Ambra Ferrari

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language

Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

📌 Curious to know more? Visit my website 👉 lnkd.in/d59v_TpH

📌 Looking for a PhD opportunity? The Spring admissions round at SISSA is now open and I’d be delighted to hear from prospective candidates (deadline: March 20, 1pm CET) 👉 lnkd.in/dvf6RuQd

I’m excited to join the vibrant SISSA community, and deeply grateful to everyone who has supported me along the way.

SISSA (Trieste, Italy)

🌟 Big news 🌟 This May I’ll join SISSA (Trieste, Italy) as an Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience, leading the Multimodal Communication Lab.

We will combine cognitive, computational and developmental methods to study how we communicate before and beyond words.

🧠🧪 #neuroskyence #neurojobs

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think.

We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science.

Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

1/7 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.

🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

w/ Giulio Degano and Uta Noppeney

In this work, we use music to investigate how the brain extracts and integrates multisensory information in real-world environments.

🧠🧪 #psychscisky #neuroskyence
TL;DR 🧵👇

More broadly, our work reveals how the brain automatically extracts statistical correlations across the senses to track complex streams of information in our natural world.

Our findings highlight the important, yet largely unexplored influence of touch on auditory processing, offering a significant leap in our understanding of how the "feeling" of music enriches our auditory world.

These encoding benefits were associated with superadditive interactions in primary auditory cortex, where tactile signals sharpen and amplify auditory envelope representations. In complex polyphonic music, touch further amplified the segregation and encoding of temporally coherent auditory streams.

Vibrotactile signals improved the detection of a brief target embedded in music, establishing the functional relevance of audiotactile integration in naturalistic settings.

Using psychophysics, fMRI and time-resolved EEG decoding, we addressed how the brain encodes the temporal structure of music (beat and envelope) across audition and touch and uses this information to guide multisensory integration and segregation in simple and more complex perceptual scenes.

We often experience music not only through our ears, but also as vibrations resonating through our bodies, whether at concerts, festivals or even just via our mobile devices. How do these vibrotactile signals influence music processing? How do they aid auditory scene analysis?

🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

w/ Giulio Degano and Uta Noppeney

In this work, we use music to investigate how the brain extracts and integrates multisensory information in real-world environments.

🧠🧪 #psychscisky #neuroskyence
TL;DR 🧵👇

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com:

1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science.

2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups.

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

We’re happy to share that the website for the 24th International Multisensory Research Forum, which will take place in Genoa, Italy, from 24 to 27 June 2026, is now live:
imrf2026.sciencesconf.org

Save and share the key dates, and stay tuned for more updates. #IMRF2026

Well this is exciting!

The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank!

Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

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 👇

GPT style cartoon of a debate between a smiling Skinner and a angry Chomsky, while in the back, a robot is reading "verbal behavior"

I’m happy to share a short opinion piece I’ve just finished, where I revisit the famous Skinner vs. Chomsky exchange on how language is learned through the lens of today’s large language models (before getting mad read the rest) 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Research Culture: The SAFE Labs Handbook as a tool for improving lab culture A survey of more than 200 researchers shows strong support for a new community-driven lab handbook that can be implemented by individual group leaders to reduce conflict and create more positive and e...

This is a great resource for setting (or improving) a lab culture rooted in awareness, fairness, and equity:
📌 Publication: elifesciences.org/articles/108...
📌 Website: safelabs.info

Asking informally: does anyone know someone who might be interested in a postdoc focused on understanding changes in memory representations driven by attention using EEG? ⚡️Thanks!

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Full Professor of Cognitive Science - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Dept. of, Aarhus University

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof).
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!

international.au.dk/about/profil...

The title page

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨
The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social)
Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics
Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Tracing neuroscience’s family tree to track its growth By mapping connections among researchers, Neurotree makes it possible to see how the field has evolved and what factors shape its direction.

By mapping connections among researchers, Neurotree makes it possible to trace how the field has evolved and to visualize how shifts in lab size, training and other factors can shape its direction, writes founder @stephenvdavid.bsky.social.

bit.ly/4od0SiL

#neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We argue that these circuit interactions are better captured by alternative theories, which we summarize under the umbrella term BELIEF. We review how BELIEF theories account for the inter-areal interactions during attentive perception.

Online Now: Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding

A worker sorts through a large pile of e-waste in an industrial facility, highlighting the environmental impact of discarded electronics.

We're seeing lots of headlines about the catastrophic impact of massive data center expansion. But what else could data centers look like?

In my perpetual quest to seek out alternative technofutures, I want to highlight the really cool work of Keolu Fox.

🧵

When and How to Deviate From a Preregistration, with Prof Daniël Lakens Prof Daniël Lakens will share guidance on appropriate circumstances and methods for deviating from a pre-registration

Dr Daniël Lakens presents 'When & How to Deviate From a Preregistration.' Essential for research integrity. Register:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-and-h...
#Preregistration #OpenScience #DataScience #Statistics #AcademicResearch @lakens.bsky.social