Clare Press

@cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Looking forward to #CCN2025! Please come to say hello and check out our lab's presentations 👇

@compcogneuro.bsky.social

My favourite talk @assc28.bsky.social was just delivered by @matanmazor.bsky.social showing that dualists are warmer 💕 @ronyhirsch.bsky.social #assc28

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

EU should double, if not triple, the EIC budget, Zaharieva says The European Commission hopes to at least double the budget of the European Innovation Council (EIC), if not triple it, when the agency can only finance 4% of the projects it receives, research commis...

Research is NOT the same as innovation. Spend the money at least equally on bottom-up research by @erc.europa.eu. ERC grantees @ercgrantees.Baku.social are the most successful in the EIC, but there is no innovation without fundamental Bluesky research by the ERC
sciencebusiness.net/news/europea...

Less than a week left to apply for this PhD studentship in my lab at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social !

Deadline Sun 6th July

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?"

Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

And the tags!
@uclpals.bsky.social @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social @mrccbu.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
#neuroscience
#consci

And many congratulations to the brilliant @akalt.bsky.social on his first paper from PhD 🎉

Fixed and flexible perceptual rhythms Our sensory inputs are never identical across time and contain temporal structure. Cognitive scientists have recently been fascinated by how these sen…

We propose this as a testable starting point for a mechanism that can account for seemingly flexible and fixed rhythms, and determine optimal sampling, across sensory domains. We also address controversies with existing accounts.

Hope it proves useful!
tinyurl.com/fixedflexibl... [6/6]

Sampling rhythms reflect statistical learning of temporal properties of inputs, governed by both externally- and intrinsically-determined sensory dynamics. We process the sensory world according to the probability with which a weighted combination of sources predicts information at that time. [5/6]

We must crucially now ask how we optimally combine these rhythmic sources to determine perceptual and motor processing. To this end we propose a new account. [4/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

Importantly sensory rhythms in our environment will usually not coincide specifically with the rate of any fixed rhythm. We must therefore crucially now ask how we optimally combine these rhythmic sources to determine perceptual and motor processing. To this end we propose a new account. [4/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Delighted to see ‘A Trick of the Mind’ reviewed in @theguardian.com as Book of the Day! 🧠 🍎

Also in the print edition tomorrow 🗞️

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

Thrilled to get my hands on the first copies of my book!

“A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality” in bookshops soon - from 26th June 🧠 🍎

(Though Ralphie more interested in the packaging….)

www.penguin.co.uk/books/451515...

#booksky #neuroskyence

Brilliant news Sam, well deserved!

“The lack of average differences between the performance of boys and girls at the beginning of the first year suggests that the causes lie in the environment children experience once they start school, rather than innate differences in interest or ability, say researchers.”

Shared and diverging neural dynamics underlying false and veridical perception We often mistake visual noise for meaningful images, which sometimes appear as convincing as veridical percepts. This suggests considerable overlap between the mechanisms that underlie false and verid...

New MEG paper by @jhaarsma.bsky.social and @dotproduct.bsky.social‬! Same design and behavioural results as our 7T layer fMRI study (www.jneurosci.org/content/43/4...), but now shedding light on the temporal dynamics of the sensory signals underlying false percepts. #neuroskyence

I'm super happy to see our project on topographic neural network models of visual processing out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! Have a look at @zejinlu.bsky.social's thread for details.

I am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

PhD Studentship: Public Communication and Private Confidence at Birkbeck, University of London Find a PhD Studentship: Public Communication and Private Confidence on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board in higher education. Click to view more!

Looking for a PhD in #psychology or #cogneuro ? I’m recruiting a fully-funded @leverhulme.ac.uk PhD student to join my lab at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social. If you’re interested in metacognition, learning, social cognition and culture I’d love you to apply 🧠👇

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNJ330/p...

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Thrilled to share the new paper from the lab out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the great @jetrach.bsky.social!

"Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations"

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

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...

Communication of perceptual predictions from the hippocampus to the deep layers of the parahippocampal cortex High-resolution neuroimaging reveals stimulus-specific predictions sent from hippocampus to the neocortex during perception.

Our study using layer fMRI to study the direction of communication between the hippocampus and cortex during perceptual predictions is finally out in Science Advances! Predicted-but-omitted shapes are represented in CA2/3 and correlate specifically with deep layers of PHC, suggesting feedback. 🧠🟦

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).

📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based team@ucl.ac.uk! ...