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Deniz Vatansever

@neurodenizen.bsky.social
341 followers 633 following 52 posts

Cognitive neuroscientist | PI @ COGNIZELab | Prof @ ISTBI, Fudan, Shanghai | Exploring memory encoding, Default Mode Network and mental navigation with 7T fMRI @cognizelab.bsky.social

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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
How does the brain interpret artistic beauty? Here’s our new article in The Conversation, based on our recent study:
theconversation.com
Science uncovers how the brain interprets artistic beauty – new research
An MRI study zeroes in on the brain networks that underline collective appreciation of art.
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
On a more personal note: this is one of the last papers @themindwanders.bsky.social saw before his untimely passing. An amazing mentor whose ideas run through this work. We dedicate it to his memory 💙💙💙 RIP 9/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
㊗️ Huge credit to @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social & @neocosmliang.bsky.social from my lab, and to our collaborators Beth Jefferies and Jonathan Smallwood, with data from @yorkpsychology.bsky.social & BNU. Massive thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers! 🙏 Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 8/9
nature.com
Model-based semantic distance reveals adaptive coordination of distinct cognitive systems in flexible knowledge retrieval - Nature Communications
Combining AI language models with brain imaging, researchers identify a neural signature that tracks how easily the mind retrieves related concepts, revealing three brain networks that cooperate more ...
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🤷‍♂️ So: Semantic control may be flexible, momentary state of coordinated coupling. A useful lens for disorders where access to meaning breaks down, like semantic dementia and aphasia. 7/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🤝 The headline finding: as meanings get harder to reach, these three systems converge. Their activity patterns align instead of each going it alone, with the posterior middle temporal gyrus standing out as a hub steering this coordination. 6/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🗺️ Decoding the signature revealed three cooperating systems: a left-lateralised Language network and a bilateral Control network (both recruited for distant meanings), and a medial Memory network from the default mode, favouring close, automatic associations (e.g. bee-honey). 5/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🐝 🍯 From whole-brain activity we built a neural signature that tracks semantic distance trial by trial. It generalised to new word lists and an independent bilingual dataset, and was specific to meaning, separating semantic from executive control at 97% accuracy. 4/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🏃 Semantic distance almost perfectly predicted how long people took to link two words. ConceptNet Numberbatch fit best, and intriguingly it peaked when we kept only the strongest 48% of features, hinting that meaning retrieval leans on a sparse, diagnostic code. 3/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
🤖 The idea: use NLP-based word embedding models to place every word pair on a continuous scale of semantic distance, from close associations to distant ones, then track the brain as people retrieve them in an fMRI task. 2/9
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
💡What makes some ideas spring to mind while others we have to reach for? We built an #NLP #fMRI #MachineLearning framework to find out. New study from our lab, led by @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧵 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #CognitiveNeuroscience #Fudan #ISTBI
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
From the "Functions of the Default Mode Network" special issue that I've co-edited with Jessica Andrews-Hanna! #COBS Two years in the making, nearly done. 30+ contributions and a remarkable breadth of perspectives on the DMN. All open to read & cite 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...
sciencedirect.com
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
What if much of human thought is navigation? 🧠 New open-access review: I argue that the DMN + hippocampal–entorhinal system form a domain-general engine for "mental navigation" across physical and abstract spaces (e.g. social, conceptual, and value). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Thanks so much! Glad to hear you enjoyed it, and thanks for the nice discussion afterwards! We’ll try to put it together as a preprint soon, stay tuned :)
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
That’s a wrap on #OHBM2026 for the COGNIZE Lab! 🧠🧠🧠 An amazing week with great science, great colleagues, and a wonderful city to do it all in. So proud of the whole team for presenting our work. Until next time! 👋 #Neuroscience #BrainMapping @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @cognizelab.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Feel free to get in touch with the presenters if you’d like to chat further 🧠
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
6/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Poster 3081 Can hippocampal structure predict memory function? Zhili Li presents: "Fine-grained morphometry reveals distinct predictors of hippocampal memory function" Proud of all our lab members presenting this week! 🎉 #Hippocampus #Memory
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
5/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Talk/Poster 3073 What is the hidden architecture of how the hippocampus organizes conceptual knowledge? Kaixiang Zhuang presents: "Latent architecture of conceptual knowledge representation in the human hippocampus" #Hippocampus #ConceptualKnowledge @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
4/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Poster 2995 How does the brain integrate perception and action while playing video games (Super Mario)? Ozan Vardal presents: "Shared neural codes for perception and action integration during naturalistic behavior" #NaturalisticNeuroscience @cneuromod.ca @ozvardal.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
3/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Talk/Poster 2994 What makes something beautiful, and how does the brain represent it? Xinyu Liang: "Dissociable representations of aesthetic features in the human visual cortex" #Aesthetics #VisualCortex #Neuroscience @neocosmliang.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
2/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Talk/Poster 1538 How does the brain represent social distance from the self, and can we decode it? Ashley Zhou presents: "Mapping a Continuous Neural Signature for Decoding Social Distance from the Self" #SocialCognition #NeuralDecoding #Neuroscience
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
1/6 📌 #OHBM2026 Poster 1428 How does the brain handle encoding vs. retrieval for effective navigation? Liangyue Song presents: "Dissociable neural representations of encoding and retrieval during naturalistic navigation" #Memory #Navigation #Neuroscience
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Thrilled to share the full roster of presentations from our COGNIZE Lab at #OHBM2026! 🧠 From naturalistic behaviour to conceptual knowledge, hippocampal morphometry to social cognition, here is a thread on what we've been up to 🧵👇 @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #Neuroscience
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Thanks to all the collaborators! @choongwanwoo.bsky.social sky.social @torwager.bsky.social for the awesome tools, the editor @macwoodburn.bsky.social and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback and the amazing #neuroaesthetics community for all their prior work that led to this project! 🙏
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Overall, the findings suggest that aesthetics, far from being inexpressible, follows a structured neural logic that can be measured, decoded, and predicted, with implications for mental health (e.g. art therapy), education and #AI
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Interestingly, the neural representations of this 2D aesthetic space scale with people's expertise in visual arts, particularly in the default mode network, the brain's hub for model-based inference, and meaning-making.
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
These neural signatures are highly robust, and generalise to completely independent task data from 100 unrelated subjects in the Human Connectome Project 🧠 🧠 🧠
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Two latent dimensions emerged: "What we see" is processed along the ventral visual stream, the brain's visual recognition highway, while "how we feel about it" engages the medial prefrontal cortex and subcortical reward centres, the same circuits involved in pleasure, decision-making, and reward.
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
We scanned participants in a 7T MRI scanner while they viewed traditional Chinese watercolour paintings by four artists. We then used a recommendation-engine-inspired algorithm to decompose shared aesthetic evaluations, which we then aimed to decode using multivariate predictive modelling.
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
What makes an artwork beautiful, and can your brain's response decode such hidden dimensions of aesthetic appeal? We built a framework to find out 🎨 🧠 @natcomms.nature.com @cognizelab.bsky.social First author: @neocosmliang.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroaesthetics #DefaultMode
nature.com
Latent neural architecture organising shared aesthetic evaluations of visual artworks - Nature Communications
Using high-resolution brain imaging, researchers reveal that aesthetic preferences for visual artworks can be captured by two key dimensions, meaning and value, offering insight into how the brain org...
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
New from our @cognizelab.bsky.social in Advanced Science: Beneath the Big Five, personality consistently organises into two dimensions, each with distinct brain signatures. Amazing work by postdoc @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social and thanks to all our collaborators! doi.org/10.1002/advs...
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Thanks a lot Rod!
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Read the full paper (open access): doi.org/10.1038/s414... Code & task available on GitHub: github.com/cognizelab/S... Huge thanks to the team, STI-2030 funding (aka China Brain Project), collaborators and #FudanUniversity! 🙏 #Neuroscience #Hippocampus #Navigation #OpenScience
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Our findings reveal that the brain does not just detect "novel or familiar", it represents spatial novelty as continuous gradients, which may be a fundamental organisational principle for spatial cognition 🌍🧭 (and potentially other structured knowledge - to be continued…)
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Figure 4: Hippocampal-cortical coupling reflects shared novelty preferences Using rest-fMRI, we found that hippocampal voxels and cortical vertices with matching novelty preferences showed STRONGER intrinsic connectivity. This suggests the gradients are functionally coupled!
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Figure 3: Two streams of cortical processing for spatial novelty 🔴 Visual + frontoparietal networks → responded to NOVELTY 🔵 Default mode + motor + ventral attention → responded to FAMILIARITY Importantly, we found a centre-surround gradient in posterior medial cortex!
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Figure 2: A novelty-to-familiarity gradient along the hippocampal long axis 🔴 Posterior hippocampus → preferred NOVEL spaces 🔵 Anterior hippocampus → preferred FAMILIAR spaces Though this division wasn't binary: we found a smooth, continuous gradient!
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Figure 1: How we quantified spatial novelty during free exploration During 7T fMRI, participants navigated a VR arena collecting objects while we tracked their every move. We divided the arena into sectors and calculated novelty based on visit frequency + time between visits.
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
🧠 New paper alert (the 1st one from our new lab)! Led by 1st author & VR wizard @jaquent.bsky.social @natcomms.nature.com How do our brains distinguish novel from familiar places as we explore our environments, e.g., a new city? 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵 Thread below with key findings ⬇️
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Thanks a lot! Happy to discuss anytime :)
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Massive congrats to @neocosmliang.bsky.social for receiving the #OHBM Merit Award for his work on “the domain general neural signature of perceived object beauty”🌹 #ECR @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social @cognizelab.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Three amazing ECR talks from our lab members 🤩 #OHBM2025 - Dual-process framework of human navigation (Zhili Li) - Global compressibility of conceptual knowledge (Kaixiang Zhuang) - Precision mapping of recognition memory @jaquent.bsky.social Well done to you all! #ECR @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Powerful and inspiring insights on “How to deal with academic burnout and how to break through it” 🔥 🔥 🔥 @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OHBM2025
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
@neocosmliang.bsky.social demonstrating a domain general neural signature that predicts perceived beauty of objects 🌹🥀 in collab with the amazing @martinhebart.bsky.social and @dkaiserlab.bsky.social #THINGS
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
@ozvardal.bsky.social modeling decision states and their neural representation during gameplay #PacMan 👾👾👾
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Zhili Li showing how anterior hipp flexibility connects to the default or action mode depending on whether you are a memory or tool-based navigator 🧭🧑‍✈️
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Yueting Su illustrating how ventral striatal connectivity (shell, not the core) predicts patience in delayed gratification 💰🤑 #thepatientbrain
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
@jaquent.bsky.social precisely mapping out the group and individual level recognition memory effects 🧠💭
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Liangyue Song quantifying the emergence of grid-like activity patterns during spatial learning #virtual-reality 🗺️📍🧠
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Kaixiang Zhuang mapping out how different brain regions contribute to the global compression of conceptual knowledge 🗜️🧠🗜️ #precision-mapping
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Deniz Vatansever @neurodenizen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Big year for our lab at #OHBM2025! Thrilled to present an exciting mix of posters, talks, and lots of brainy fun 🧠🤓 Come check us out! We’d love to connect! @cognizelab.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OHBM #OHBM2025 #Neuroimaging
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