Derek Evan Nee

Basic Experimental Studies Involving Humans (BESH) will no longer be subject to the requirements under the NIH Clinical Trial Definition.
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Congratulations to Jongmin Lee for his tireless work in detailing these fascinating results! Thank you to David De Vito for his meticulous efforts to design the task, collect the data, and initial analyses! And shout out to @neurojacob.bsky.social for help on all aspects of the project throughout!

These data indicate the importance of abstract coding to guide predictions for the future which support efficient behavior. Moreover, they highlight the importance of later visual areas (e.g., IPS) in the generation of these abstract codes to guide performance.

Representational similarity analyses revealed that both concrete and abstract codes were multiplexed in the IPS and traded off from retrospective to prospective over time. But the strength of abstract prospective coding in the IPS in particular speeded behavioral performance.

Geometric analyses revealed that IPS and VC coded retinotopic spatial locations shortly after stimulus presentation. Over time, IPS representations realigned to reflect sequence positions more so than retinotopic space. By contrast, VC maintained stronger alignment to retinotopic visual space.

In the IPS, but not the VC, spatial locations generalized across hemifield by sequence position. E.g., a location at the left point of the star in the left hemifield shared a common code with the left point of the star in the right hemifield. This indicates abstract coding of sequence in the IPS.

Multi-variate fMRI analysis showed that representations in visual cortex (VC) and the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS) transitioned from representing the last spatial location presented (retrospective) to the next spatial location in the sequence (prospective).

To address this, we designed an experiment wherein human subjects learned a spatial sequence forming a star. Spatial locations were held in WM and probe locations required responding whether they were in or out of sequence. The spatial sequence was applied to both left and right visual hemifields.

We have a fair understanding of how visual areas sustain the recent sensory past in working memory (WM). But much of our use of WM is prospective and more abstract than our sensory experiences. How do we transform the recent sensory past into predictions for what will happen in the near future?

Excited to share Jongmin Lee’s discovery of abstract codes guiding prospective working memory!
Thread below.
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

🚨 I'm searching for a full-time research coordinator to join my group & work on precision brain 🧠 network and cognitive control projects at both 3T and 7T. Please rt 🙌

Applications due: Feb. 26
Start date: flexible, as early as June
More 👇
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Hey #SfN25 #SfN2025, come by DD10 this afternoon to see Jongmin Lee's poster showing that iTBS to DLPFC and FPl dissociably affect cognitive flexibility, neural efficiency, and conjunctive coding in the PFC!

👇Happening this afternoon at #SfN25 #SfN2025 as part of a nano poster group on finescale organization of the PFC, including work from @rodbraga.bsky.social @derekevannee.bsky.social @abbynoyce.bsky.social @visscherlab.bsky.social @neurojacob.bsky.social and more!
Come see them all 👀👀👀

I am recruiting a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara for an NIH-funded project on the organization of lateral PFC function--across emotion and cognition--using representational fMRI & TMS. I’d love to find someone w/ a background in cognitive control & computational modeling to complement our team! 🏝️ 🧠 🧲

You're not entirely off-base, but it doesn't track. We now have data with 4-5 sessions. Session 1 has more DMN and longer RTs - I think they do daydream on occasion here. But they appear to learn to stay on task after that. So, less DMN-like, sharper Control B, and faster over repeated sessions.

When I discuss our temporal control demand w.r.t. the task paradigm, people say it's impossibly difficult. Then when I show the activations, they call them default. They align best with Control B. "Impossibly difficult" and "default" are odd bedfellows. iiif.elifesciences.org/lax/12112%2F...

Image of brain networks in a group average and individual LPFC. Individuals show: 1) smaller FP network 2) more interdigitation 3) conserved motifs 4) idiosyncratic features This was validated with task and rest fMRI

The lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied.

👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Excited to share my first preprint investigating the feasibility and reliability of using precision RSFC in people with Parkinson’s disease! 🧠👇
📄: go.illinois.edu/PDfeasibility

🧵 Thread ⬇️ 1/12

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons - Nature Human Behaviour Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

In this Article, Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe. @jankaminski.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wessel Cognitive Neurology Lab | The University of Iowa Thanks for visiting the Cognitive Neurology Lab at the University of Iowa. The lab is directed by Dr. Jan R. Wessel. We are affiliated with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Depa...

I will be looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, using EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI, or related methods.

If you know anybody, please tell them to email me.

Formal ad to follow. Lab website: wessellab.org

New modeling paper, spearheaded by Raphael Geddert and Seth Madlon-Kay, now out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: "Modeling of control over task switching and cross-task interference supports a two-dimensional model of cognitive stability and flexibility".
Free read link: rdcu.be/epatc

Check out my newest preprint to see the TCP dataset in action! 🤘🧠

Brain network dynamics reflect psychiatric illness status and transdiagnostic symptom profiles across health and disease: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Precise individual measures of inhibitory control Nature Human Behaviour - Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on four inhibitory control tasks, Gratton et al. show that more than 1,000 trials per participant are necessary to reduce...

Excited to announce that our paper (led by @hyejinjadelee.bsky.social & Derek Smith) is out in @nathumbehav.nature.com
go.illinois.edu/Lee2025_NHB
We use 36 days of testing in 4 inhibitory control tasks to examine the precision of inhibitory control measures in *individuals* and how they vary
🧵👇

In @elife.bsky.social: Stimulus dependencies—rather than next-word prediction—can explain pre-onset brain encoding during natural listening doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.

New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula...

The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵