I’m very excited to finally see this one in print! Led by the incomparable @brissend.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... We find that cognitive processes (e.g. attention, working memory) undergo error-based adaptation in a manner reminiscent of sensorimotor adaptation. Read on! (1/n) - ThreadSky

tarazlee.bsky.social • 31 days ago

I’m very excited to finally see this one in print! Led by the incomparable @brissend.bsky.social

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02109-5

We find that cognitive processes (e.g. attention, working
memory) undergo error-based adaptation in a manner reminiscent of sensorimotor adaptation. Read on! (1/n)

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aaronlwong.bsky.social•21 days ago

This seems similar to the paper by Josh Wallman and colleagues from 2002
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698902003048

tarazlee.bsky.social•21 days ago

Very much inspired by that paper! We use their paradigm to elicit the errors. @brissend.bsky.social was kind of obsessed with that paper when he joined my lab years ago. He wanted to extend the work to WM and dig into it more given his interest in cerebellar contributions to cognition

aaronlwong.bsky.social•21 days ago

Very cool! Will definitely give it a read

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

James previously showed that you can decode the contents of visual working memory from the cerebellum akin to what you’d expect from frontoparietal areas. The cerebellum is clearly involved in many different cognitive processes, but its computational role remains unclear.

https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1253-20.2020

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

James favored the hypothesis that the cerebellum is responsible for adaptive control across a variety of functions as a feedforward controller sensitive to the mismatch between predicted and actual outcomes (see Ito and others).

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

It’s clear that this sort of adaptive control is at play for many types of movements including eye movements (e.g., saccade adaptation), but how can you show that cognitive processes might also be subject to these same learning mechanisms?

(Figure from Albert et al., 2012)

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

We designed a task that repeatedly induced errors in the allocation of spatial attention to a particular location and intermittently measured spatial working memory recall to
assess whether internal spatial representations adaptively shifted to counteract these errors.

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

We found that as attention errors accumulated over the
course of the experiment, participants’ working memory recall dramatically shifted to counteract the attentional error. The timecourse of this adaptation is strikingly similar to observed in saccade and other sensorimotor adaptation paradigms.

tarazlee.bsky.social•31 days ago

Across 5 experiments, we ruled out the possibility that this effect can be explained by eye movements or alternative attentional biases unrelated to error. This suggests the computational mechanisms governing the adaptation of motor commands appear to also adjust and calibrate spatial cognition. 😎

paulakuokkanen.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

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