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Reposted by Tommy Botch

Erica Busch @elbusch.bsky.social · Aug 12

Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! Come learn about a project combining many of my favorite interests - naturalistic neuroimaging, development, & manifold learning (of course). Catch me at poster C181 on Fri - “Intrinsic dimensionality of brain activity manifolds across tasks and development”

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Reposted by Tommy Botch

Hayoung Song @hayoungsong.bsky.social · Aug 12

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention

The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

www.biorxiv.org

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Ralph Emilio Peterson @ralphpeterson.bsky.social · Jul 25

New preprint!  

tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵

w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius

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

Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats

Urban rats are highly adaptable, thriving in the dynamic and often inhospitable conditions of modern cities. Despite substantial mitigation efforts, they remain an enduring presence in urban environme...

www.biorxiv.org

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Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · May 23

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing?

We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

There's a lot more in the paper (lookin' at you, prosody) -- we hope our work demonstrates the power of using LLMs as alternative models to understand language writ large! None of this would have been possible without the support of @esfinn.bsky.social and the FinnLab :)

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

How does sensory context facilitate language acquisition? We hypothesized that training LLMs with richer sensory context would partially ”rescue” performance relative to humans.

LLMs trained with richer sensory context performed better with much less data (~20%)!

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

However, LLMs are can still be useful models of behavior –LLM prediction distributions better reflected human predictions when reading written language.

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

Human predictions were more accurate than LLMs, even when just reading! This performance gap scaled with the amount of sensory context provided to humans.

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

We collected human predictions of natural language under varying sensory conditions (written, audio- only, or audiovisual language) and compared these with LLM predictions to the same stories.

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

Humans learn and use language informed by audiovisual information. In contrast, LLMs are often trained solely on written text – i.e., their view of language lacks the sensory richness of our human experience.

How essential are these sensory contexts for cultivating "human-like" language processing?

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Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs"

osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Erica Busch @elbusch.bsky.social · Apr 3

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...

doi.org

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Reposted by Tommy Botch

Adam Steel @neurosteel.bsky.social · Jan 7

Have you wondered where scene perception and memory intersect in the brain?

Do you want to localize these areas?

In a preprint, @carolinerobertson.bsky.social, Deepa Prasad, Brenda Garcia, and I detail this topography and release these parcels and our localizer.

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

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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · Oct 27

Thrilled to share new work w @taylorwwebb.bsky.social Shanka Mondal:
A Prefrontal Cortex-inspired Architecture for Planning in Large Language Models (arxiv.org)

LLMs struggle w multi-step planning.
We propose a solution inspired by brains: planning via recurrent interactions of PFC subregions.
🧵1/n

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Oct 5

We review behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence that converge to suggest that social interaction perception is visual and distinct from higher level social processes like theory of mind.

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Tristan Yates @tristansyates.bsky.social · Sep 18

Resting state, or sleeping state? We know that wakefulness matters for adult functional brain network organization. In our new paper, we show that wakefulness can also be important in infant fMRI! 1/9

Functional networks in the infant brain during sleep and wake states

Abstract. Functional brain networks are assessed differently earlier versus later in development: infants are almost universally scanned asleep, whereas adults

academic.oup.com

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