Fabian Soto

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Yannik Stegmann and Matthias Gamer:

The impact of inherently aversive contexts on visuocortical processing of generalized threat

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors Nature Communications - Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors

Who doesn't like a good model of the brain? Yet, from simple regression to neural nets, some limitations keep popping up (e.g., overfitting) @mjwolff.bsky.social & I saw some cool but puzzling data, ran a quick analysis & found one such limitation: model mimicry. Now in #naturecommunications &🧵below

relationship between sensory evidence and confidence evidence

If you work with perceptual confidence judgments, you may be interested in our CNCB model of confidence ratings. Joint work with Vincent de Gardelle.

Uncorrected proofs here:
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

(🧵 1/4)

‼ Announcement: Online Unfold.jl workshop ‼

📅 09.05.2025
💶 Free!
👉🏼 www.s-ccs.de/workshop_unf...
❓ rERPs, mass univariate models & deconvolution!

#EEG #linearmodels #statistics @julialang.org #julia

Organized with Romy Frömer @thechbh.bsky.social
and the S-CCS lab @unistuttgart.bsky.social

Increasing prevalence of autism is due, in part, to changing diagnoses | Penn State University The greater than three-fold increase in autism diagnoses among students in special education programs in the United States between 2000 and 2010 may be due in large part to the reclassification of ind...

Increasing prevalence of autism is due, in part, to changing diagnoses www.psu.edu/news/researc... - many cases of what used to be called 'intellectual disability' are now being diagnosed as 'autism'

osf.io/preprints/ps...

turns out, u can analyze meta-d' w/ just reaction times rather than confidence. loses some info & also a bit different. but maybe RT really isn't so metacognitive, so we might have to call it pseudo-meta-d'

new preprint with Kiyo Miyoshi & Doby Rahnev

🧠📈

Estimating Signal Detection Models with regression using the brms R package: https://osf.io/vtfc3

About the Course Aims of the course

Apply for a FREE virtual workshop on "R Programming for Psychology and Neuroscience." Sponsored by NSF and will take place this summer. Enrollment is open to all students. Direct training on using R to analyze data from psychological tasks. Applications due 4/30. 🤓🧑‍💻

sites.google.com/view/r-progr...

Bridging computation and representation in associative learning:
gershmanlab.com/pubs/Gershma...

Last couple of lectures of the term... done. Got to teach the 2nd years about my favourite find of the year.

"Does natural selection favour the Rescorla-Wagner model"

Got to say "Rescorla-Wagner babies" in a lecture. #WinningAtLife

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

US map via scienceimpacts.org visualization of economic loss due to IDC cuts to 15% as part of Feb 7, 2025 executive order, with shading denoting intensity of cuts.

Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs.

Find out how your community may be impacted.

Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org

a 🧵

Introspection Is Signal Detection | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Vol 75, No 1 Introspection is a fundamental part of our mental lives. Nevertheless, its reliability and its underlying cognitive architecture have been widely disputed. Here, I propose a principled way to model in...

The paper of mine Spener cites— “Introspection is signal detection”—came out last year in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. doi.org/10.1086/715184

🚨 UNSW Face Lab is hiring 3-year post-doc 🚨 Please repost and contact David White for informal enquiries external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/53...

Theoretical Neuroscience | Understanding Cognition | Xiao-Jing Wang | This textbook is an introduction to Systems and Theoretical/Computational Neuroscience, with a particular emphasis on cognition. It consists of three parts:

As our community increasingly shifts toward embracing the complexity of the brain, this new book by Xiao-Jing Wang will be an essential go-to.

He is among a small, prescient group that embraced important ideas before the rest of us. Here he unpacks them. 1/2

www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

🧵 1/5 Excited to share our latest @joss-openjournals.bsky.social 🧪 #paper:

UnfoldSim.jl

New @julialang.org package to simulate continuous event-based time series for #EEG & beyond!

📜 doi.org/10.21105/jos...
🛠 github.com/unfoldtoolbo...

With @judithschepers.bsky.social, Luis Lips & Maanik Marathe

Fast face-selective responses in prefrontal face patches of the macaque Face processing models propose gradually more complex receptive field properties culminating in invariant representations in anterior inferotemporal c…

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

some PFC neurons are face-selective & respond faster than neurons in IT. unlikely for them to be all just late stage monitors

🧠📈 🧠💻

It’s #BrainAwarenessWeek! Today, we're highlighting songbirds as a key model organism in #neuroscience research. These vocal learners help scientists study how the brain processes speech, learning, and memory. #KavliNeuro #BAW

"When a subset of scientists can reliably produce incredible effects (because they cut corners), and publish hundreds of papers, they set a bar that serious, careful researchers can never hope to meet."

People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We always see that 1) neural responses are very diverse 2) the shattering dimensionality is as high as it can be. Now also in an extensive analysis of the IBL dataset. Wonderful collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, Shuqi Wang, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski. Many new analyses in this new version

Excellent talk from @jeffreybowers.bsky.social on why deep neural networks are poor models of human vision (and why people persist in thinking they're good). Hosted by @maxinesherman.bsky.social Sussex Consciousness & @sussexai.bsky.social. Here's the paper: www.cambridge.org/core/service...

The NIH’s new imposed standard indirect cost rate threatens life-saving brain & behavior research that benefits millions of Americans. SfN, with other scientific organizations,urge reversal of this policy & implore Congress to protect critical research infrastructure.

Full statement: bit.ly/4jVJnCL

Photo of United States Capitol on a blue background with the PS logo and announcement in white text of the Society's statement on federal research funding and data access.

PS joins fellow scientific organizations in opposing the federal research funding freeze, data access restrictions, and proposed cuts to grant infrastructure costs at NIH. Read here: https://buff.ly/419qOUp

Indirect Costs at NIH . . . I wasn’t planning on spending part of a Saturday writing about cost accounting principles and the like, but NIH-world was hit with a doozy of a policy announcement on Friday night:

Great analysis of the indirect cost rate announcement by @stuartbuck.bsky.social

Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania has indirect rate of 70%, but they probably didn’t want to list that atop Harvard because defunding a children’s hospital might be perceived as problematic.

This is devastating

NIH In Your State - United For Medical Research Select a state on the map to see the impact of NIH funding across America.

Know the facts around NIH funding cuts and how it will impact you directly www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

It's finally out!

Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses

Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode.

10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

SPM goes Python for its 30 year anniversary! Great news for #neuroimaging! 👍

Why is the Rescorla-Wagner model so influential? The influence of the Rescorla-Wagner model cannot be overestimated, despite that (1) the model does not differ much computationally from its predecess…

Just discovered this lovely 2023 review "Why is the Rescorla-Wagner model so influential?" by @ccnlab.bsky.social and others.

It's succinct, insightful, and full of citations to fascinating work. Put it in your 'to read and cite' list.

#neuroskyence

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