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. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

new paper in TICS officially out today. great learning from and writing with Anastasia, and super cool cover art from Prof. Pinar Yoldas.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...

New pre-print day! Distributed and drifting signals for working memory load in human cortex 🧠 (with Ed Awh & @serences.bsky.social)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Near-random connections support top-down feature-based attentional modulations in early sensory cortex Author summary In everyday life, we focus on what matters—like finding our car keys on a messy desk—by sending signals from higher control brain areas to earlier sensory brain areas. These “top-down” ...

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Attention Alters Population Spatial Frequency Tuning Spatial frequency (SF) selectivity serves as a fundamental building block within the visual system, determining what we can and cannot see. Attention is theorized to augment the visibility of items in...

Cool new paper from @luisdr.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang, and Sam Ling on the impact of attention on spatial frequency processing: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Come chat with me about visual working memory and sensory recruitment this Tuesday! Work with the fabulous @kirsten-adam.bsky.social and @serences.bsky.social #VSS2025

Dynamic categorization rules alter representations in human visual cortex - Nature Communications This study shows that neural representations of shape stimuli in human visual cortex are adaptively modulated when participants switch between different variants of a categorization task, becoming mor...

How do we flexibly categorize objects under changing task requirements? Our new paper in Nature Communications (@serences.bsky.social & @nuttidanuttida.bsky.social) examines this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

see 🧵👇

Assistant Professor - Computational Mechanisms of Behavior (Department of Psychology) University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

My department, Psychology at UC San Diego, just posted an assistant professor position focused on computational approaches to understanding behavior. Open area search, and more information can be found here: apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04049