Neural Control of Autonomic Arousal During Threat Anticipation Revealed by High-Resolution Cardiac Contractility https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.707545v1

Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition Although artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this opinion article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We introduce human wisdom as strategies for solving intractable problems—those outside the scope of analytic techniques—including both ‘object-level’ strategies, such as heuristics (for managing problems), and ‘metacognitive’ strategies, such as intellectual humility, perspective-taking, or context adaptability (for managing object-level task fit). We argue that AI systems particularly struggle with this type of metacognition. Wise metacognition would lead to AI that is more robust to novel environments, explainable to users, cooperative with others, and safer by risking fewer misaligned goals with human users. We discuss how wise AI might be benchmarked, trained, and implemented.

Online Now: Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition

Duration reproduction under memory pressure: Modeling the roles of visual memory set size in duration encoding and reproduction Duration estimates are systematically biased toward the mean of recently sampled intervals, a central-tendency effect typically attributed to the inte…

Ever feel like time flies when you're juggling too much? It's not just a feeling. Our new study shows that holding more items in memory literally warps how your brain encodes and reproduces short durations. ⌛️🧠

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

Vision Fine‐Tunes Predictions of Bimanual Self‐Touch When we move to touch ourselves, our somatosensory perception is gradually attenuated due to the predictions of the internal forward models about the somatosensory consequences of our movements. Here...

Happy to share that our new paper has been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience (@ejneuroscience.bsky.social)! Using psychophysics, we show that vision fine-tunes self-touch predictions, leading to the temporal modulation of somatosensory perception during movements to self-touch.

📍2003 marked the year in which the retro-cue paradigm was born. Fast forward, 23 years later, we adapt this logic to long-term memory and ask how does attention shape retrieval from long-term memory? 🤔

w/ @william-nm.bsky.social Kia Nobre, Nahid Zokaei and Nora Roüast
osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

Why do people seem to prioritize semantic stuff when holding info in working memory? Had lots of fun trying to shed some light on this question, together with the great @ckerren.bsky.social and @lindedomingo.bsky.social

Facial expressions in mice reveal latent cognitive variables and their neural correlates Nature Neuroscience - The face reveals more than just emotion. Cazettes, Reato and colleagues show that subtle facial movements reveal hidden cognitive states, reflecting the brain’s ongoing...

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯

Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions!

We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉
🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

🎉 New preprint 🎉 with Olya Bulatova, @drmack.bsky.social & @keisukefukuda.bsky.social! We decode shapes in working memory from EEG and show that representations are task-dependent, flexibly integrating information about category and task during the memory delay

⏱️ Strikingly, this difference was specific to periods of uncertainty about which action was required and when - precisely when temporal structuring demands were greatest - and disappeared once action identity and timing became predictable. n/n

New paper from the lab now out online! @changrun-huang.bsky.social asked whether people use informative pre-cues to up-regulate cognitive control in the spatial Stroop task. Surprisingly, they do not, and we rule out some possible reasons why. Enjoy!

Experimental task. Trials began with variable fixation (500–1,000 ms) and placeholder (500–1,000 ms) intervals, followed by two spatial cues (100 ms) on opposite sides of the visual field to indicate the likely locations of both a subsequent near-threshold target and a salient distractor (100 ms). Cue validity was 70% for both cue types. Targets and distractors were presented after a variable delay (500–1,600 ms). Stimulus displays could include (i) both a target and a distractor, (ii) a target only, (iii) a distractor only, or (iv) neither a target nor a distractor. The number pad on a computer keyboard was used to indicate the presence of a target at the cued location, a target at a non-cued location, or no target.

Attentional resources vary rhythmically, but what about susceptibility to #distractors?@fiebelkornian.bsky.social &co show that theta & alpha phases modulate sensitivity & distractor impact, revealing rhythm-specific mechanisms shaping #attention & distractability @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4tU0vh4

Grounding distractor inhibition in action control: Implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent Spatial selective attention is typically thought to act as a sensory filter: prioritizing the processing of relevant information at a particular locat…

📢 New paper in Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with my co-authors: Freek van Ede @freekvanede.bsky.social, Chris Jungerius @cjungerius.bsky.social, and Heleen A. Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social. Grateful to have collaborated with you on this work: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... [1/5]

Correcting for Unequal Variance in Signal Detection Models Using Response Time This study examines signal detection theory (SDT) analysis of perceptual detection performance using response time (RT) data. A defining feature of detection tasks is the asymmetry between trials with...

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

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

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

The perceptual primacy of feeling: Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect | PNAS Looking at the world often involves not just seeing things, but feeling things. Modern feedforward machine vision systems that learn to perceive th...

The perceptual primacy of feeling: Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share Jongmin Lee’s discovery of abstract codes guiding prospective working memory!
Thread below.
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Perceptual clustering in auditory streaming Author summary Perceiving the world requires humans to organize perceptual stimuli according to the likely sources that generated them, requiring inference about these sources and their relationship w...

As we were celebrating psychophysics the other day, here is a fun example in the multi-source auditory domain. So beautiful. So clean. Bayes all the way. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Honored to see this paper from the lab profiled by JNeurosci’s “This week in the Journal”!
www.jneurosci.org/content/46/3...

Time Cells in the Human Brain Support Working Memory Maintenance https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.12.699074v1

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm In this issue of Neuron, Han et al. leverage a change-identification working memory task coupled with electrophysiological recordings in the macaque frontal eye field to show that information retrieva...

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

A normative account of human temporal structure learning People rapidly recalibrate their expectations about the world in the face of surprising observations. This recalibration should depend on the temporal structure of the environment, however how people ...

A normative account of human temporal structure learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently"

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/n

Interesting read on how chunking can emerge directly from #synaptic dynamics: by temporarily suppressing groups of items via synaptic augmentation, #WorkingMemory can retrieve up to 8 items despite a base capacity of only 4.

3/3 Oh, and no need to despair! the promises and hopes that come with a dynamic view of the brain are also discussed. We are all writing history one burst at a time ;)

Enjoy!
rdcu.be/ejeNv

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control Human motivation is fundamentally shaped by one's expectations of the reward they could earn for good performance or the punishment they would avoid for poor performance. However, the extent to which ...

Thrilled to share our new preprint highlighting distinct neurocomputational mechanisms underlying how reward and punishment determine adaptive cognitive control - a massive fMRI study and collaborative team effort with the @shenhavlab.bsky.social 🧠

Link here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Modeling how contextual and structural biases shape duration perception Human time perception is flexible and shaped by both structural constraints and contextual influences. Disentangling these sources of bias is essential for understanding the predictive mechanisms unde...

Preprint out, from my work with @mamassian.bsky.social and Anne! We show that time perception is shaped not only by context but also by structural constraints, by extending classical Bayesian models by explicitly quantifying a structural prior impacting duration discrimination.
shorturl.at/q8bE6

Say it like you mean it: Linguistic vividness and the attentional optimization hypothesis This study investigates whether phonemic Surprisal in English words is systematically elevated for semantically vivid meanings, extending prior resear…

Language isn’t optimized just for efficiency. This study shows that phonological surprisal systematically marks vivid meanings—slowing processing but strengthening memory. Surprisal isn’t noise; it’s how language directs attention.

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

New preprint on how working memory (WM) supports event segmentation. Using load-sensitive EEG markers, we test whether WM accumulates information within events or instead reactivates prior event information at boundaries. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning