Joey Saito

Specialized structure of neural population codes in parietal cortex outputs - Nature Neuroscience Cortical neurons comprising an output pathway form a specialized population code that enhances the propagation of information to a downstream target, potentially improving the accuracy of decision-mak...

Parietal cortex output neurons form a specialized population code that enhances the propagation of information to a downstream target and potentially improves the accuracy of decision-making

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

Different learning algorithms achieve shared optimal outcomes in humans, rats, and mice Animals must exploit environmental regularities to make adaptive decisions, yet the learning algorithms that enabels this flexibility remain unclear. A central question across neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning, is whether learning relies on generative or discriminative strategies. Generative learners build internal models the sensory world itself, capturing its statistical structure; discriminative learners map stimuli directly onto choices, ignoring input statistics. These strategies rely on fundamentally different internal representations and entail distinct computational trade-offs: generative learning supports flexible generalisation and transfer, whereas discriminative learning is efficient but task-specific. We compared humans, rats, and mice performing the same auditory categorisation task, where category boundaries and rewards were fixed but sensory statistics varied. All species adapted their behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise. Yet their underlying algorithms diverged: humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Crucially, end-point performance concealed these differences, only learning trajectories and trial-to-trial updates revealed the divergence. These results show that similar near-optimal behaviour can mask fundamentally different internal representations, establishing a comparative framework for uncovering the hidden strategies that support statistical learning. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 219880/Z/19/Z, 225438/Z/22/Z, 219627/Z/19/Z Gatsby Charitable Foundation, GAT3755 UK Research and Innovation, https://ror.org/001aqnf71, EP/Z000599/1

paper🚨
When we learn a category, do we learn the structure of the world, or just where to draw the line? In a cross-species study, we show that humans, rats & mice adapt optimally to changing sensory statistics, yet rely on fundamentally different learning algorithms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Yes! the eeg follow-up😊 here it is. drive.google.com/file/d/1MQwf...

Is this the snake game or something new? Post the Poster pdf!!

Testing location invariance of the flashed face distortion effect - Yong Hoon Chung, Nicole C. Anaya Sosa, Viola S. Störmer, 2025 Spatially aligned faces presented in a continuous stream in the periphery appear distorted and grotesque. This flashed face distortion effect (“FFDE”) was first...

New paper with NicoleAnayaSosa and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in Perception! "Testing location invariance of the flashed face distortion effect" journals.sagepub.com/eprint/WVUFW...

Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...

Explicit memory representations in decisions from experience https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.27.684917v1

Longitudinal measures of monkey brain structure and activity through adolescence predict cognitive maturation - Nature Neuroscience Working memory improves during adolescent brain development. Zhu et al. tracked monkeys through adolescence, revealing that maturation of white matter tracts and refinement of neural firing patterns s...

New paper from the lab:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brief thread (1/10)

Check our new Psych Science paper w/Daniil Azarov & Daniil Grigorev. Although an ability to recognize a familiar object among new ones clearly depends on how many and which objects there are, we show a remarkable stability of underlying "representational spaces"
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Senior Lecturer Position in Computational Neuroscience at Vanderbilt. Please disseminate.

apply.interfolio.com/173997

📣 Out in TINS (@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social):

Neural processing is often described as either externally or internally directed. In our new Forum article, we (@freekvanede.bsky.social & Kia Nobre) propose a multilevel framework for conceptualising external and internal continua of brain processes.

Rapid inversion of singleton distractor representations underlies learned attentional suppression In visually complex and dynamically changing environments, humans often face the challenge of filtering out salient stimuli that are presently irrelevant to their tasks. Recent evidence suggests that ...

We found attentional suppression might be related to re-coding salient singleton locations in a inverted format to target locations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. Th…

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Slow change blindness from serial dependence Slow change blindness, when attentive observers fail to notice large changes that happen gradually, raises questions about how visual information is combined across time. One plausible integration str...

Slow change blindness from serial dependence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Flexible Working Memory in the Peripheral Nervous System Working memory (WM) representations that are distributed across the brain can be flexibly recruited to best guide behavior[1][1]–[4][2]. For instance, information may be represented relatively more st...

Flexible Working Memory in the Peripheral Nervous System
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pre-stimulus beta power mediates explicit and implicit perceptual biases in distinct cortical areas - Communications Psychology Two EEG studies in healthy human adults suggest that choice history and stimulus probability-induced biases in somatosensory perception are reflected in distinct prestimulus beta power modulations across distinct cortical regions.

Pre-stimulus beta power mediates explicit and implicit perceptual biases in distinct cortical areas
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
#neuroscience

A distinctive meaning makes a sentence memorable Prior work on visual memory has suggested that humans have a high-capacity but imperfect memory: image representations accumulate noise over time, whi…

A distinctive meaning makes a sentence memorable | Journal of Memory and Language

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

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

Go ahead and bring of these to Psychonomics

University of Colorado Boulder Psychology & Neuroscience is searching for TWO tenure track assistant professors!!

jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

#socialpsychology #cogpsyc #PsychSciSky #PsychJob
#psycjobs #psychology

1/n

Decoupling lower-level and higher-level visual features in naturalistic scenes: https://osf.io/unv5g

8x8 grid depicting the approach to stimulus creation. Feature pairs are on the axes and images are in the cells. The x-axis represents the high-level feature pairs: setting (green) and object (teal). For example, the first column of images all depict “truck” (object) in “field” (setting) rendered in various textures and patterns. The y-axis represents low-level feature pairs: texture (blue) and pattern (purple). For example, the first row of images all depict different objects and settings rendered as if drawn with crayon (texture) and containing large horizontal edges (pattern).

Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings.

We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity.

1/

Recurrent pattern completion drives the neocortical representation of sensory inference - Nature Neuroscience Neurons that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion in V1. Pattern completion in lower cortical areas may therefore mediate perceptual inference by selectively reinforcing ac...

Neurons in mouse primary visual cortex that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion

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

The keynote speaker at this year's @opam.bsky.social Object Perception, Attention, and Memory meeting will be Dr Joy J. Geng of UC Davis. We're thrilled to have Joy join us, discuss her research, and impart some wisdom that she's gained throughout her incredibly impressive career.

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

Come work with us! UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is looking for a new Assistant Professor to join our team: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

I'm not on the committee, but happy to talk if you're interested.

By integrating the 'pinging' technique with fMRI-based multivariate pattern analysis, we provide evidence for a dual-format representation of attention during the preparatory period.

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be presenting my symposium talk at #ESCoP2025 titled "Meaningful and familiar stimuli support visual working memory for simple features"! See you there!

Dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in early visual cortex Task-irrelevant yet salient stimuli can elicit automatic, bottom-up attentional capture and compete with top-down, goal-directed processes for neural representation. However, the temporal dynamics und...

🧠 Excited to share that our new preprint is out!🧠
In this work, we investigate the dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in the early visual cortex using rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT).

📄 Check it out on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...