Floris de Lange

Transformers

I wrote an entry on Transformers for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (‪@oecs-bot.bsky.social‬). I had to work with a tight word limit, but I hope it's useful as a short introduction for students and researchers who don't work on machine learning:

oecs.mit.edu/pub/ppxhxe2b

🔵 Tübingen Systems Neuroscience Symposium 2025 is here! 🔵

#SNS2025 brings together leading international researchers in system neuroscience 🧠

Join us for plenary lectures, poster sessions and social events on 6️⃣-7️⃣ October 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣

registration is open here 👉 meg.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/sns_2025/

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🎈 Out now: 🎈

"The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination"

(by Balaban & me)

of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more

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

The what and when of visual surprise:
EEG shows that high-level visual surprise emerges rapidly and modulates neural responses ~200ms after stimulus onset.

New preprint with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social available here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Summary 🧵 below

When our protests are banned, may we have the courage of the Hungarians to march in ever greater numbers!

CCN 2025 Satellite Event Background The human visual system is full of optimisations—mechanisms designed to extract the most useful information from a constant stream of incoming data. The field of neuro-AI has made significa...

Not just one, but two fantastic chances to discuss how infant development can inform machine learning and vice-versa at CCN 2025 in Amsterdam!!! Satellite workshop sites.google.com/view/child2m...
and Generative Adversarial Collaboration sites.google.com/ccneuro.org/...

𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗡𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Title of section 1 summarizes it:
"The problem: Reductionism and control vs natural behavior: from Descartes and Bacon to Natural Neuroscience"
The brain as a complex network.
Looks like a fantastic book.
#neuroskyence

deadline 23 June!! Please re-bleat(??) widely!

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪
www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

I think that’s clearly a win bsky.app/profile/imag...

US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war Facing an extreme budget, the National Academies hosted an event that ignored it.

The failure of the National Academy of Sciences USA to make a clear and unequivocal statement about the disastrous Trump administration science policies — it lets all of us down and dooms them to eventual irrelevance.

We have a PhD position for an upcoming project in metacognition research in Potsdam / Berlin. A great opportunity for those interested in cognitive modeling of confidence and EEG.

More information at coconeuro.github.io/phd2025

Kindly share this opportunity with potential candidates - Thanks!

Imaging cortical layers to understand brain as network organ This spatial scale, bridging cells and brain areas, has been overlooked in human brain research. But advances in fMRI technology are changing that.

Human neuroscience research has largely overlooked the mesoscale, which bridges cells and brain areas. But new advances in fMRI technology are changing that, writes Laurentius Huber @layerfmri.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/future-of-fm...

🚨PhD position alert!🚨
Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions
vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...
Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

Universities quietly negotiating with White House aide to try to avoid Harvard’s fate, source says | CNN Politics College and university leaders have been privately negotiating with a deputy to top Trump aide Stephen Miller in hopes of avoiding the same aggressive targeting of Harvard University, a person familia...

No no no! These university leaders don’t get it. If you negotiate one on one you don’t buy peace; you just expose the whole sector and yourselves to more shakedowns. See law firms.

The only response is to unite in collective action and fight the Admin’s illegality. www.cnn.com/2025/05/31/p...

"We thank the reviewers for their helpful comments"

Finally the Version of Record of our paper "Criterion placement threatens the construct validity of neural measures of consciousness" is out in @elife.bsky.social as *fundamental* and *compelling*!
doi.org/10.7554/eLif....

Higher-level spatial prediction in natural vision across mouse visual cortex Theories of predictive processing propose that sensory systems constantly predict incoming signals, based on spatial and temporal context. However, evidence for prediction in sensory cortex largely co...

New preprint, w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social !

we've found that visual cortex, even when just viewing natural scenes, predicts *higher-level* visual features

The aligns with developments in ML, but challenges some assumptions about early sensory cortex

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

🚨 New preprint! 🚨
Can humans learn sensory regularities that are irrelevant to ongoing behavior? Yes, and we reveal the predictive coding mechanisms behind their acquisition

Our results support uncertainty minimization over environmental state transitions as a core objective of brain function

🧵👇

Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. T...

Visual image reconstruction from brain activity via latent representation arxiv.org/abs/2505.08429 by @ykamit.bsky.social et al.; "enables new psychological measurements of visual experiences, with applications spanning clinical diagnostics and brain-machine interfaces"; #neuroscience

Today, the ERC formally adopted a decision to increase its support for researchers moving to Europe.

On top of its normal grants, the ERC offers 'start-up' funding to help PIs establish laboratories / research teams in Europe.

This extra funding is now x2 (up to €2 million!)

europa.eu/!6Vdgmp

Had a great time on @braininspired.bsky.social with Oscar Ferrante and @alexlepauvre.bsky.social , chatting about our work at @arc-cogitate.bsky.social and the results of the consortium's Nature paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...). Grateful for the chance to share the journey and our thoughts!

Please RT🙏

Reach out if you want to help understand cognition by modelling, analyzing and/or collect large scale intracortical data from 👩🐒🐁

We're a friendly, diverse group (n>25) w/ this terrace 😎 in the center of Paris! See👇 for + info about the lab

We have funding to support your application!

Thrilled that this collaborative project with the @maureenritchey.bsky.social lab, co-led by @gushennings.bsky.social and Paula Brooks, is out in preprint form!

I’m pretty pro-AI but god damn is doing this missing the entire point of college and learning.

You need to think and do the hard work to build the skills to effectively wield the tools. But our attitude to university education is also to blame here: we treat it as a prereq for financial stability

@bagleycartoons.bsky.social

Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia

Protect international education in Dutch Academia! openletter.earth/against-lang...

Calling all science advocates!! Carlos Brody+ are creating a searchable database of tangible science benefits, and they need you.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

They are asking for suggestions - from brief to lengthy. The database is state-searchable, so all 50 states.

Please spread the word!