Vlad Ayzenberg
Director of the Vision Learning and Development Lab at Temple University.
Interested in cognition, computation, neuroscience, and development.
vlad-lab.com
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergEver wondered how the Dalmatian Dog effect works? The human brain can quickly learn from a single experience and generalize it to related experiences — an impressive feat so far not matched by AI. Our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com reveals how this works. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Vlad Ayzenberg1/7 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 Vlad AyzenbergThe extended version of my thesis procrastination project/subcortex visualization package is out now in both Python and R, now that I’ve graduated 🤠 This figure shows the 9 atlases included (and counting)! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Website: anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergI was curious about the fact that there were seemingly no women scientists mentioned, even of equivalent caliber, and came across what is, seemingly, beef between Epstein and Brockman debating whether "the women are all weak" or not
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergAwake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!
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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 🧵
- Using face perception as a case study, we describe how DNNs can be used as a “model organism” to test developmental questions that are difficult or unethical to test in humans.
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergThere’s video floating around. You don’t want to watch it. News feed will be updated continuously. No paywall. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergOur experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergTwo days left to donate to Children Helping Science with 1-to-1 matches from an anonymous donor up to $100K! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... For fun: 1 repost = 1 citation to a paper with data from Children Helping Science/Lookit!
- This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergNew Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergPrediction: task-based optimization will ultimately prove to have a relatively minor role in DNN models of the ventral stream. Although tasks (including self-supervised ones) are currently crucial, there are signs that a simpler approach is possible. A thread:
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergThis is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...
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- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergWe are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
- Reposted by Vlad Ayzenberg🚨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
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergHappy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergIt’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* > These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees > They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergPlease repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
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- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergPennsylvania has an important Supreme Court race coming up on Tuesday, November 4. If you live in the Keystone State, or know someone who does, vote YES to retain three justices who will protect your fundamental rights and freedoms.
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergIt's FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS FALL 🍁🎃🍂 Check out our free, upcoming talks and register here: fitng.org/fitng-togeth...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergWe wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?
- Reposted by Vlad Ayzenberg🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergSeeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship. MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior. Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...
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- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergDelighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergSo what explains the rest of the variance? If it's not genes, it must be environment, right?

- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergOver the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen. He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergThrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergWe’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!
- The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab! Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergEver wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
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- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergFunctional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergLast month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergI am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergThe cerebellum isn’t just about coordinating movement. It’s implicated in nearly every domain of cognition—from language to social behavior. But how exactly does the cerebellum contribute to action and cognition? 🧵 Check out our new paper w/ Rich Ivry. arxiv.org/abs/2509.09818
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergNew Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergOur multi-sensory integration Neuro-AI paper is now published in J Neurosci www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
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- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergVisual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system. In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergThe latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ
- Reposted by Vlad Ayzenberg"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
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- Excited to be at my first @cogscisociety.bsky.social meeting! Come check out my talk tomorrow morning on the organization of the human visual system at birth in @noranewcombe.bsky.social Rumelhart award symposium #CogSci2025
- Reposted by Vlad AyzenbergLooking for @theabcdstudy.bsky.social fMRI timeseries data?It's all in the 6.0 data release, thanks to @drdamienfair.bsky.social and team at ABCC 🧠: docs.abcdstudy.org/latest/docum...
- Reposted by Vlad Ayzenbergthrilled to share this project over a decade in the making out now in @pnas.org! We show that precocious GABA boosting in neonates by early sevoflurane/propofol anesthetic exposure accelerates visual cortical maturation in human infants www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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