Attention is doing just fine! Just don’t take it too seriously - Volume 48

Bayesian spatial modeling provides a flexible framework for whole-brain fMRI analysis by explicitly incorporating spatial dependencies, overcoming the limitations of traditional massive univariate app...

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

The University of Akureyri is seeking a specialist in psychology. Applicants from all areas of psychology are welcome to apply, but particular emphasis is placed on the following fields: clinical psyc...

Background Serial dependence (SD) is a contextual bias in visual processing, where current perception is influenced by past stimuli. This study explores how prioritization in visual working memory (VW...

Duffy, Huttenlocher, Hedges, and Crawford (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(2), 224–230, 2010) report on experiments where participants estimate the lengths of lines. These studies were designed to t...

Are you using Zotero with Box and don’t know what to do when Box support for WebDAV eventually runs out? Are you searching for Zotero with Box alternative? Don’t fret, Koofr is here for you. Read abou...

On 14 October 2022, Science published the Research Article “In vivo direct imaging of neuronal activity at high temporospatial resolution” by P. T. Toi et al. (1). On 24 August 2023, Science ran an Ed...