Paula Pena

JOB ALERT: I am offering a 4-year funded PhD opportunity. The position is specifically linked to the project “Assessing the balance between goal-directed and habitual processing through the course of learning". The project is about learning habits and include eye tracking and pupillometry...

Thank you all for the questions and feedback, it was a great experience #ICON2025 #poster #neuroscience

Yesterday at #ICON2025 I got to present our poster with #EttoreAmbrosini, @palencianoap.bsky.social, and @mruz.bsky.social on flexible task representations. I loved the chance to share our preliminary results and hear such thoughtful feedback!

👩‍💻 New preprint out (FIRST one of my PhD journey) with the incredible @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

"From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" 🧠

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧠💻 We (a bunch of colleagues at @cimcyc.bsky.social) just released a programming guide for psych & cog neuro students. Instead of a tutorial, this is a starting point: a collection of reflections, examples, and recommendations.

👉 Still growing, but ready to explore: wobc.github.io/programming_book/

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

#JNeurosci: Using EEG, @paulapena.bsky.social @palencianoap.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social examined how the brain encodes and organizes task-relevant information during novel recombination settings. @cimcyc.bsky.social
vist.ly/3n68yqw

📢 This week, CIMCYC offered the Course of Initiation to Programming in #MATLAB, during which the center's students and researchers learned about data manipulation techniques, visualization and automation.

[6/6] Our study highlights the dynamic nature of cognitive control, revealing how the brain adaptively reconfigures information in complex environments. These results demonstrate that neural geometry shifts flexibly, balancing generalization and information complexity across task stages.

[5/6] RSA revealed that activity patterns coding task demands generally followed a parallel geometry, supporting the transfer of information across contexts. At target onset, there was a shift toward an orthogonal configuration, likely minimizing interference between stimulus and response factors.

[4/6] Instruction content was encoded in distributed EEG signals, with overall task demands displaying more stable patterns. Further, neural codes exhibited both high abstraction, generalizing across conditions,and high and variable dimensionality, suggesting flexible expansion-compression dynamics.

[3/6] Participants followed instructions that involved a novel re-combination of components. These were, the higher-level task demand of integrating or segregating information, the stimulus category, and the relevant feature to attend.

[2/6] Research shows that the patterns of activity of neurons coding task-relevant information evolve dynamically to support flexible behavior. Our work temporally characterized the content encoded in these neural patterns and elucidated its underlying configuration in novel settings.

Novel Verbal Instructions Recruit Abstract Neural Patterns of Time-Variable Information Dimensionality Human performance is endowed by neural representations of information that is relevant for behavior, some of which are also activated in a preparatory fashion to optimize later execution. Most studies...

[🧵1/6] Would you like to know more about how the brain organizes complex, novel task information? Check out our last study in #JNeurosci @sfnjournals :
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1...
@palencianoap.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social @mruz.bsky.social @cimcyc.bsky.social

We are pleased to announce our next Time-resolved Neuroimaging (EEG+) #CIMCYCsession which will be held by Paula Pena. She will present the results of her work www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

No prior experience in EEG is needed, just curiosity and a willingness to discuss ideas. Save the date!

New preprint! In this study, we assessed the reliability and validity of the measures intended to capture the "habit construct" in the forced-response task and the aliens outcome-devaluation task.

w/ Antonio Vázquez-Millán, @frangfr.bsky.social and @davluque.bsky.social