🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684

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@annabavaresco.bsky.social and
@tlmnhut.bsky.social show: supervised pruning of a DNN’s feature space better aligns with human category representations, selects distinct subspaces for different categories, and more accurately predicts people’s preferences for GenAI images.
doi.org/10.1145/3768...

Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1

New findings from my lab in Nature Communications suggest that racial stereotypes can lead the brain's perceptual system to temporarily "see" weapons where they don't exist.

Led by: @dongwonoh.bsky.social

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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The myth of optimality in human movement science

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

New in #JNeurosci: People share the same brain responses to different colors, and Bannert and Bartels predicted what color a person is looking at by using the brain activity of others. <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:cxqcrpjowzzgwptscc3ncqiq" class="hover:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@unituebingen.bsky.social https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share my latest work with @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @andpru.bsky.social!
We asked: How does the motor cortex account for arm posture when generating movement?
Paper 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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"Assuming that functional specialisation necessarily implies an ‘encapsulated module’ is a widely recognised error even in evolutionary accounts."

Shared texture-like representations, not global form, underlie deep neural network alignment with human visual processing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.29.673066v1

Can self supervised learning help understand how the brain learns to see the world?

Our latest study, led by Josephine Raugel (FAIR, ENS), is now out:

📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18226
🧵 thread below

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com

What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed?

Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation

www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7

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Congratulations to Flo Martinez-Addiego and ‪@striemamit.bsky.social‬ for the publication of a cool new paper in PNAS showing that high-level actions like tool use generalize between hand and foot, even in individuals born without hands. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Presented my study a few days ago at a minitalk during the Cognitive Science Arena #CSA in Brixen. It was fun :)
#VisionScience
#ObjectPerception

At #EWCN I presented my poster. Preliminary results from 2 #fMRI experiments (2nd ongoing) suggest scene clutter may influences size & animacy along the ventral stream—with animacy staying robust after mid-level controls. Feedback welcome!

#VisionNeuroscience #CognitiveNeuroscience #VisionScience

🚨 Preprint alert! Excited to share my second PhD project: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision” -- a nice case showing that biology, neuroscience, and psychology can still help AI :)! arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

Interested in category selectivity and topographic modelling? Come see my poster tomorrow at CCN (A57). We show that encoding models confirm dissociable selective responses to bodies, hands, and tools, and test if topographic ANNs capture that organization.
See you there!

New lab preprint, led by @tlmnhut.bsky.social. We show that certain topographic CNNs offer computational advantages, including greater weight matrix robustness, better handling of OOD noisy data, and higher entropy of unit activation.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043

Nhut Truong, Uri Hasson: Improved Robustness and Functional Localization in Topographic CNNs Through Weight Similarity https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00043 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.00043

Thanks so much to all co-authors @tlmnhut.bsky.social @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social and my supervisor @stefania-bracci.bsky.social

I will be at CCN if you have any questions!

Vision isn't just passive object (or even action) classification; it's deeply linked to our interaction with objects.

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