Katharina Dobs
Professor @JLU | cognitive computational neuroscientist | mom of 3 | she/her www.vccnlab.org
- Very excited to be part of the new graduate training program "PIMON" by @dfg.de alongside a fantastic team! 🥳 We're looking forward to training a new generation of scientists in perception, cognition and (inter)action! 🧠🤖👀 Stay tuned for upcoming positions! #PIMON #neurojobs #NeuroAI #vision
- Super happy to announce that our Research Training Group "PIMON" is funded by the @dfg.de ! Starting in October, we will have exciting opportunities for PhD students that want to explore object and material perception & interaction in Gießen @jlugiessen.bsky.social ! Just look at this amazing team!
- ✨ I’m so excited and grateful to have been awarded an #ERC Starting Grant! 🧠✨ The project aims to investigate how the brain builds and uses cognitive maps to guide behaviour, how emotions shape these computations, and what this all means for mental health 🧠
- We are very proud of our researchers Beatrice Baragli, Jerome Beetz, Jacqueline Degen, Mona Garvert, Jake Greenfield, and Jens Hör: They have been awarded prestigious ERC Starting Grants worth €1.5 million. Congratulations! @erc.europa.eu #ERCStG ➡️ www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-...
- A little late to the party, but huge congrats, Mona! 🥳
- So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!
- Fantastic news! Congratulations, Mariya 🥳
- So sad (and definitely feeling the FOMO) that I can’t attend #CCN2025 this year 😢, but very proud that our lab will present 6 projects! 🥳 Here's a quick rundown:
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View full threadWednesday (1:00–4:00 pm) • Anastasia (B50): selectivity metrics in DNNs Friday (2:00–5:00 pm) • Zhengqing "John” (C149): resilience of functional specialization in DNNs
- Find them at their posters and chat about these or any other #NeuroAI topics. They’re all excited to hear your feedback! 🧠🤖
- Tuesday (1:30–4:30 pm) - Elah (A60): holistic face processing in humans & DNNs - @levandyck.bsky.social (A64): face–body integration in DNNs & brains - Sule (A63): top-down effects on neural face representations - Saskia & @apurvaratan.bsky.social: neural decoding during object permanence
- Honored and thrilled to receive the GGN Early Career Award @jlugiessen.bsky.social 🏆 Huge thanks to my awesome supervisors Daniel @dkaiserlab.bsky.social & Marius @peelen.bsky.social , all my collaborators, and the amazing colleagues from both labs — couldn’t have done it without you! 💗
- Congrats, Lu! 🥳
- Ever wondered whether it's categorical specialization or distributed representation in the human visual cortex? Check out how the brilliant @levandyck.bsky.social tackles this long-standing question in his first PhD project. Spoiler alert: no need to choose anymore! 🤝🔄🧠
- How is high-level visual cortex organized? In a new preprint with @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social, we show that category-selective areas encode a rich, multidimensional feature space 🌈 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence 🧵 1/n
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- Thanks for the shout-out! 😊 I loved this result too, especially since we didn’t expect such strong differences. That the object-only trained network didn’t show this at all was quite striking!
- Sounds like a fantastic PhD opportunity at the intersection of visual neuroscience, AI and developmental psychology! 🧠👁️🤖👶 'lees meer' here 👇
- There are 2 PhD positions in my lab in Amsterdam (collaboration with Sander Bohte, @tessamdekker.bsky.social and Ingmar Visser) on NeuroAI of developmental vision. academicpositions.nl/ad/centrum-w...
- Looks like a super cool summer school and a great way to enhance your coding skills! 👩💻🐍😎
- Are you a scientist who codes? 🐍 Fearing that your public repo might implode the moment someone looks at it? Then ASPP 2025 this is *the* summer school for you! Hands-on tutorials on collaborative code dev, code orga & sharing, testing, debugging, computer architecture.. aspp.school
- So excited that our excellence cluster 'The Adaptive Mind' got funded! 🥳 Looking forward to lots of great science and projects! #TheAdaptiveMind #ExcellenceInitiative 👁️🧠🤖
- Herausragender Erfolg in der #Exzellenzstrategie: Gleich drei #Exzellenzcluster für die #JLUGiessen – #Herz-#Lungen-, #Batterie- und #Wahrnehmungsforschung konnten im Wettbewerb überzeugen @cpi-exstra.bsky.social @heroldlab.bsky.social @dfg.de @wissrat.bsky.social www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
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- Congrats, Ko! 🥳 And so well deserved!
- Good morning, Bsky'ers! Some people have asked for a life update, here it is: I finished my last chemotherapy yesterday! 🥳 It’s been a long ride, but I’m feeling happy, relieved, and incredibly grateful. I sort of always knew, but now more than ever: #cancersucks #sciencematters #sciencesaveslives
- I’m not really sure what to say, but it’s good to see you’re getting through it. Sending you lots of hugs. And you are absolutely right. Cancer sucks and science matters.
- Thank you so much, Haemy! There are no right or wrong words, just hearing from you means a lot. 💛 I really appreciate the support. I'm also trying to raise awareness of how much we owe to science, a message that seems to be forgotten by some these days. 🧠✨
- This post made my day! 🥲
- INCREDIBLE TURNOUT with hundreds of thousands of people attending #HandsOff rallies around the US to protest illegal cuts and government corruption ✊ #nyc #newyork #boston #ma #chicago #il #stpaul #minneapolis #mn #saltlakecity #ut #washington #dc
- Schon erledigt! ☑️
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- Would love to be added if still possible. Thanks! Here's a link to a recent post: bsky.app/profile/kath...
- 🧵 A bit late, but excited to share insights from our new publication in PLOS Comp Biol by Pranjul Gupta (journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...). Here, we explored the phenomenon of face pareidolia—like seeing faces in our morning coffee! What might explain this effect?
- By popular demand, Cognitive Psychology starter pack, part 2! If you are a professional conducting research in cognitive psych: Comment here if you would like to be added. If you are just interested in the topic: Open the starter pack and click "follow all" to join the convo! go.bsky.app/RgVxacVat://did:plc:hnlkil4ehrr65qrjzhdvjuwp/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3lb5up5fnxz2c
- Would love to be added. 😊
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- Thanks! 😊 For a more insights into our study, check out our 🧵 here: bsky.app/profile/kath...
- 🧵 A bit late, but excited to share insights from our new publication in PLOS Comp Biol by Pranjul Gupta (journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...). Here, we explored the phenomenon of face pareidolia—like seeing faces in our morning coffee! What might explain this effect?
- Thanks for the shout-out! 😊 For more insights into our study, check out our detailed 🧵 here: bsky.app/profile/kath...
- This is so cool! ANNs are just like us ;) journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
- 🧵 A bit late, but excited to share insights from our new publication in PLOS Comp Biol by Pranjul Gupta (journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...). Here, we explored the phenomenon of face pareidolia—like seeing faces in our morning coffee! What might explain this effect?
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View full threadOverall, our findings suggest that the phenomenon of face pareidolia emerges from an optimization for both face and object recognition. Clearly, there’s tons more we could explore. We view this as a critical first step towards understanding face pareidolia from a task optimization perspective.
- This could connect to other recent findings, like those from Koyano et al. (2025) or Sharma et al. (2024), hopefully stimulating more research in NeuroAI. 🧠🤖 And no, ANNs aren’t quite like us (yet?)—but they are proving invaluable in understanding human behavioral and neural phenomena! ;)
- Our findings left us intrigued, driving us to look further into behavioral aspects. Research by Omer et al. (2019) and others shows that humans primarily use the ‘eyes’ and ‘mouth’ to recognize faces in objects. So, what features do our DNNs focus on when classifying pareidolia faces as ‘faces’?
- We employed interpretability methods to identify the critical features DNNs focus on. Most relied on the face and mouth regions; however, only the Dual-task DNN, trained on face and object recognition, focused on the eyes.
- Which task optimization best mirrors neural data? Using RSA, we compared MEG responses to activations of 5 DNNs (penultimate layer), each trained on unique combinations of face and object recognition tasks. DNNs w/ object categorization aligned more closely with neural data compared to those w/out.
- 🧐 Does face optimization affect pareidolia? To find out, we ran the same model-based RSA on DNNs across layers. Task optimization had a strong impact. DNNs w/ face identification showed weaker pareidolia effects than those w/out. Overall, dual-task training best mirrored the neural data.
- We started with a MEG dataset by Wardle et al. (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) featuring pareidolia faces, matched objects, and real faces. To assess the pareidolia effect, we used RSA with 2 models capturing: 1) the pareidolia effect (Par~Faces), and 2) that pareidolia are not faces (Par~Objs).
- 🤯 The pareidolia effect (blue line) peaked earlier but, surprisingly, was generally weaker than the similarity between pareidolia and objects (orange line). This suggests that although pareidolia start between faces and matched objects, they trend closer to matched objects overall.
- Super cool work by @apurvaratan.bsky.social's lab! If you're interested in making models more biologically plausible by incorporating topography without sacrificing performance, check it out! 🧠🤖
- Hey Bsky friends on #neuroskyence! Very excited to share our @iclr-conf.bsky.social paper: TopoNets! High-performing vision and language models with brain-like topography! Expertly led by grad student Mayukh and Mainak! A brief thread...
- Thought-provoking and inspiring essay about agency by @neurograce.bsky.social. Thanks for reminding us to take our world into our own hands, no matter how small the step.
- I wrote about the concept of agency (both human and artificial) in the year 2025. gracewlindsay.com/2025/01/24/2...
- I am overjoyed to share that I will be joining the Faculty of Psychology @tudresden.bsky.social as Professor/Chair of Biopsychology! Thrilled and excited about this new chapter for both myself and the lab!
- Whoop whoop! Congrats, Bernhard! 🥳
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- Would love to be added! 🧠🤖😊
- Starter packs are great, but they can only have 150 accounts on them. Check out my much larger list of Brain and Mind researchers here - and let me know if you would like to be added! #neuroskyence #psychscisky bsky.app/profile/mica...
- Would love to be added as well.
- For the Blueskyers interested in #NeuroAI 🧠🤖, I created a starter pack! Please comment on this if you are not on the list and working in this field 🙂 go.bsky.app/CscFTArat://did:plc:cen7snsmmrec7psa2jillvj2/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3l6qamzwif32f
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- Finally, my first post on bsky! I’m excited to share that I became a tenured full professor this year—a dream come true! At the same time, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, so it’ll be a challenging journey. Life is a rollercoaster, but I believe we should never miss a reason to celebrate! 🎢 🎉
