Leonardo Ceravolo
leoceravolo.bsky.social
Leonardo Ceravolo
@leoceravolo.bsky.social
Neuroscientist @University of Geneva
Our latest article in eLife on the sensitivity of the human temporal voice areas to closely related primate calls:

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
doi.org
November 26, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
A Perspective in Nature Reviews Neuroscience focuses on neural resonance theory in music, which summarizes how the dynamics of fundamental neural mechanisms can explain various aspects of music perception and performance. https://go.nature.com/3DXLLJ2 🔒
March 29, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Temporal variation in the acoustic dynamic range is a confounding factor in EEG-based tracking of absolute auditory attention to speech https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.04.641391v1
March 5, 2025 at 11:19 AM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
A systematic review and meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour shows that people discern true from false news with ease. When making mistakes, people err on the side of skepticism and rate true news as false, instead of being fooled by false news. https://go.nature.com/4h6TQZC 🧪
March 5, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reduces Non-Decision Time in Perceptual Decisions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.13.637859v1
February 15, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Yesterday's post on our @pnas.org study of London taxi drivers. Yellow lines = imagined journeys, described street-by-street. Some were 30 streets, which if using a tree-search over 26,000 possible states would take a very very long time.
Daniel McNamee's models show how they compress this problem:
🚨 new publication from our lab in @pnas.org !
"Expert navigators deploy rational complexity–based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning"

Entropy of streets & successor representations explain planning speed

Colab wth Daniel McNamee at Champalimaud

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
January 28, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Syntax, speech, brain, continuous listening: fascinating work!
Understanding spoken #language requires info beyond the raw speech signals. @andreaeyleen.bsky.social &co use MEG recording during story listening to show that the human brain projects its knowledge of #syntax onto speech in a predictive & language-dependent way 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/42uyKAs
January 27, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Conscious #perception is modulated by brain oscillations & slow cortical potentials within the brain, but how? @luakoenig.bsky.social & @biyuhe.bsky.social show that oscillations & aperiodic brain activity influence perception independently of each other 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/42dxjGH
January 17, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles dynamically encode task features during associative memory and virtual navigation
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
#neuroscience
Prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles dynamically encode task features during associative memory and virtual navigation
Abbass et al. demonstrate that neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of non-human primates dynamically mix eye position and visual task features during virtual navigation. Neurons located dorsally ...
www.cell.com
January 14, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Neuroethology of natural actions in freely moving monkeys www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - neural activity in freely moving conditions is richer and more generalizable than in restrained conditions
Neuroethology of natural actions in freely moving monkeys
The current understanding of primate natural action organization derives from laboratory experiments in restrained contexts (RCs) under the assumption that this knowledge generalizes to freely moving ...
www.science.org
January 10, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Temporal recurrence as a general mechanism toexplain neural responses in the auditory system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.08.631909v1
January 9, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Behavioral and neural sound classification: Insights from natural and synthetic sounds https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.06.631484v1
January 8, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Hippocampus and orbital frontal cortex synchronise to make the right choice given the context:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Context-dependent decision-making in the primate hippocampal–prefrontal circuit - Nature Neuroscience
The brain uses different valuation schemes across contexts. Elston and Wallis show this is supported by hippocampal encoding of context that is broadcast to prefrontal value subcircuits via theta sync...
www.nature.com
January 8, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Important study on midbrain's acoustic region response independent of auditory cortex
Neurons in parts of the brain dedicated to processing sound can respond to sound detection behaviour without input from the auditory cortex.
Hearing connections
Midbrain regions dedicated to sound processing can encode behavioral information without input from the auditory cortex.
buff.ly
January 2, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Meaning of emotions in 2500 languages, impressive study:
By mapping the meanings of the words used to communicate emotions across more than one-third of the planet’s spoken languages, a study in Science found that there is significant variation in how emotions are expressed across cultures. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/41X6dDk
Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure
Analysis of the terms used for emotions across a sample of 2474 spoken languages reveals low similarity across cultures.
scim.ag
December 27, 2024 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Women leave academia at higher rates than men at every career stage, and attrition is especially high among three groups: tenured faculty, women in non-STEM fields, and women employed at less prestigious institutions, a #ScienceAdvances analysis finds.
Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty
Women faculty are more likely to leave their jobs than men, most often due to workplace climate, rather than work-life balance.
scim.ag
December 23, 2024 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
An essay in Nature discusses how it’s an astonishing achievement that all of statistics and much of science depends on probability considering no one’s sure what it is. 🧪
Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does)
All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.
go.nature.com
December 21, 2024 at 8:31 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Voice identity invariance by anterior temporal lobe neurons https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.19.629267v1
December 20, 2024 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Research in Nature Computational Science shows that large language models exhibit social identity biases similar to humans, having favoritism toward ingroups and hostility toward outgroups. https://go.nature.com/4gjBtku 🧪
December 20, 2024 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Interesting article by many scientists discussing how many scientists can team up to explore comparative cognition

(love the image chosen for this)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Challenges and promises of big team comparative cognition - Nature Human Behaviour
Big team science has the potential to reshape comparative cognition research, but its implementation — especially in making fair comparisons between species, handling multisite variation and reaching ...
www.nature.com
December 19, 2024 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Change is rarely easy, but the right changes are worth it.

As the year comes to a close, we’re showcasing some research and publishing highlights from the year with the hashtag #12DaysOfeLife

Follow along over the next 12 days or check out our blog now!
https://buff.ly/3Dhn21z
A look back at 2024
We take a look back at some of the key milestones and announcements of 2024.
buff.ly
December 19, 2024 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Hot take: I don't really think Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) can elucidate circuits based on fMRI data.

Maybe not so hot???
December 18, 2024 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
What is the optimal level at which to describe the brain? @misicbata.bsky.social explores a study by @kangjoolee.bsky.social &co in #PLOSBiology, showing that simplifying complex brain recordings makes them more useful for studying brain function. 🧪Primer: plos.io/4iInF4q Paper: plos.io/3MZAdG4
December 18, 2024 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Leonardo Ceravolo
Evidence for systematic - yet task- and motor-contingent - rhythmicity of auditory perceptual judgements https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.17.628892v1
December 18, 2024 at 6:21 AM