Andrea Costantino
👀🧠🤖 cognitive neuroscientist @ Hoplab, KU Leuven | interested in vision and learning
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoNew paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoThis paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
- Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A wonderful surprise to see our latest study on expertise so beautifully explained by @bjbalas.bsky.social on @lichess.org. Go check it out!
- After a rather long delay, I've finally got a new Science of #Chess post up on lichess! This time I'm looking at a very neat #neuroscience paper (co-authored by @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social) using chess as a model for studying expertise. Enjoy! #cogneuro #PsychSciSky
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoY’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)
- Huh, funny. 40 years passed, but this is still so relatable
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- Reposted by Andrea Costantino1. 🧵 Thread: What happens to the visual brain after early transient blindness? Our new Nature Communications paper examines a rare population: people born with dense bilateral cataracts—a short blindness occurring during a critical window of visual development. 🔗 rdcu.be/eQjMH
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- Super excited to share a new preprint! We asked a simple-but-big question: What changes in the brain when someone becomes an expert? Using chess ♟️ + fMRI 🧠 + representational geometry & dimensionality 📈, we ask: 1️⃣ WHAT information is encoded? 2️⃣ HOW is it structured? 3️⃣ WHERE is it expressed? 1/n
- To test this, we built a stimulus set spanning low-level (visual similarity) to high-level (strategy, checkmate) structure, and turned these into RDMs capturing our theoretical models. **Enter: Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA).** 2/n
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoNew paper (and thread) on the representational dynamics of the main dimensions of object space: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 1/n
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoIt's finally out! Our work with @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & @costantinoai.bsky.social is published. We went looking for dissociations between types of recurrence in DNNs, but we found something quite different.. hopefully that can tell us somehting about our models! rdcu.be/eLwBA
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoWe’re hiring! We’re looking for two RAs to study neuroplasticity in sight loss, sight rescue and development in children and adults @ucl.ac.uk using a wide range of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Please help spread the word! Apply by 16 Oct! t.ly/q3aYe #neurojobs #NeuroSkyence
- Reposted by Andrea Costantino🧠 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...
- It was great reconnecting with friends and colleagues at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam and presenting our latest #expertise work. We 👀 into how #chess experts represent the board, and how the content, structure, and location of these repr shift w/ expertise.⬇️
- Reposted by Andrea CostantinoNeural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...
- Reposted by Andrea Costantino🚨 New preprint alert! Our latest study, led by @DrewLinsley, examines how deep neural networks (DNNs) optimized for image categorization align with primate vision, using neural and behavioral benchmarks.
