Peter Kok

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1).
If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

Whether it was jets from Israel or US is irrelevant. It was a coordinated action & it does not receive the attention it should, because all our minds have been numbed by the constant, relentless brutality exacted by these two agressors. "How do we sleep while our bed are burning?"

The United States slaughtered school children in Iran, aided by AI.

Brilliant paper by @akalt.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social, happy to have been part of it. Rhythmic predictions of visual content, regardless of task relevance! #neuroskyence

Excited to share that our MEG project is now out in Current Biology! We show how visual content codes relate to motor oscillations in telling time.

Huge thanks to Quirin Gehmacher, Peter Kok, Matt Davis and Clare Press (bsky links below).🧵

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?

In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.

we tackle this problem in our new preprint!

paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...

w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne

Priority-Driven Transformation of Visual Working Memory Content

New this year at @cogneuronews.bsky.social 2026: All abstracts will be published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society jocnf.pubpub.org/cns2026. Functionality includes ability to append a visual abstract, like this: doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

Very proud that this is finally out!

Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

📢 Workshop announcement.

We are super excited to announce the workshop Perceptual Inferences, from philosophy to neuroscience, organized by Alexander Schütz and Daniel Kaiser.

📍 Rauischholzhausen Castle, near Marburg, Germany
🗓️ June 8 to 10, 2026.
1/4

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...

🧵

It’s out!

Come join us in Dublin:

Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Neuroscience position available at UCD!

Let me know if you have any questions :)

full advert here: lnkd.in/dW_uFuab

🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?

Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Principles for proper peer review

Or worse: Here's what I would do if I had this data. I refer to points #4 and #5 in Principles for Proper Peer Review:
4. Don’t write the paper for the authors
5. Respect the authors’ time and effort
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...

Signatures proposed to index perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review A central question in many studies on perception and consciousness is whether the effects of a given manipulation are perceptual or cognitive. Typically, studies seek to find evidence that the raw sen...

New paper from the lab in which we test whether DDM and confidence distributions can be used to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. We show that putative signatures of perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

Quote: Kabinet over schrappen paraatheidsplannen pandemie speld.nl/?p=243288

But "Alternatively, in higher-order representation of a representation (HOROR) theory, the relevant higher-order state in PFC itself is phenomenally conscious."

For some HOTs, "consciousness is ‘jointly determined’ by concurrent activity in the higher-order areas and areas that maintain the lower-order representations."

Understanding the Higher-Order Approach to Consciousness The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here, we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views, such as the global workspa...

My understanding is that yes, some HOTs argue that contents are re-represented in the higher-order model and only that model is important for consciousness.

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?

We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!

Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

Objects warp space in our mind, and events warp time in our mind. @samiyousif.bsky.social and I teamed up to review the work in these two literatures and suggest that there may be deep connections across them (with analogous influences of objects on space and events on time).

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research!

Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

UK business secretary urges EU to stop ‘putting up barriers’ Comments by Peter Kyle come on Brussels trip aimed at securing British access to ‘Made in Europe’ scheme

🚨🚨 Major irony warning:

The UK decision to depart from the EU in the "hard" way opting for the TCA was the most severe barrier to EU trade that could be imposed.

Now live with it or renegotiate the basic terms of this framework. #brexit

www.ft.com/content/05e0...

This is great from the @athenaakrami.bsky.social lab — hippocampus is required for unsupervised statistical learning, and dCA1 populations split into subspaces for sensory features vs abstract rules. Elegant optogenetic + recording approach.

https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.14.705916

Bilingual language processing relies on shared semantic representations that are modulated by each language www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... fMRI with participants reading hours of natural narratives in their native & non-native languages then compared semantic representations between the two languages