Antonino Greco

Why are tactile sensations suppressed during movements? In our new preprint, we explain this as optimal integration of sensory signals with an internal model.

Work led by @fatatai.bsky.social with Dimitris Voudouris, Katja Fiehler and @c-rothkopf.bsky.social

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

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Renormalization in the brain?
With @andreasantoro.bsky.social and @jesseba.bsky.social we're organizing a workshop at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social (Lisbon, March 16) on how coarse-graining principles from physics can explain neural computation across scales. nplresearch.github.io/neurorenorm2...

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

Our bilingualism paper is now published in PNAS. We used fMRI to compare semantic brain representations in English-Chinese bilinguals. Semantic representations are largely shared across languages, but finer-grained differences modulate how meaning is represented.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

TBH the thing that is most sad about the loss of ~2015-2021 era science twitter is the loss of a public square where grad students can see, and participate in, the diversity of expert opinions in the field. It really shaped how I see science.

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception Predictive processing frameworks have emphasized the role of forward prediction as a critical ingredient for learning and perceptual inference. We ant…

These findings align well with what @clarepress.bsky.social and I discuss in our "Forward and backward prediction" paper, see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What type of relationship is learned during visual statistical learning? Statistical learning enables observers to extract regularities from their environment, but what statistical regularity is extracted remains debated. While previous research has mainly focused on condi...

Which "statistic" governs statistical learning? Find out in this new article of our lab: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!

underappreciated concept 🙂

for more dipoles: neighboring dipoles have different orientations & can have different stimulus preferences. so even though topographies look similar, subtle differences remain. maybe that's why it is possible to decode information from relatively few sensors?

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted.
see our comment:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hiring now!
📢 The CRC 1233 Robust Vision consortium at @unituebingen.bsky.social is looking for a Research Coordinator to lead science management, support project execution, and help steer our interdisciplinary research in neuroscience, machine learning and computer vision.

Man I really need to go back and watch this show again

I completely agree. I think accurately predicting future sensory input is rewarding per se!

This is because it’s one of the brain’s most fundamental objectives, arguably second only to survival itself

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

bsky.app/profile/agre...

I think this is worth a read

A perspective at how AI is becoming part of how we work 👇👇👇

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

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

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

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Bootstrapping Life-Inspired Machine Intelligence: The Biological Route from Chemistry to Cognition and Creativity Achieving advanced machine intelligence remains a central challenge in AI research, often approached through scaling neural architectures and generative models. However, biological systems offer a bro...

New preprint with Giovanni Pezzulo:
arxiv.org/abs/2602.08079
Bootstrapping Life-Inspired Machine Intelligence: The Biological Route from Chemistry to Cognition and Creativity

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures?

Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham

arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

The Self-Evidencing Agent What is it to be a human individual, an agent? According to Jakob Hohwy, it is to “self-evidence,” to actively seek out sensory evidence for one&...

"The Self-Evidencing Agent" - my new book - is out now with @mitpress.bsky.social

Can be purchased, or just download the whole thing for free, via the 'Open Access' option.

I'm grateful to @anilseth.bsky.social and Karl Friston for the generous endorsements.

mitpress.mit.edu/978026255389...

By end of Feb @bsky.app will be the 2nd largest social media source for research sharing in our database

- Google+ managed 945,000 mentions of research during its life
- Facebook pages (not people's profiles) have shared papers 6.6m times
- Reddit = 600k

Bluesky is currently at 6m and climbing

How to start the year off right 😊

Our commentary in Nature Mental Health proposes using AI and VR to simulate experiences similar to those produced by traditional psychedelics, offering a novel pathway to advance psychedelic-assisted therapy research🤩

Link 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

🚨 New paper out in Science Advances 🚨
With @suryagayet.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social, in two fMRI studies we investigate mental object rotations that are driven by the scene context, rather than purely by cognitive operations. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Biomedical and life science articles by female researchers spend longer under review Women are underrepresented in academia, especially in STEMM fields, at top institutions, and in senior positions. This study analyzes millions of biomedical and life science articles, revealing that f...

Cost of being female lead/corresponding author in biomedical sciences: "[T]he median amount of time spent under review is 7.4%–14.6% longer for female-authored articles than for male-authored articles" even in disciplines where women well-represented. #AcademicSky

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap.
dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D...

Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

GitHub - thosvarley/syntropy: A python package for information-theoretic analysis of discrete and continuous data. A python package for information-theoretic analysis of discrete and continuous data. - thosvarley/syntropy

Introducing a new scientific computing library: syntropy.
Syntropy is a comprehensive package for information theory, aimed at both theoreticians and data analysts working on discrete, continuous, and mixed data.
1/N
github.com/thosvarley/s...

The many faces of multivariate information Extracting higher-order structures from multivariate data has become an area of intensive study in complex systems science, as these multipartite interactions can reveal insights into fundamental feat...

New preprint on unifying the zoo of multivariate higher-order information measures into a common form.
May be of interest to anyone interested in higher-order interactions, complex systems, emergence, or complexity.
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arxiv.org/abs/2601.08030

How complex should network models be?

🚨 In our latest paper we quantify (if and) when higher-order interactions are informative versus reducible to pairwise structure without losing functional signal (e.g., diffusion behavior).

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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