Floris de Lange

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

Great opportunity to work in a terrific lab:

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

Why are tactile sensations suppressed during movements? In our new preprint, we explain this as optimal integration of sensory signals with an internal model.

Work led by @fatatai.bsky.social with Dimitris Voudouris, Katja Fiehler and @c-rothkopf.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Preprint alert ❗

Holistic and kinematics priors enable predictive neural representations during biological motion perception

With: @predictivebrain.bsky.social and
@moritzwurm.bsky.social

At: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception Predictive processing frameworks have emphasized the role of forward prediction as a critical ingredient for learning and perceptual inference. We ant…

These findings align well with what @clarepress.bsky.social and I discuss in our "Forward and backward prediction" paper, see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What type of relationship is learned during visual statistical learning? Statistical learning enables observers to extract regularities from their environment, but what statistical regularity is extracted remains debated. While previous research has mainly focused on condi...

Which "statistic" governs statistical learning? Find out in this new article of our lab: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

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

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

📢 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

Interesting convergence:

The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along

w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1

Now published:
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception Predictive processing frameworks have emphasized the role of forward prediction as a critical ingredient for learning and perceptual inference. We ant…

"Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception"

@predictivebrain.bsky.social @clarepress.bsky.social

nice to see our work situated within a broader research program on differences between learning & perceptual predictions

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World Uruguay built a power grid that runs 99% on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. Here’s how its bold energy overhaul became a global model.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

With 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.

🧠 Feature-specific predictive processing: What’s in a prediction error? 🧠

Perspective article w/ Cem Uran, @martinavinck.bsky.social & @predictivebrain.bsky.social now in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, highlighting recent work on the nature of surprise reflected in visual prediction errors.

🧵👇

This 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!

Rep. Seth Moulton comes on CNN and starts by saying: "Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? This is insane. What the hell are we doing? We've got a lot of problems in America today, and invading / occupying / running Venezuela does not solve any of them."

Me getting back to sending nagging emails on January 6th when people return to work from the Christmas break

Leveraging insights from neuroscience to build adaptive artificial intelligence Nature Neuroscience - Adaptive intelligence envisions AI that, like animals, learns online, generalizes and adapts quickly. This Perspective reviews biological foundations, progress in AI and...

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI?

➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com

rdcu.be/eWVmA

There's been a cluster of recent work on these sort of flow based or trajectory based world models, including nova flow and amplify (amplify a past episode of ours). These are super exciting because they reduce requirements for really accurate action labels imo

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally yield better models of biological vision. However, we present accumulating evidence that this alignment is now plateauing – and in some cases worsening – as DNNs scale to human or even superhuman accuracy. This divergence between artificial and biological perception may reflect the acquisition of visual strategies distinct from those of primates, and these findings challenge the view that advances in AI will naturally translate to progress in neuroscience. We argue that vision science must chart its own course, developing algorithms grounded in biological visual systems rather than optimizing for internet data.

Online Now: Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology

Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )

Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception - Nature Human Behaviour Vision–language deep neural network models better explain human visual cortex activity than vision-only models. Damaging brain connections between visual and language areas reverses this pattern, suggesting that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Using brain lesions and DNN models, this article suggests that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Dimensionality 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...

Very well done Peter, congrats!

I am very excited and grateful to have been awarded a Consolidator grant by @erc.europa.eu. We will use it to investigate the role of memory in perception, focused on the hippocampus. Thank you to all the colleagues in my team and the department for their support in making this possible!

Rapid computation of high-level visual surprise Health sciences

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference!

🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Summary 🧵 below 👇

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain - Nature A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic processing.

Nature research paper: Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain

go.nature.com/4839zaL

1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social