Adam Hockley

Sensory sharpening and semantic prediction errors unify competing models of predictive processing in human speech comprehension Speech comprehension relies on predictive mechanisms, but models disagree on whether the brain prioritizes expected or unexpected information. This study shows that sharpening of sensory representatio...

Same sound, different perception: Do expectations change what you hear?👂🧠

We paired faces w topics and played the same ambiguous speech w different faces. The brain sharpened sensory signals toward predictions and showed gated prediction errors at higher levels.

Read @plosbiology.org. Blueprint👇

Synaptic input variation increases firing rates at the expense of temporal precision. Left: GBC identification based on morphological features. Top: Low-magnification image of cochlear nucleus parasagittal slice containing a biocytin-filled GBC near the AN root (arrow). AVCN, anteroventral cochlear nucleus; PVCN, posteroventral cochlear nucleus; DCN, dorsal cochlear nucleus; AN, auditory nerve. Bottom: High-magnification image of the same GBC, displaying its characteristic round soma and short dendrites. Right: Schematic of the experimental paradigm: Acoustic stimuli (top) were processed by an auditory nerve model to generate spike trains for 10 AN fibers (ANF1-10). These spike trains were convolved with the EPSC waveform to generate conductance templates with varying synaptic strengths, ranging from “no variation” (blue) to “high variation” (orange), and injected into GBCs.

In the #cochlear nucleus, the size of inputs from #auditory #nerve fibers is variable. This study shows that variable input strength enhances rate coding at the expense of temporal precision, potentially creating diverse information streams for #sensory encoding @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3YCaLMU

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I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Excited to share our preprint! We show that primary visual cortex is modulated by global predictability. This effect depended on higher level brain region (area ACa), and better explained classic oddball paradigms better than “local” context effects (i.e., recent stimulus history). 1/3

The human insula reimagined: Single neurons respond to simple sounds during passive listening The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggested that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, these...

Our paper is out now in J Neuroscience (currently in "accepted paper" form). We directly record single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while participants passively listen to simple sounds. @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇

A massive thanks to my co-authors @cgalli-io.bsky.social, @jordanhamm.bsky.social & Manolo Malmierca for all the contributions!

Cortical deviance detection represents a canonical difference signal Context modulates neural processing of sensory stimuli. Neural responses are suppressed to stimuli that are typical in their context and augmented to stimuli that deviate from their context. The latte...

Our new preprint is out!

We show that deviance detection in auditory cortex conveys the theorised comparison of internal prediction to sensory input. Our data confirm this key assumtion that links theoretical models of sensory processing to experimental data.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Adam Audio make consumer active monitors with a decent amount of measurement data: www.adam-audio.com/content/uplo...

My nonprofit @your.neighborhoodscientist.org is looking for scientists to share their stories with us in 2026! Is your New Year's resolution to communicate & interface more with your community as a scientist? Send us a pitch at audrey@neighborhoodscientist.org ! 🧪🧠🇺🇸

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Enlightening the brain

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.

The 10th of these, would you believe?

This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more

Enjoy!

medium.com/the-spike/20...

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg:
#psychskysci #neuroscience

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Neural Response Reliability as a Marker of the Transition of Neural Codes along Auditory Pathways Decoding sound from neural activity in mice reveals a striking shift in how the brain encodes sound: from precise but redundant timing codes in early auditory areas to efficient, synergistic rate-bas....

"Silent neurons individually carry little information... however, we observed that combining the silence of one neuron with temporal firing patterns or firing rate of the other neuron in a pair led to comparable synergy to combining the spiking activity of both neurons"

doi.org/10.1002/advs...

Transient conductive hearing loss (CHL) during development. Top left: Schematic of coronal section of a guinea pig skull (traced from high-resolution CT scan). A custom-made earplug is fitted within the cartilaginous ear canal (dotted line), a safe distance from the tympanic membrane (TM). Inset: View of external ear with earplug in place. Top right: Earplugs provide 10–35 dB SPL sound attenuation for frequencies >1 kHz. Bottom: Experimental timeline. Litters of newborn guinea pigs were divided into two groups at hearing onset (birth): pups that were raised with no earplug (littermate Controls) and pups that were raised with a unilateral earplug (“Early CHL”). Earplugs remained in place until adulthood (P56). Following earplug removal, animals were tested on: auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) including the binaural interaction component (BIC), a startle-based spatial discrimination task, and in vivo single-unit recordings in the auditory midbrain (i.e., inferior colliculus, IC). All testing was done within 1 week of earplug removal.

Early unilateral auditory deprivation can cause lasting spatial #hearing deficits. @anbuhlk.bsky.social &co show that unilateral #HearingLoss during development (but not adult-onset) impairs binaural #brainstem function & spatial hearing acuity in guinea pigs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/46njw1P

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature 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...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

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

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding - Nature Communications Widely cited studies have claimed that musical training is associated with enhanced neural encoding for sound at early stages of the auditory system. Results from this large-scale multisite study do n...

music lessons don't make kids smarter, but many people have assumed that music lessons would have near-transfer effects, e.g. improving aspects of auditory perception

big new study led by Andrew Oxenham says "nope".

music lessons make kids better at music & that's good enough reason to do 'em !

First lab outing since the move to NYC.... feeling so lucky to have such a talented and fun group! with Lital Rachmany, @adhockley.bsky.social, me, Molly Hornick, Fumiyasu Imai, and @cgalli-io.bsky.social

Are predictions computed hierarchically, or can they be computed locally? Check out our paper! Congrats, Toshitake Asabuki and @colleenjg.bsky.social !
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Brain mechanisms that distinguish imagination from reality discovered Areas of the brain that help a person differentiate between what is real and what is imaginary have been uncovered in a new study led by UCL researchers.

#ICYMI Areas of the brain that help a person differentiate between what is real and what is imaginary have been uncovered in a new study led by @uclpals.bsky.social‬ and @uclqsion.bsky.social‬ researchers.

Distinct dendritic integration strategies control dynamics of inhibition in the neocortex Dendrites critically influence single-neuron computations, but their role in neocortical GABAergic interneurons (INs) remains poorly understood. We fo…

📣New study in Neuron, featuring modeling insights: "Cell-Specific Dendritic Integration in Cortical GABAergic Interneurons"! It reveals PV & SST interneurons compute differently. This highlights how distinct dendrites enable specialized brain computations!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In wakefulness, deviant stimuli may evoke more localised Up states to increase saliency of, guide attention towards, and produce behavioural responses to, unexpected stimuli.

We've presented these data before at the MMN and SfN meetings and glad to have the manuscript submitted 🎉

Auditory deviants evoke cortical state changes under anesthesia Context-dependent sensory processing within the predictive coding framework relies on detecting mismatches between incoming stimuli and internal predictive models. Sensory deviants elicit prediction e...

Here's our new #preprint on triggering of cortical Up states by deviants in the auditory oddball paradigm.

Up states are reliably evoked by deviants under anesthesia, explaining the long-latency deviant responses seen in previous studies.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

🚀 We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and interpretable & adjustable classification thresholds.
pip install and play around with our toy dataset:
🔗 github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

A great catch up today in the Jono's @ Nottingham 🏰

My final day at the @incyl.bsky.social today! I've met so many amazing people here and I'll miss everyone so much 🩵 next step is back to UK for a month of hiking, cycling and camping, then heading to @jordanhamm.bsky.social lab soon! 🗽

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams

1/
Excited to share our new paper just out in Scientific Reports!
🧠🎧 Using intracranial EEG, we show how the human brain automatically encodes patterns in random sounds– without attention or explicit awareness.
🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Objective autonomic signatures of tinnitus and sound sensitivity disorders Emotionally evocative sounds elicit pupil dilations and facial movements that index the severity of common hearing disorders.

Exciting work showing an objective test for tinnitus!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How does our brain predict the future? Our review of predictive processing + research program is now on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614
50+ neuroscientists distributed across the world worked together to create this unique community project.