Chris Baker

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience If you are a current Barnard College employee, please use the internal career site to apply for this position. Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience The Barnard Visua...

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

Postdoc position to work on neuroimaging methods with @fmri-today.bsky.social (and me) fim.nimh.nih.gov/positions-av...

It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:

I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15).
werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

I finally got around to setting up a lab website!

Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io

Just in time to start the new semester.

🔥Design the next #VSS2026 T-shirt! Show off your creativity & win $500 + recognition at the meeting.

Deadline: Jan 15, 2026 → www.visionsciences.org/2026-graphic...

Has anyone attended any pre-data-collection poster sessions (i.e., poster sessions where people present their plans for experiments before data collection in order to get feedback when it's most useful) at conferences other than VSS?

photo of a human hand holding a tiny gold analog clock, two brain pictures showing fMRI results in medial parietal cortex on the inflated cortical surface (one brain map is thresholded, the other is not)

Now out in #JNeurosci -- we found changes in medial parietal cortex after manual exploration of everyday real-world objects

doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

with Beth Rispoli, Vinai Roopchansingh & @cibaker.bsky.social

New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social

Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy

Is the “standard workflow” holding back fMRI analysis?

Mass-univariate analysis is still the bread-and-butter: intuitive, fast… and chronically overfitted. Add harsh multiple-comparison penalties, and we patch the workflow with statistical band-aids. No wonder the stringency debates never die.

New paper (and thread) on the representational dynamics of the main dimensions of object space: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 1/n

Noise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data.

But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality.

Let's dive into why. 🧵

I’ll soon(ish) post an ad for a postdoc position in my lab to study individual differences in brain plasticity following blindness or deafness, with a start date of spring/summer 2026. Feel free to email me if you’re interested.

🌏 Come spend some time with us in Sydney! 🇦🇺

@marcsinstitute.bsky.social is offering International Visiting Scholarships for PhD students + postdocs.

Spend 1–3 months collaborating, exploring ideas, and building connections.

📅 Apply by 4 Dec
📍 Sydney, Australia

Curious or keen? DM or email me

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

📣 New preprint by a stellar team 🤩

I’m most excited by “phase III” in the alignment time course, which is best captured by mid-layers of temporally integrating video models! While we do not directly compare with image-EEG (yet - will do so in the #VIDI) I suspect this is unique to video vision 🎥🔥

Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age.

Link in post below 👇

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Happy to hear any and all feedback on our discussion article!

So much fun to work with this amazing set of authors :)

Excited to have this one out! We found that the perception of illusory faces relies on parallel brain representations of faces and objects with different dynamics, enabling flexible behaviour.

Eye movements, vision and memory through the lens of Sherlock - awesome collaborative project led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social

The brain’s map of the body is surprisingly stable — even after a limb is lost Study challenges the textbook idea that the brain region that processes body sensations reorganizes itself after limb amputation.

A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief

go.nature.com/3Jp9NPG

Loss of sensory input has long been used to study brain plasticity - here, we challenge the prevailing view of massive reorganization in a longitudinal study of amputees

Massive effort from @hunterschone.bsky.social who was in the awesome NIH/UCL PhD program with @plasticity-lab.bsky.social

Centering cognitive neuroscience on task demands and generalization - Nature Neuroscience Task demands are a primary determiner of behavior and neurophysiology. Here the authors discuss how understanding their influence through multitask studies and tests of generalization is the key to ar...

Datasets like NSD & THINGS offer rich stimuli but often test a single task.

After great conversations at #CCN2025 on multi-task studies & generalization in brains & models, I thought I would repost our perspective for those interested in this topic. We need multiple tasks!👉 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

After preparing for a full year together with @neurosteven.bsky.social and all other amazing organizers
of @cogcompneuro.bsky.social, #CCN2025 is finally here!

While I'm proud of the entire program we put together, I'd now like to highlight my own lab's contributions, 6 posters total:

four brain maps showing noise ceiling estimates in response to image presentation

New CNeuroMod-THINGS open-access fMRI dataset: 4 participants · ~4 000 images (720 categories) each shown 3× (12k trials per subject)· individual functional localizers & NSD-inspired QC . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.09024 Congrats Marie St-Laurent and @martinhebart.bsky.social !!

Amazing effort from @gcaedwards.bsky.social @ryanruhde.bsky.social Mica Carroll to rigorously test hf-tRNS on visual cortex. We didn’t replicate, but learned a lot and have ideas for moving forward

Thanks to @pci-regreports.bsky.social for constructive guidance through the whole process

Can humans use artificial limbs for body augmentation as flexibly as their own hands?
🚨 Our new interdisciplinary study put this question to the test with the Third Thumb (@daniclode.bsky.social), a robotic extra digit you control with your toes!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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