Cognitive Neuroscience and Deep Learning Group

Welcome to the Bonner Lab at the Cognitive Science Department of Johns Hopkins University, led by Assistant Professor Mick Bonner. Our research focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and computational vision. We are dedicated to understanding how visual information is processed and represented in biological systems. Our approach combines neuroimaging and computational modeling to investigate the brain’s mechanisms for vision. We utilize advanced imaging techniques and deep learning models to explore the complex neural and computational underpinnings of visual perception.

Our goal is to uncover the core statistical principles governing visual representation in the brain. Our recent investigations have revealed that these representations are intrinsically high-dimensional and that new theoretical perspectives and methods are needed to understand the full complexity of human brain representations. These findings challenge traditional views of neural representations as low-dimensional objects, and they have inspired new directions of research into the computational and neural underpinnings of biological vision. Our ongoing work builds on these discoveries and seeks to push neuroscience research beyond the characterization of a handful of representational dimensions and toward a more comprehensive understanding of how the human brain operates in high dimensions.

Latest News

20 May 2026
Two talks and two posters presented by the Bonner Lab at this year’s VSS conference in St. Pete Beach, FL.
15 Apr 2026
Yash starts as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, working on AI agents for science.
12 Mar 2026
Mick Bonner receives the prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship for research in Germany.
18 Feb 2026
Yash received a $10,000 USD Google Gemini Research Grant to support computational cognitive science investigations.
15 Dec 2025
Kelsey’s paper on individual differences in visual experience accepted at Current Biology!
11 Dec 2025
Atlas’ Nature Machine Intelligence paper covered in The Baltimore Sun!
3 Nov 2025
Raj’s paper on High dimensional representations in the cortex accepted at PLOS comp bio!
7 Oct 2025
Atlas’ paper on Convolutional architectures are cortex-aligned de novo accepted at Nature Machine Intelligence!
20 May 2025
Ray’s paper on universal dimensions of vision accepted at Science Advances!
17 May 2025
Prof. Bonner presents ‘The AI Revolution in Visual Science’ talk at VSS conference.
15 May 2025
Yash begins research scientist internship at Sakana AI in Tokyo, focusing on AI for scientific discovery.
1 May 2025
Yingqi’s paper accepted as a full paper at CCN conference!