Floris de Lange

Interesting convergence:

The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along

w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1

Now published:
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

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…

"Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception"

@predictivebrain.bsky.social @clarepress.bsky.social

nice to see our work situated within a broader research program on differences between learning & perceptual predictions

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

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World Uruguay built a power grid that runs 99% on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. Here’s how its bold energy overhaul became a global model.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

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.

🧠 Feature-specific predictive processing: What’s in a prediction error? 🧠

Perspective article w/ Cem Uran, @martinavinck.bsky.social & @predictivebrain.bsky.social now in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, highlighting recent work on the nature of surprise reflected in visual prediction errors.

🧵👇

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Rep. Seth Moulton comes on CNN and starts by saying: "Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? This is insane. What the hell are we doing? We've got a lot of problems in America today, and invading / occupying / running Venezuela does not solve any of them."

Me getting back to sending nagging emails on January 6th when people return to work from the Christmas break

Leveraging insights from neuroscience to build adaptive artificial intelligence Nature Neuroscience - Adaptive intelligence envisions AI that, like animals, learns online, generalizes and adapts quickly. This Perspective reviews biological foundations, progress in AI and...

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI?

➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com

rdcu.be/eWVmA

There's been a cluster of recent work on these sort of flow based or trajectory based world models, including nova flow and amplify (amplify a past episode of ours). These are super exciting because they reduce requirements for really accurate action labels imo

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally yield better models of biological vision. However, we present accumulating evidence that this alignment is now plateauing – and in some cases worsening – as DNNs scale to human or even superhuman accuracy. This divergence between artificial and biological perception may reflect the acquisition of visual strategies distinct from those of primates, and these findings challenge the view that advances in AI will naturally translate to progress in neuroscience. We argue that vision science must chart its own course, developing algorithms grounded in biological visual systems rather than optimizing for internet data.

Online Now: Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology

Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )

Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception - Nature Human Behaviour Vision–language deep neural network models better explain human visual cortex activity than vision-only models. Damaging brain connections between visual and language areas reverses this pattern, suggesting that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Using brain lesions and DNN models, this article suggests that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Very well done Peter, congrats!

I am very excited and grateful to have been awarded a Consolidator grant by @erc.europa.eu. We will use it to investigate the role of memory in perception, focused on the hippocampus. Thank you to all the colleagues in my team and the department for their support in making this possible!

Rapid computation of high-level visual surprise Health sciences

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference!

🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Summary 🧵 below 👇

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain - Nature A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic processing.

Nature research paper: Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain

go.nature.com/4839zaL

1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social

Find a baby and watch them (when they're not napping). What you will no doubt observe is a tiny human curiously exploring the world around them, playing with objects, making noises, imitating faces, and otherwise learning from interactions and experiences. "Studies suggest that children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do— by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms," the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik notes, all before learning how to talk. Babies may not yet be able to use language, but of course they are thinking!

If you’d like to independently investigate this for yourself, here’s one simple way:
www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Scientific Director Donders Institute | Radboud University Do you want to work as a Scientific Director Donders Institute at the Donders Institute? Check our vacancy!

Donders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠

Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

This was a fabulous, once in a lifetime colloquium -- and now the videos are available in high quality on the College de France web site @college-de-france.fr
www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/co...
With talks by Edvard Moser, Nancy Kanwisher, Liz Spelke, Manuela Piazza, Luca Bonatti and more!

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

A compressed hierarchy for visual form processing in the tree shrew - Nature Tree shrews show a primate-like hierarchical organization in their visual pathway and object decoding accuracy, along with strongly face-selective cells, demonstrating how core computational principle...

A compressed hierarchy for visual form processing in the tree shrew www.nature.com/articles/s41... - you can get representations of complex objects and features (even face specialisation) in a shallow hierarchy!

🚀 We’re hiring - Join our lab 🚀

🔍 Hiring: PhD (75% TV-L) & Postdoc (100% TV-L)
🧠 fMRI, VR, EEG, modelling

We combine a range of cognitive neuroscience methods to study flexible behaviour.

📅 Start: Feb 2026 or later | ⏳ Apply by Nov 3!

More details:
tinyurl.com/ms3a9ajt

#CognitiveNeuroscience

Nice piece about extreme multiverse analysis! The exemplar study performed 3.6 billion regression models. The author argues against this approach and suggests that multiverse analysis should only include valid models selected based on theories. Statistical inference requires thinking before acting🤓

Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

I said it before and I'll say it again: Cognition is rhythmic
Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies
www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
#neuroscience

Universities are embracing AI: will students get smarter or stop thinking? Millions of students arriving at campuses are now using artificial intelligence. Worries abound.

Reading, thinking and writting are defunct. 😢😡
"Faculty members also worry that students are using AI to short-cut their way through assignments and tests, and some research hints that offloading mental work in this way can stifle independent, critical thought."
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Last week, the International Brain Laboratory released a comprehensive activity map of the rodent brain during decision-making, enabling researchers to "test new ideas in a really easy and powerful way," says neuroscientist @predictivebrain.bsky.social.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

bit.ly/4mhqMRO