Mick Bonner
Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins. My lab studies human vision using cognitive neuroscience and machine learning. bonnerlab.org
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- This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵
- 1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.
- Infants organise their visual world into categories at two-months-old! So happy to see these results published - congratulations Cliona and the rest of the FOUNDCOG team.
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- Human visual cortex representations may be much higher-dimensional than earlier work suggested, but are these higher dimensions of cortical activity actually relevant to behavior? Our new paper tackles this by studying how different people experience the same movies. 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...
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- Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931
- I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
- Wonderful article about our recent paper in @pnasnexus.org! Thanks, @sachapfeiffer.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! @yikai-tang.bsky.social @uoftpsychology.bsky.social @artsci.utoronto.ca @utoronto.ca
- Why do we find some scenes more aesthetic than others? For my first in @sciencenews.bsky.social, I wrote about a new study that suggests that our aesthetic preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts. 🧠🧪 www.sciencenews.org/article/brai...
- Why do we find some scenes more aesthetic than others? For my first in @sciencenews.bsky.social, I wrote about a new study that suggests that our aesthetic preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts. 🧠🧪 www.sciencenews.org/article/brai...
- Our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.
- #JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Han and Epstein explored how people integrate different kinds of views to form mental maps of places, revealing two sets of brain regions involved in integrating views of landmarks into existing mental maps of a virtual city. doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0…
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- 1/X Excited to present this preprint on multi-tasking, with @david-g-clark.bsky.social and Ashok Litwin-Kumar! Timely too, as “low-D manifold” has been trending again. (If you read thru the end, we escape Flatland and return to the glorious high-D world we deserve.) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
- 🚨 New preprints out!🚨 Excited to share two new preprints from my #MSCA project. With Daniel @dkaiserlab.bsky.social , Marius @peelen.bsky.social , and Belma Seferovic, we show how contextual associations shape real-world object representations and guide everyday visual task performance. 👇👇👇 1/n
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- Spatiotemporal representations of contextual associations for real-world objects. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Cool work by Lu! Dissociating "context frames" from categorical/perceptual similarity and finding unique "context" signatures in LOC/PPA.
- Spatiotemporal representations of contextual associations for real-world objects. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
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- Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
- 🚨New Preprint! How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715 + @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social 🧵 1/14
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- Happy to see this preprinted! We show temporally fine-grained auditory representations in EEG during silent reading. Could be a candidate neural substrate for the inner voice many people report having while reading! Congrats @jiaweili.bsky.social on all the hard work.
- New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... As you are silently reading this, you may experience a little voice in your head. How is it represented in the brain, and what purpose does it serve? Our new study answers the questions. Together with @adriendoerig.bsky.social and Radek Cichy.(1/8)
- Check this out - yesterday I was on Dutch national television to discuss the intersection between #AI and the #brain, how we are addressing the fundamental questions there @uva.nl, and how we plan to tackle video understanding in my #NWO #VIDI project next! 🧠🤖📽️ npo.nl/start/afspel...
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- We are seeking candidates for two tenured/tenure-track faculty positions: One in high-level vision, written language and/or conceptual representation apply.interfolio.com/178825 One in language apply.interfolio.com/178813 Please help us spread the word!
- I'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪
- Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
- Gao, Peiran, and Surya Ganguli. 2015. “On Simplicity and Complexity in the Brave New World of Large-Scale Neuroscience.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 32 (June): 148–55.
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- For this paper, it’s worth considering that structure in brain activity need not be linear…
- Sure, that's fair. But, do you think it's really just a low-D manifold curled up many times? Why would you actually want a low-D manifold for most real-world tasks?
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