Nicholas Menghi
nichome.bsky.social
Nicholas Menghi
@nichome.bsky.social
Postdoc @mpicbs.bsky.social, interested in Generalization, Transfer Learning, Cats and Pirates
Pinned
🚨 New preprint! Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference 🧠

We compare humans and neural networks in a learning task, showing how training regime and task similarity interact to drive transfer or interference.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference
Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...
www.biorxiv.org
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
🚨New preprint on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social:
“Competing Neural Decision Variables in Human Frontal Cortex Shape Decision Confidence”
by Alessandro Toso, @ayeletarazi.bsky.social, @jrochav.bsky.social, @ktsetsos.bsky.social & Tobias H. Donner
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Competing Neural Decision Variables in Human Frontal Cortex Shape Decision Confidence
Mounting evidence indicates that decisions emerge from a competition between populations of neurons encoding the different choice options. Theoretical models propose that the outcome of this competiti...
www.biorxiv.org
November 3, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com

Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
October 31, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Do we perceive static vs dynamic emotions differently?
New research finds both shared and unique patterns in how stimulus properties, recognised emotion, and perceived intensity jointly shape how we see facial emotions.
doi.org/10.1080/0269...
@psplabatuea.bsky.social
October 30, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
🚨Checkout our new article!
"Observer and stimulus factors jointly shape perceptual similarity of static and dynamic facial emotions"
doi.org/10.1080/0269...
October 30, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
🧠🚨 How does the hippocampus transform the visual similarity space to resolve memory interference?

In this new preprint, we found that the hippocampus sequentially inverts the behaviorally relevant dimensions of similarity 🧵

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Hippocampal transformations occur along dimensions of memory interference
The role of the hippocampus in resolving memory interference has been greatly elucidated by considering the relationship between the similarity of visual stimuli (input) and corresponding similarity o...
www.biorxiv.org
October 14, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Dynamic updating of cognitive maps via traces of experience in the subiculum
In the classical view of hippocampal function, the subiculum is assigned the role as the output layer. In spatial paradigms, some subiculum neurons manifest as so-called boundary vector cells (BVCs), ...
www.biorxiv.org
October 3, 2025 at 7:01 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
I'm thrilled to share that our new paper is now published in Psychophysiology (Open Access):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@zacndr.bsky.social @teamlabuda.bsky.social @fraferri.bsky.social @danlikesbrains.bsky.social
September 26, 2025 at 8:31 AM
🚨 New preprint! Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference 🧠

We compare humans and neural networks in a learning task, showing how training regime and task similarity interact to drive transfer or interference.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Impact of Task Similarity and Training Regimes on Cognitive Transfer and Interference
Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...
www.biorxiv.org
September 23, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
A while in the making, here's a short paper on how one might get from spatial to episodic memory with temporal indexing, sequence generation via grid cell analogs, + a bit of perspective/review on time, wider HPC function ...

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
September 9, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Happy to share our new preprint. We found that brain adaptively switches between relational and item-based coding strategies based on the structure of memory contents.
@doellerlab.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Efficient coding in working memory is adapted to the structure of the environment
Working memory (WM) relies on efficient coding strategies to overcome its limited capacity, yet how the brain adaptively organizes WM representations to maximize coding efficiency based on environment...
www.biorxiv.org
August 26, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS
Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...
www.pnas.org
August 22, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Paper AND preprint day.
If you’re interested in motor control, incentives, and brain oscillations, we have new results to share.
Together, they reveal how feedback and motivation shape behavior, and how brain rhythms help keep our force stable.
August 11, 2025 at 6:56 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
We did it! 🏆 We won Phase 1 and placed 2nd overall in the Algonauts 2025 Challenge. So proud of the crew
@keckjanis.bsky.social,Viktor Studenyak,Daniel Schad,Aleksandr Shpilevoi. Huge thanks to @andrejbicanski.bsky.social and @doellerlab.bsky.social for support. Report: arxiv.org/abs/2507.17958
July 31, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵
July 27, 2025 at 9:31 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
/1 We took our sweet time (~3yrs) to put this into its final shape - but happy to say that the pre-print of an extensive review of brain rhythms in cognition - from a cognruro perspective - is now available. Please let us know what you think. #neuroskyence doi.org/10.48550/arX...
Brain rhythms in cognition -- controversies and future directions
Brain rhythms seem central to understanding the neurophysiological basis of human cognition. Yet, despite significant advances, key questions remain unresolved. In this comprehensive position paper, w...
doi.org
July 22, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social:

How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :)

#neuroskyence

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling
Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...
www.biorxiv.org
June 30, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Amazing #RegisteredReport led by Sumaiyah Raza from @mrccbu.bsky.social.

We (again) found evidence against a memory benefit of spatial novelty. However, this time we did find a retroactive benefit of rest, which highlights that more work is needed here.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
July 1, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro #psychscisky
N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task
Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...
dx.plos.org
June 26, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
🚨Preprint Alert: Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Contribution of Neural Units using Game Theory: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732
The result of my MSc thesis is out with @kayson.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social @kordinglab.bsky.social, Claus C. Hilgetag
Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units
Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI ...
arxiv.org
June 25, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Excited to share that our work on the interplay of symmetric learning rules and successor representations (SR) is published in @plos.org (comp.bio)

Work done together with @doellerlab.bsky.social, @caswell.bsky.social and Juergen Jost.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...
#neuroskyence #compneurosky

1/n
Impact of symmetry in local learning rules on predictive neural representations and generalization in spatial navigation
Author summary The hippocampus is a brain region which plays a crucial role in spatial navigation for both animals and humans. Contemporarily, it’s thought to store predictive representations of the e...
doi.org
June 25, 2025 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
📣 Very excited for our symposium on “Building Knowledge Structures” tomorrow at 16:30 at @pug2025.bsky.social

Together with amazing people:
@barnaveliirina.bsky.social
@lukaskunz.bsky.social @mirkothm.bsky.social
and Andrea Greve
June 19, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
preprint alert 🚨
1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇
June 16, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
Did you ever wanted to see a visualisation how two common brain 🧠 network parcellations (Yeo 7 vs. CAB NP) differ?

Here is a small something I quickly cooked up because I was curious myself.

#neurosky #neuro #brain #brainsky #neuroimaging

Code: github.com/JAQuent/netw...
May 28, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
New preprint! We explored how learned movement patterns affect our sense of traveled distance and proposed a neurocomputational model that leverages embodied memories to denoise spatial codes.

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Re-enacting steps supports human path integration consistent with motor-corrected grid cell drift
Efficient navigation, especially in the absence of vision, requires path integration - the continuous updating of spatial position from self-motion cues. However, path integration is prone to cumulati...
www.biorxiv.org
May 22, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Nicholas Menghi
🍾🥳 Proud to share our new paper published on eLife 📄: elifesciences.org/articles/100...

Accompanied by an insight piece by @neurojacob.bsky.social 📄: elifesciences.org/articles/106...

1/4
May 3, 2025 at 2:19 AM