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.

Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.

Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Our editor Dr Jon Sutton meets Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of new book ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… Common Knowledge and the S...

Multi-step planning is a challenge for LLMs. Here, the authors introduce a brain-inspired Modular Agentic Planner that decomposes planning into specialized LLM modules, improving performance across tasks and highlighting the value of cognitive neuroscience for LLM design.

The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize acros…

We are an international group of scientists consisting of linguists, cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, computational neuroscientists, computational modellers, computational scientists, ...