Lynn Sörensen

Are you a postdoc in the Brain & Cognitive Sciences? 🧠 Don't miss this opportunity to showcase your work at MIT - apply by May 31! 🌟

I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15).
werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Congratulations - that's terrific news, Iris!!!

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Happy Birthday Iris - what a way to celebrate! 😀

We still have a few spots left - make sure to join us if you're in the area!

Atlanta community: we are organizing a CCN @cogcompneuro.bsky.social watch party!

Watch the talks, engage in structured discussions, and (optionally) present your own work.

Register:
forms.gle/AWxVPbrgxkdd...
Schedule:
tinyurl.com/ccn2025atlanta

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Possible start in October 2025 (contact me ASAP), or from April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky #neurojobs 1/

CCN Boston Local Meetup @ MIT This form is to register to attend a 'local meetup' for CCN 2025 held at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT (https://2025.ccneuro.org/local-meetups/). We will watch the conference talks,...

Join us for the #CCN2025 local meetup, we're hosting at MIT's McGovern Institute on Aug 13-15!
Think: conference talks 🧠 + local discussions over food & snacks 💬+ meeting awesome researchers in your backyard 🏠 Open to all researchers in the area!
Intrigued? Sign up here: forms.gle/oq6Rw3TvUja6...

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.

Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

So far we have CCN local meetups @ NYC @neurograce.bsky.social, Boston @lynnkasorensen.bsky.social, Atlanta @neuranna.bsky.social, Lyon and Bucharest!

Who will host one on even further away from Amsterdam (West Coast? East Asia? Africa?)

Representation of locomotive action affordances in human behavior, brains, and deep neural networks | PNAS To decide how to move around the world, we must determine which locomotive actions (e.g., walking, swimming, or climbing) are afforded by the immed...

In 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):

Decoding predicted future states from the brain’s “physics engine” Using fMRI in humans, this study provides evidence for future state prediction in brain regions involved in physical reasoning.

Thrilled to announce our new publication titled 'Decoding predicted future states from the brain's physics engine' with @emiecz.bsky.social, Cyn X. Fang, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

(1/n)

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case.

Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

graph with scientist names on the x axis and colored indicators for NIH, NSF, and Other funding. Also indicators for active pre-1960 and Outside US

When we communicate science, we often don't say where the resources for it come from. This is clearly a mistake: people consuming science should know who is funding it--and if that funding is being taken away. So, I decided to document the funding sources of every scientist mentioned in my book.

I believe this is an in-person event, unfortunately. I will reach out to the other people involved to confirm, though, and let you know if I learn anything else.

The deadline for this is ⏰THIS SATURDAY!⏰ Please consider applying and share your science with the MIT BCS community!🧠

Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab MIT - Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab - Cambridge MA 02139

I’m hiring a full-time lab tech for two years starting May/June. Strong coding skills required, ML a plus. Our research on the human brain uses fMRI, ANNs, intracranial recording, and behavior. A great stepping stone to grad school. Apply here:
careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...
......

Kanwisher Lab is preparing for this Friday's #Standupforscience Rally!

I admire this tremendously! THIS is the next generation we need to protect. It's one that is both genius AND steps up.

Registration for CCN2025 is open! 2025.ccneuro.org/meeting-regi...

Join researchers across the country in fighting restrictions on the NIH Please click the link to complete this form.

Academic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately.
There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event.
Join us!
form.jotform.com/250226137228...

2025: Agency gained and lost If you’ve had even a passing glance at tech journalism over the past few months, you know the top buzzword for AI in 2025 is agentic. Agentic AI (according to many think pieces and press releases a…

I wrote about the concept of agency (both human and artificial) in the year 2025. gracewlindsay.com/2025/01/24/2...

Nominations for Area Chairs: Area Chairs should have the following requirements: A senior researcher in the area (professor or senior research fellow, could also be a postdoc) Have authored at CCN at least once You can nominate y...

The #CCN2025 conference 2025.ccneuro.org is looking for area and senior area chairs for the new 8-page track. You can sign up for area chair and form this list we will also invite senior area chairs. We might also nominate you ourselves :-) forms.gle/MTBgZZxQaDY8...

Congratulations on your position!!! Academia is lucky to have you. I'm rooting for you and wish you lots of strength. Thanks for sharing this.

Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks Many artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained with ecologically plausible objectives on naturalistic data align with behavior and neural representations in biological systems. Here, we show that this...

Why do diverse ANNs resemble brain representations? Check out our new paper with Colton Casto, @nogazs.bsky.social , Colin Conwell, Mark Richardson, & @evfedorenko.bsky.social on “Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks.” 🧠🤖
tinyurl.com/yckndmjt

Please check out the paper (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) for more details and feel free to ping me if you have questions or comments! [7/7]

🐒🤖 Obviously, we're studying plasticity at a coarse scale here. Still, I find it encouraging to see that there is a convergence between biological & artificial learning in the context of representational shifts in IT when controlling for performance! [6/7]

🎯 So what can we do with this? The cool thing is that we can use these models to predict changes that were not part of training. For example, how does category training affect IT information about an object's size? We found that IT-like models effectively predicted changes for many variables! [5/7]

🦾We only tested models that performed as well as the monkeys after training. Notably, around 28% of all such trained models using gradient descent showed differences indistinguishable from those in IT across all tested metrics. Most models (~88%) matched the changes for at least one metric. [4/7]