Vlad Ayzenberg

This is a fundraising post!

An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure!

giving.mit.edu/search/node/...

Details below...

MOSAIC: A scalable framework for fMRI dataset aggregation and modeling of human vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.11.28.690060v1

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026.
2026.ccneuro.org

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!

More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...

Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
🧵 1/14

Nice result! You might be interested in our perspective paper which also explores this phenomena: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Happy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice.

Caveats:
-*-*-*-*


> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees

> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

I've come around to this way of thinking too

It reminds me of the animal cognition debates where people would move the goal post for intelligence once an animal passed some task

By contrast, people are more than happy to ascribe sophisticated capacities to babies on the basis of looking time

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Recording and communicating uncertainty in science: how geologists manage variability in spatial data - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications All scientists must cope with variability in data to make inferences about the world. However, in observation-based geology, how scientists cope with variability is particularly consequential because ...

Lovely work by my colleagues, great illustration of what happens when cognitive science meets real world readoning cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Pennsylvania has an important Supreme Court race coming up on Tuesday, November 4. If you live in the Keystone State, or know someone who does, vote YES to retain three justices who will protect your fundamental rights and freedoms.

It's FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS FALL 🍁🎃🍂

Check out our free, upcoming talks and register here: fitng.org/fitng-togeth...

A "methods primer" article in the journal "BMJ Medicine", titled "Factors associated with: problems of using exploratory multivariable regression to identify causal risk factors"

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

a peek through fall foliage to some people at the University of Pennsylvania, photo by Eric Sucar

Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship.

MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior.

Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

Developmental alterations in brain network asymmetry in 3- to 9-month infants with congenital sensorineural hearing loss Early sensorineural hearing loss disrupts lateralization development of the brain network.

Expecting experience, not getting it, the brain adapts
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain"

with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social

Summary 👇

1/8

a cat is laying down on a table with the words `` no '' written on its face . ALT: a cat is laying down on a table with the words `` no '' written on its face .

So what explains the rest of the variance? If it's not genes, it must be environment, right?

Over the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen.

He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

infant data from experiment 1

conceptual schema for different habituation models

title page

results from experiment 2 with adults

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Take a look at the logo! Then the thread!

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

This is awesome. Drag and drop a brain MRI scan into the window and it does tissue segmentation in the browser (in about 8 seconds), then creates a 3D mesh suitable for 3D printing. This has been an hours-to-days long process for us in the past, all in a couple minutes. 🤯 brain2print.org

Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

PCDL @ OSU

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org

Cerebellar Contributions to Action and Cognition: Prediction, Timescale, and Continuity The cerebellum is implicated in nearly every domain of human cognition, yet our understanding of how this subcortical structure contributes to cognition remains elusive. Efforts on this front have ten...

The cerebellum isn’t just about coordinating movement. It’s implicated in nearly every domain of cognition—from language to social behavior.

But how exactly does the cerebellum contribute to action and cognition? 🧵

Check out our new paper w/ Rich Ivry.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.09818