Happy Transgender Day of Visibility! Keep hope and kindness in your hearts -- we are all in this together! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Finally, this is a project that is very near and dear to my heart and that would not have seen the light of press without the huge collective effort and unwavering support of an amazing team of collaborators: Victoria Ritvo, Ken Norman (@ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social), Nick Turk-Browne, and Jon Cohen.

We also observed a strong positive correlation between the increase in perceptual discrimination after training and the increase in neural category separation we sculpted into our participants' brains: the more we changed people’s brains, the more they saw the world differently as a result!

After successfully self-modulating their brain activity (top), our participants began to see the objects assigned to the same brain pattern as more categorically distinct from those assigned to a different brain pattern (bottom).

Positive feedback (less wobbling) was given to our participants *only if* their brains would start to represent the shape they were looking at as a stronger member of a specific (neural) category that we chose arbitrarily, instead of how their brains would represent the shape by default.

We ran a 10-day experiment that included 6 days of neurofeedback training. In each training trial, our participants were shown a random wobbling shape from the complex stimulus space we created, and they were asked to “Generate a mental state that will make the shape wobble less or even stop!”.

We used real-time fMRI neurofeedback to modify how the human brain processes visual information: participants viewed objects and were given feedback to encourage their brains to represent them more similarly to an activity pattern that we chose, instead of how they would be represented naturally.

Hi all! I'm Cora and I run the Naturalistic Cognition Lab at the University of Rochester. We are a team of cognitive and computational neuroscientists who study how people understand and remember stories, using movies, fMRI, neural networks, and neurofeedback.