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In recent years, neuroscience has made significant progress in building large-scale artificial neural network (ANN) models of brain activity and behavior. However, there is no consensus on the most efficient ways to collect data and design…

Neuroscience has recently made much progress, expanding the complexity of both neural-activity measurements and brain-computational models. However, we lack robust methods for connecting theory and experiment by evaluating our new big…

As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more accessible, and scientists face new obstacles to data collection (e.g. rising costs, declining survey response rates), researchers increasingly use predictions from…

A major challenge in both neuroscience and machine learning is the development of useful tools for understanding complex information processing systems. One such tool is probes, i.e., supervised models that relate features of interest to…

Innovation is the direct intended product of certain styles in research, but not of others. Fundamental conflicts between descriptive vs inferential statistics, deductive vs inductive hypothesis testing, and exploratory vs pre-planned…

In recent years, the field of neuroscience has gone through rapid experimental advances and a significant increase in the use of quantitative and computational methods. This growth has created a need for clearer analyses of the theory and…

The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of…

The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…

The currently dominating artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, neural networks, builds on inductive statistical learning. Neural networks of today are information processing systems void of understanding and reasoning…

Neuroscience is undergoing faster changes than ever before. Over 100 years our field qualitatively described and invasively manipulated single or few organisms to gain anatomical, physiological, and pharmacological insights. In the last 10…

Statistical analysis is an important tool to distinguish systematic from chance findings. Current statistical analyses rely on distributional assumptions reflecting the structure of some underlying model, which if not met lead to problems…

In order to gain a mechanistic understanding of how tinnitus emerges in the brain, we must build biologically plausible computational models that mimic both tinnitus development and perception, and test the tentative models with brain and…

A growing body of work makes use of probing to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the…

The tension between qualitative theorizing and quantitative methods is pervasive in the social sciences, and poses a constant challenge to empirical research. But in science studies as an interdisciplinary specialty, there are additional…

The brain is a powerful tool used to achieve amazing feats. There have been several significant advances in neuroscience and artificial brain research in the past two decades. This article is a review of such advances, ranging from the…

Causal inference methods (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, etc.) are primary tools used across many social science milieus. One area where their application has lagged however, is in the study of…

Recent advances in probabilistic modelling have led to a large number of simulation-based inference algorithms which do not require numerical evaluation of likelihoods. However, a public benchmark with appropriate performance metrics for…

Quantum theory, originally proposed as a physical theory to describe the motions of microscopic particles, has been applied to various non-physics domains involving human cognition and decision-making that are inherently uncertain and…

With the wide adoption of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) by cognitive neuroscience researchers, large volumes of brain imaging data have been accumulated in recent years. Aggregating these data to derive scientific insights…

Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…