Floris de Lange

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

*Absolutely* beautiful work characterizing the neural transformations between imagery and perception! 🤩

Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +

Hi, we will have three NeuroAI postdoc openings (3 years each, fully funded) to work with Sebastian Musslick (@musslick.bsky.social), Pascal Nieters and myself on task-switching, replay, and visual information routing.

Reach out if you are interested in any of the above, I'll be at CCN next week!

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

🚨Amazing opportunity: position available for a new associate/full professor at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social @uclbrainscience.bsky.social! Do you have a neuroimaging-focused research program? Get applying! 🚨

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

#bignews: @unibonn.bsky.social now has a Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience and it is already growing! Welcome to Bonn, Professor Floris de Lange @predictivebrain.bsky.social ! New #caian website and more updates will follow within the next few weeks.

www.caian.uni-bonn.de/en/news

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