CogBooster

📣New Paper Out!

When we look at the world around us, our brain is constantly recognising objects and estimating how we can interact with them. For these rapid computations to occur, the representation of these objects has to be organised in an efficient way. A large effort in cognitive neuroscience research is to uncover the principles which determine this organisation.

In our new study, published in NeuroImage, we show that dimensions related to object manipulation (i.e. texture and graspability) explain this organisation better when compared to previously identified dimensions, such as animacy. This is primarily explained by an important connectivity between the areas responsible for object recognition and regions responsible for object manipulation.

🔗Read the paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811926004465

🎯Last days to submit your abstract!!🎯

👀🧠SAW 2026 - Meet the Speakers
Jeffrey Bowers, from University of Bristol, will be presenting "Current research practices in NeuroAI do not support the many strong claims of ANN-Human Alignment".

Abstract:
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) developed in computer science are successful in a range of vision, language, and reasoning tasks. They can also predict behavioural responses and brain activations of humans better than alternative models. This has led to the common claim that ANNs are the best models of biological intelligence. However, most prediction studies are correlational, and accordingly, do not support causal conclusions. Furthermore, researchers are incentivized to identify ANN-human similarities, as reviewers and editors are more likely to publish studies that report similarities rather than differences. Accordingly, researchers rarely carry out "severe" tests of their claims that are more likely to falsify their conclusions (if indeed the conclusions are false). I show when the relevant experiments are carried out, ANNs do a poor job in explaining human intelligence. The field of NeuroAI needs to change its methods to better characterize ANN-human alignment and build better models of minds.
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc Proaction Lab

🤩Recebemos hoje seis dezenas de crianças do Clube de Tempos Livres para um dia repleto de atividades dedicadas ao cérebro e à visão. A visita terminou com uma entrevista ao neurocientista Jorge Almeida, numa conversa cheia de ciência e curiosidade, que estará disponível em breve.

Um enorme obrigado a toda a equipa do CLT de Santa Clara e do CogBooster que tornaram esta atividade possível!
Proaction Lab

👀🧠SAW 2026 - Meet the Speakers

Roberta Klatzky, from Carnegie Mellon University, will be presenting "SAW should include TAW: Touch is an active modality".

Abstract:
That vision drives action is a given, but what about touch? The somatosensory system is often considered only as a footnote in this context, where the main story is: We may need touch to stably grasp an object, but the essential action is grounded in and directed by vision. My talk is meant to tell the story from the perspective of what happens after we reach to grasp - vision is often occluded, leaving perception through touch to guide the purposive action. I will provide a general overview of touch in relation to action, from the sensory periphery to the complex gating between perception and motor control that commences in the spinal cord and proceeds to the brain. I will highlight my own work on the role of purposive action for haptic perception and how sensory signals guide manipulation.
👉Submit your abstract by July 30!
uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc Proaction Lab

Meet the CogBooster Team 🧠🌏

Yih-Shiuan Lin - Post-Doctoral Researcher

"Since an early age, I've been fascinated by how easily our brains can be deceived by cleverly designed visual illusions. Wanting to understand more about how human minds work, I decided to pursue a scientific career in human vision. As a visual neuroscientist, I use behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to study how we see and understand the world around us.

Originally from Taiwan, I majored in Psychology for my bachelor's degree and received my master's in the lab of Prof. Chien-Chung Chen at 國立臺灣大學 National Taiwan University, where I focused on perceptual grouping and color vision. I earned my PhD in Experimental Psychology in the lab of Prof. Mark Greenlee at the Universität Regensburg, where I investigated perceptual filling-in and related phenomena using fMRI and MEG. I am now a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Jason Fischer's lab, where my research focuses on revealing the relationship between early visual processes (e.g., visual illusions) and higher-level processes such as physical prediction.

Outside of academic work, I am a mental health advocate and passionate about science communication."
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc

👀🧠SAW 2026 - Meet the Speakers

Kami Koldewyn, from Bangor University, will be presenting "Mapping the Social World: Interaction as a Core Dimension of Social Scene Perception".

Abstract:
Humans are inherently social, and our understanding of the world is shaped from the very beginning by the social interactions we observe and engage in. Social interactions are multifaceted and subtle, yet we can almost instantaneously discern if two people are cooperating or competing, flirting or fighting. We swiftly learn a great deal about people from observing their interactions with others – even a brief interaction gives us important clues about their relationship, their personalities, their social abilities, and their current mood. As a consequence, we excel at extracting information from social scenes, using a small network of brain regions that are sensitive to social cues such as faces, bodies, and biological motion. This work has identified the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) as a key region for processing dynamic social interactions, but other regions in the “social brain” – particularly extrastriate body area (EBA) – also show sensitivity to specifically interactive information, depending on stimulus content and context. Here, I’ll primarily explore the brain basis of our remarkable ability to extract interactive information from complex social scenes, particularly looking at the role of various structures in the “social brain” across development.

👉Submit your abstract by July 30!
uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Proaction Lab

🧠Um estudo científico combinou estimulação magnética transcraniana com eletroencefalografia (TMS-EEG) para estimular diretamente o córtex pré-motor de pianistas profissionais enquanto estes realizavam tarefas de improvisação musical e de leitura à primeira vista.

Os resultados, publicados na The New York Academy of Sciences, sugerem que, durante a improvisação, o córtex pré-motor mantém o mesmo tipo de processamento, mas opera num regime distinto: menos reativo a perturbações externas e, nesse sentido, mais eficiente — compatível com um modelo de eficiência neuronal da performance motora criativa. O estudo mostra que é possível levar paradigmas de TMS-EEG para contextos motores mais complexos, como o da performance musical.

👏Parabéns aos autores Pedro Palhares, Sasha D’Ambrosio e Óscar Gonçalves!
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.70351

👀🧠SAW 2026 - Meet the Speakers

Marius Peelen from Radboud University will be presenting "Seeing and thinking: Interplay between externally and internally generated neural representations".

Abstract:
Visual cortex is activated by input from the eyes. However, there is also abundant evidence for visual cortex activity in the absence of visual input, such as during mental imagery, expectation, concept retrieval, preparatory attention, episodic memory, and visual working memory. Do these findings all reflect the same underlying process/mechanism, despite the various cognitive domains within which they have been studied? In this talk, I will present evidence for internally-driven visual cortex activity in multiple tasks and propose a taxonomy of these processes: Internal visual cortex activity can be divided into those that are directed externally (visual anticipation) and those that are directed internally (visual thinking). While externally-directed activity facilitates visual processing, internally-directed activity competes with it. These considerations provide a framework for understanding how and when internally-generated visual cortex activity can be used to see and to think.

👉Submit your abstract by July 30!
https://www.uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc Proaction Lab

👀🧠SAW 2026 - Meet the Speakers

Elizabeth Tibbetts from the University of Michigan will be presenting "Wasps know each other's faces: The development and evolution of face recognition in the Polistes".

Abstract:
Despite the evolutionary distance between vertebrates and wasps, these groups share surprising similarities in their social recognition behavior. Polistes fuscatus wasps have sophisticated individual face recognition abilities and, like humans, use specialized, configural mechanisms to identify individuals. I will describe experiments that take advantage of natural variation in individual face recognition within and among wasp species to assess 1) how wasps recognize individuals, including specialized holistic face processing and viewpoint-independent face recognition and 2) how natural selection shapes the capacity for face recognition through effects on selecting social partners and stabilizing cooperative societies. Given the evolutionary distance between wasps and vertebrates as well as their distinct sensory and neural systems, a comparative approach provides a useful perspective on how and why sophisticated social cognition evolves.

👉Abstract submission by July 30!
https://www.uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc Proaction Lab

📢 The 4th edition of the SAW – Seeing and Acting Workshop is coming!

📅 When: September 24–26, 2026
📍 Where: FPCEUC
📄Abstract Submission: July 30, 2026
⏳ Registration deadline: September 14, 2026
🎤 Invited speakers: uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/invited-speakers/
ℹ️ More information: uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026

Join us for the scientific event that brings some of the world’s leading experts in perception and action to the Universidade de Coimbra!
Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Coimbra Cineicc - Fpce-Uc Proaction Lab