveals stimulus-specific predictions sent from hippocampus to the neocortex during perception.

Human magnetoencephalography reveals neural representations of perceptual choices that are abstracted from motor-responses even during stable choice-response associations. This suggests a general role...

Human magnetoencephalography reveals neural representations of perceptual choices that are abstracted from motor-responses even during stable choice-response associations. This suggests a general role...

Classical models of collective behavior fail to explain the mechanisms driving desert locust swarms

Neural activity in sensory cortex is modulated by behavioral and cognitive factors, and this modulation is thought to contribute to the selection o...