Adrien Doerig
Cognitive computational neuroscience, machine learning, psychophysics & consciousness.
Currently Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, also affiliated with the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience.
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew 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 Adrien DoerigThis 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...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigOut today in Journal of Vision: Mapping the visual cortex with Zebra noise and wavelets By Sophie Skriabine and Max Shinn, with Samuel Picard and @kenneth-harris.bsky.social doi.org/10.1167/jov....
- Introducing our new favorite stimulus. A few minutes are enough to map the visual preferences of thousands of neurons. Mapping the visual cortex with Zebra noise and wavelets www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... By Sophie Skriabine and Max Shinn, with Samuel Picard and @kenneth-harris.bsky.social
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigPublished @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigLegit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307
- 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)
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigDimensionality 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...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigWhat does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigIs the “standard workflow” holding back fMRI analysis? Mass-univariate analysis is still the bread-and-butter: intuitive, fast… and chronically overfitted. Add harsh multiple-comparison penalties, and we patch the workflow with statistical band-aids. No wonder the stringency debates never die.
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigExcited to share my first paper: Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn’t the Right One (NeurIPS 2025). link below.
- Very cool work, go check it out! Rich, brain-like scene representations built from acrive vision
- 🚨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
- This seems very cool, @singerjohannes.bsky.social decidedly did loads of cool stuff before I got lucky and he joined our group
- New preprint led by @pablooyarzo.bsky.social together with @kohitij.bsky.social, Diego Vidaurre & Radek Cichy. Using EEG + fMRI, we show that when humans recognize images that feedforward CNNs fail on, the brain recruits cortex-wide recurrent resources. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)
- Ask a brain anything! This is incredible work led by Victoria Bosch @initself.bsky.social at the Kietzmann Lab @timkietzmann.bsky.social, developing interactive and flexible brain decoding. I'm excited to see where this goes next.
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigOver the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Today I want to share two new works on this topic: Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425 Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492 1/9
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684 🧵
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigAwesome work by @jorge-morales.bsky.social and team, using LLMs to suggest that propositional reasoning might be enough to solve classic imagery tasks! ✨
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigSo excited to see this preprint released from the lab into the wild. Charlotte has developed a theory for how learning curriculum influences learning generalization. Our theory makes straightforward neural predictions that can be tested in future experiments. (1/4) 🧠🤖 🧠📈 #MLSky
- 🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigI wanted to add some thoughts to this excellent blog post, not detailed, maybe wrong, maybe useful: 1. Unique variance is easy to interpret as a lower bound of what a variable explains (the upper bound being either what the variable explains alone or what the other variables cannot explain uniquely)
- Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigVariance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🧠 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...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigWhat determines where specialisation for sensory information occurs in the cortex? We observe a spatial competition between primary sensory areas and the Default Mode Network, using our new Spatial Component Decomposition method. Work by @ulysse-klatzmann.bsky.social , with Bazin & Daniel Margulies
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigPreprint alert! 🚨 1/ How does deep sleep reshape our memories? Our new study shows that slow-wave sleep (SWS) reorganises episodic memory networks, shifting recall from the parietal cortex to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). With Polina Perzich and @bstaresina.bsky.social . A thread below👇
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigA transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🧠 “You never forget how to ride a bike”, but how is that possible? Our study proposes a bio-plausible meta-plasticity rule that shapes synapses over time, enabling selective recall based on context
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew paper with @ManuKirberg 💭 Is “unconscious mental imagery” real? The evidence is weaker than it seems. We explain why—and how to move the debate forward. 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🔍 Large language models, similar to those behind ChatGPT, can predict how the human brain responds to visual stimuli New study by @adriendoerig.bsky.social @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social with colleagues from Osnabrück, Minnesota and @umontreal-en.bsky.social Read the whole story 👉 bit.ly/3JXlYmO
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigWhat makes humans similar or different to AI? In a paper out in @natmachintell.nature.com led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @lukasmut.bsky.social, w/ Umut Güclü, we took a deep look at the factors underlying their representational alignment, with surprising results. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigOur 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
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigSo happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩🔬
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.
- Causal necessity of human hippocampus for structure-based inference in learning biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigVery happy to see this preprint out! The amazing @danwang7.bsky.social was on fire sharing this work at #ECVP2025, gathering loads of attention, and here you can find the whole thing! Using RIFT we reveal how the competition between top-down goals and bottom-up saliency unfolds within visual cortex.
- 🧠 Excited to share that our new preprint is out!🧠 In this work, we investigate the dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in the early visual cortex using rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT). 📄 Check it out on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigJob alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigHigh-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models www.nature.com/articles/s42... by @adriendoerig.bsky.social @timkietzmann.bsky.social et al.; more information in the thread bsky.app/profile/adri... #neuroscience #AI #NeuroAI
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigDelighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigWill also talk about this work tomorrow, 25Aug, at the Computational modeling session at #ECVP at 8:30! …and an impromptu poster on Wed 27Aug in the afternoon poster session 5 at 15:30 Come have a chat on how to model scene processing in the brain!
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigIs it possible to manipulate a high-level visual property while holding ~all low-level visual properties constant? “No!”, you say. Allow @talboger.bsky.social to show you otherwise! Now in press @currentbiology.bsky.social 🐇🐘
- 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
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigIn our new paper, we explore how we can build encoding models that are both powerful and understandable. Our model uses an LLM to answer 35 questions about a sentence's content. The answers linearly contribute to our prediction of how the brain will respond to that sentence. 1/6
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigNew paper with @rjantonello.bsky.social @csinva.bsky.social, Suna Guo, Gavin Mischler, Jianfeng Gao, & Nima Mesgarani: We use LLMs to generate VERY interpretable embeddings where each dimension corresponds to a scientific theory, & then use these embeddings to predict fMRI and ECoG. It WORKS!
- Evaluating scientific theories as predictive models in language neuroscience biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig📜[PUBLICATION ALERT]📜 I had the honour to be co-first author of this huge effort to advance dream science and our understanding of conscious experience during sleep. In Nature Communications rdcu.be/eAwni. @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @thomasandrillon.bsky.social #sleep #dreams #EEG
- Check out Jiawei's cool work at her poster tomorrow! Includes neural correlates of auditory processing during reading, and some mysterious negative correlations about which we'd love to hear your ideas.
- We may have found the neural correlates🧠 of "the voice🗣️ in your head" when you’re reading📖! If you’re at CCN and are interested, come chat with us! @adriendoerig.bsky.social @Radoslaw Martin Cichy **Where:** Session A, Poster A32 **When:** Tuesday, August 12 | 1:30 – 4:30 pm See you in Amsterdam!
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigOK, time for a CCN runup thread. Let me tell you about all the lab’s projects present at CCN this year. #CCN2025
- 🚨 Finally out in Nature Machine Intelligence!! "Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models" 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- We show that LLMs representations—despite being trained on text—align closely with visual representations in the human brain. This opens new avenues of research to use language models for modelling biological visual processing. Here's a walkthrough of the main ideas: bsky.app/profile/adri...
- 1/13 Heavily updated preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2209.11737 We show that the contextual information encoded in Large Language Models (LLMs) is beneficial for modelling the complex visual information extracted by the brain from natural scenes. 🧵
- Thanks to all co-authors @timkietzmann.bsky.social, Emily Allen, Yihan Wu, Thomas Naselaris, Kendrick Kay & Ian Charest for their help on this huge, challenging and enriching project!
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🧠 NEW PREPRINT Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigExciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigUsing in silico neuroscience, @alessandrogifford.bsky.social et al. developed a neural control algorithm to modulate the representational relationships between visual cortical areas, revealing how these areas jointly represent the world as an interconnected network. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigOut now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social. Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]
- We're happy to announce the Berlin Consciousness Symposium, an in-person event bringing together expert speakers to discuss new trends in the neuroscience of consciousness. Date: 3rd of July 2025 at @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @ccnberlin.bsky.social www.ewi-psy.fu-berlin.de/en/psycholog...
- Speakers: @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social, Matthew Larkum, @clairesergent.bsky.social (online), @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, Karla Matić & @titoschmi.bsky.social.
- Our speaker Karla Matić has joined bluesky: @karlamatic.bsky.social
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigJuly 3rd Berlin Consciousness Symposium: New Trends in the Neuroscience of Consciousness One-day symposium at Freie Universität (+ Social Event of CCNB) www.ewi-psy.fu-berlin.de/en/psycholog...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigWhat shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigCan seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case. Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- I'm super happy to see our project on topographic neural network models of visual processing out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! Have a look at @zejinlu.bsky.social's thread for details.
- Now out in Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com : “End-to-end topographic networks as models of cortical map formation and human visual behaviour”. Please check our NHB link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigJust a few months until Cognitive Computational Neuroscience comes to Amsterdam! Check out our now-complete schedule for #CCN2025, with descriptions of each of the Generative Adversarial Collaborations (GACs), Keynotes-and-Tutorials (K&Ts), Community Events, Keynote Speakers, and social activities!
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig🚨 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.
- Reposted by Adrien Doerig@therealspr.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @sfn.org @dsbarra.bsky.social @esfinn.bsky.social @tervoclemmensb.bsky.social @dylanggee.bsky.social @ajaysatpute.bsky.social @neurosynth.bsky.social @jamielarsh.bsky.social
- We're hiring! The Shackman Lab is hiring a full-time postbac RA for the 2025-26 academic year. This is fabulous opportunity to learn, work, and play with us in the DMV before heading off to graduate school. shackmanlab.org/studycoordin...
- Reposted by Adrien DoerigI'd put these on the NeuroAI vision board: @tyrellturing.bsky.social's Deep learning framework www.nature.com/articles/s41... @tonyzador.bsky.social's Next-gen AI through neuroAI www.nature.com/articles/s41... @adriendoerig.bsky.social's Neuroconnectionist framework www.nature.com/articles/s41...
