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Rochelle Kaper

@rochellekaper.bsky.social

250 followers 190 following 33 posts

phd student @ uc irvine cog sci w/ Megan Peters. 🧠 structure learning, metacognition, perception, comp cog neuro. https://tinyurl.com/rochellekaper she/her

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · May 9

✨new preprint✨

Examining the Influence of Stress and Anxiety on Visual Working Memory and Decision-Making
osf.io/preprints/ps...

😊huge thank you to my coauthors & masters advisors Dr. Alicia Walf & Dr. Chris Sims!

excited to present this work from my masters project @ #CogSci2025 this summer🚀!

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

ARC ETHOS @arcethos.bsky.social · 19h

Going to @sfn.org this year? Check out @aliekhlasi.bsky.social's poster. November 19th from 4-5pm.
See the abstract: www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/?_gl=1*1...

Program Planner

www.abstractsonline.com

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 18h

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 1d

the best PI🥳🙌🏻 no one deserves this more

megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 1d

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce…

🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉

The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 10d

congrats!!

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 12d

I had a wonderful time visiting UC Irvine to give a talk in the cognitive science colloquium. Thank you @annaleshinskaya.bsky.social for being a fantastic host, and to all the other faculty, students, and postdocs I got to meet during my visit 🙏

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 12d

Thank you so much for coming!

Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Jeff Zacks @jzacks.bsky.social · 14d

New eLife preprint from Tan Nguyen—Pattern-based functional MRI and computational modeling show evidence for multiple signals contributing to updating the brain's representations of events: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Multiple event segmentation mechanisms in the human brain

elifesciences.org

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Erica D. Pratt @pratted.bsky.social · 18d

Announcing such a major change to NSF GRFP this late in the cycle is incredibly cruel. 2nd yr students (mine included) have been working so hard on their proposals despite ongoing uncertainty. They are driven and passionate about being outstanding scientists and helping those coming up behind them.

This means individuals in the following statuses at the time of application are eligible:

Undergraduate in the final (senior) year of a bachelor’s degree program
Bachelor’s degree-holder with NO enrollment in a graduate degree program (non-degree graduate coursework allowed)
Individual enrolled in a joint bachelor’s-master’s degree program with at least three undergraduate years completed
First-year graduate student in their first graduate degree program with less than one academic year completed in the degree program (according to institution’s academic calendar)
Individuals enrolled in joint bachelor’s-master’s degree programs are considered graduate students. For GRFP, joint bachelor’s-master’s degrees are defined as degrees concurrently pursued and awarded.
Not be a current NSF employee.

Applications that do not meet eligibility requirements will be returned without review as being ineligible for a fellowship.

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Kobe Desender @kobedesender.bsky.social · 19d

"Learning to be confident: How agents learn confidence based on prediction errors"! Now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social led by @pierreledenmat.bsky.social

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

but how would you explain the purpose of feedback connections in lower visual levels not being for the role of subjective percepts?

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

indeed that's what i'm doing😉 naturalistic vs perceptual stimuli make a difference

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

hmm this is a cool perspective that'd be great to explore more. i'm wondering tho why so much of metacog research would utilize very low-level perceptual tasks like orientation detection (and show metacog efficiency) if that's the case

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

but don't early visual areas still receive top-down feedback loops as well?

Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

been thinking about this also not just for peripheral vision but how our perceptual systems may compensate for impairments (e.g., cataracts, etc.) and to what extent this has to do with our internal models of the structure of environment (2/2)

Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 19d

i'd assume a combo of lateral connections & expectations about what should be there given other areas of vision (e.g., central) where there are more adequate feedback connections to form an internal model via predictive coding (1/2)

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 19d

Just accepted at BBS - a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's Sensory Horizons article:
Reality monitoring decision policies and the slowness of consciousness
osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Qingqing Zhang @qqzhang.bsky.social · 22d

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Katharina Schmack @kathaschmack.bsky.social · 23d

Great thread that explains why I sometimes dread Q&A after cognitive and systems neuroscience talks. 👇

"You say awareness/perception/imagination. But couldn't it all just be attention/motor preparation/memory?"

#neuroskyence

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 23d

I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Brynn Sherman @brynnsherman.bsky.social · 25d

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Moments Lab

www.momentslab.org

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 26d

agreed very pre-preliminary😕

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Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 26d

prelim program: view.flipdocs.com?ID=10026226_...

2025 Preliminary Program

view.flipdocs.com

Rochelle Kaper @rochellekaper.bsky.social · 26d

i present to you the first introspective brain emoji😌:

Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 28d

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions

Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Pete Hitchcock @pf-hitchcock.bsky.social · Sep 13

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently"

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/n

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Reposted by Rochelle Kaper

Gaia Molinaro @gaiamolinaro.bsky.social · Sep 9

📢 New preprint!
How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

Reward function compression facilitates goal-dependent reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making l...

arxiv.org

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