Peter Kok

Priority-Driven Transformation of Visual Working Memory Content

New this year at @cogneuronews.bsky.social 2026: All abstracts will be published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society jocnf.pubpub.org/cns2026. Functionality includes ability to append a visual abstract, like this: doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

Very proud that this is finally out!

Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

📢 Workshop announcement.

We are super excited to announce the workshop Perceptual Inferences, from philosophy to neuroscience, organized by Alexander Schütz and Daniel Kaiser.

📍 Rauischholzhausen Castle, near Marburg, Germany
🗓️ June 8 to 10, 2026.
1/4

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...

🧵

It’s out!

Come join us in Dublin:

Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Neuroscience position available at UCD!

Let me know if you have any questions :)

full advert here: lnkd.in/dW_uFuab

🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?

Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Principles for proper peer review

Or worse: Here's what I would do if I had this data. I refer to points #4 and #5 in Principles for Proper Peer Review:
4. Don’t write the paper for the authors
5. Respect the authors’ time and effort
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...

Signatures proposed to index perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review A central question in many studies on perception and consciousness is whether the effects of a given manipulation are perceptual or cognitive. Typically, studies seek to find evidence that the raw sen...

New paper from the lab in which we test whether DDM and confidence distributions can be used to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. We show that putative signatures of perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

Quote: Kabinet over schrappen paraatheidsplannen pandemie speld.nl/?p=243288

But "Alternatively, in higher-order representation of a representation (HOROR) theory, the relevant higher-order state in PFC itself is phenomenally conscious."

For some HOTs, "consciousness is ‘jointly determined’ by concurrent activity in the higher-order areas and areas that maintain the lower-order representations."

Understanding the Higher-Order Approach to Consciousness The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here, we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views, such as the global workspa...

My understanding is that yes, some HOTs argue that contents are re-represented in the higher-order model and only that model is important for consciousness.

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?

We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!

Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

Objects warp space in our mind, and events warp time in our mind. @samiyousif.bsky.social and I teamed up to review the work in these two literatures and suggest that there may be deep connections across them (with analogous influences of objects on space and events on time).

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research!

Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

UK business secretary urges EU to stop ‘putting up barriers’ Comments by Peter Kyle come on Brussels trip aimed at securing British access to ‘Made in Europe’ scheme

🚨🚨 Major irony warning:

The UK decision to depart from the EU in the "hard" way opting for the TCA was the most severe barrier to EU trade that could be imposed.

Now live with it or renegotiate the basic terms of this framework. #brexit

www.ft.com/content/05e0...

This is great from the @athenaakrami.bsky.social lab — hippocampus is required for unsupervised statistical learning, and dCA1 populations split into subspaces for sensory features vs abstract rules. Elegant optogenetic + recording approach.

https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.14.705916

Bilingual language processing relies on shared semantic representations that are modulated by each language www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... fMRI with participants reading hours of natural narratives in their native & non-native languages then compared semantic representations between the two languages

Can’t help but think this an issue….

The Rise of Eyes Began With Just One

Vision Science makes the front page of NYT!!
featuring work from @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social with comments from Berkeley's own @karthikshekhar.bsky.social
#visionscience

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/s...

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

Infant brain categorizes common objects by two months of age Brain activity patterns in the ventral visual cortex appear to distinguish images across 12 categories, including birds and trees, fMRI scans suggest.

The Transmitter writes about @clionaod.bsky.social's work with
@ainedineen.bsky.social, @annatruzzi.bsky.social, Graham King, @lorinanaci.bsky.social, Keelin Harrison, Enna-Louise D'Arcy, Jessica White, @chiarac.bsky.social, Tamrin Holloway, Anna Kravchenko, @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social!

This really stuck out - the loans are currently unrepayable for the vast majority of students. This means you pay for the entire 30 years it takes before it gets wiped, and so you end up paying maybe twice what you borrowed. This is an insane burden to place on students

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...