Lenny van Dyck
PhD candidate in CogCompNeuro at JLU Giessen
Exploring brains, minds, and worlds 🧠💭🗺️
levandyck.github.io
- Reposted by Lenny van Dyck1/7 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.
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckHuman 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...
- Reposted by Lenny van Dyck
What should academics be doing right now? I have been writing up some thoughts on what the research says about effective action, and what universities specifically can do. davidbau.github.io/poetsandnurs... It's on GitHub. Suggestions and pull requests welcome. github.com/davidbau/poe... - Reposted by Lenny van DyckNow out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: our short response to @neurosteven.bsky.social & Edward de Haan's recent paper on the binding problem. We argue that the binding problem arises because of tradeoffs faced by any information processing system, including the brain and DNNs. shorturl.at/RGXzt
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckOur 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…
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckNow in press at Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Check it out if you are interested in category selectivity, the organization of visual cortex, and topographic models!
- New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckDimensionality 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 Lenny van DyckNew Correspondence with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social in Nat Rev Neurosci. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here, we critique a recent paper by Rosas et al. We argue that "Bottom-up" and "Top-down" neuroscience have various meanings in the literature. PDF: rdcu.be/eSKYI
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckInvestigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckY’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)
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckOur 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
- Really looking forward to #CCN2025! On Tuesday, I'm presenting new work with @kathadobs.bsky.social on segregated vs. integrated face & body processing in visual cortex 😊🧍🧠 Using DNNs & fMRI, we test competing hypotheses, finding both distinct & shared selectivity. Come by Poster A64 for more.
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckVery much looking forward to #CCN2025! Would love to see you at our lab's talks and posters, and meet me at the panel discussion in the Algonauts session on Wednesday!
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckNew preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckSuper excited to share our new article: “Dissociable cortical regions represent things and stuff in the human brain” with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @rtpramod.bsky.social and @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social Video abstract: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0XR... Paper: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lWxv3QW8S...
- Reposted by Lenny van Dyck🧠 NEW PREPRINT Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckWhat 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 Lenny van DyckIn these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):
- 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
- During my studies, I got interested in a long-standing debate in visual neuroscience. On one side, a categorical view holds that high-level visual cortex is composed of discrete modules specialized for domains like faces, bodies, and scenes. 2/n
- Reposted by Lenny van DyckWhat 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 Lenny van DyckThere 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...
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- Reposted by Lenny van DyckWhat 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
