The horizontal bias in visual processing is also evident in functional connectivity.

fully agree with Stefano. I spent years of my training learning to translate scientific thinking into models and code. if that’s no longer a bottleneck, what was the point — and what should replace it?

🚨 Congress held NIH and NSF budgets roughly flat. Scientists celebrated. Here is what actually happened. NIH awarded 4,641 fewer grants in FY2025 than the 4-year avg. New awards dropped 14%. Over $1.3B never reached investigators. NSF awards fell 22%. The money was there.

The President's Budget Request proposes a 47% cut to NASA Science, a 55% cut to NSF, and a 13% cut to the DOE Office of Science. AAS President Dr. Dara Norman sent a call to action to AAS members via email today. Urge your members of Congress to reject these cuts now! aas.org/reject-2027-...

Among the atrocities and contradictions, SBE is the NSF directorate that funds the brain and mind research relevant to NSF’s new AI-focused priorities. Make it make sense appears to be expecting too much (sigh).

NIH and NSF Updates (using graphs from grant-witness.us) NIH all awards (New and Non-Competitive Renewal, Type 1 and Type 5, consistent with what is shown on NIH Reporter) The flattening MAY be due to the lack of an OMB apportionment, which has now been remedied. 1/5

These are essential questions to be asking right now. Ignoring the power of these models (which are only getting smarter by the month) is a recipe for professional obsolescence for one's self and their students.

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions. Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October. No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out. Why...? 1/x source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv... 🟦🧠 #academicsky

Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos... I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...

Metacognition ppl, check out this upgraded hmetad package for estimating metacognitive metrics (e.g., M-ratio)! ☑️More efficient ☑️Easier to implement ☑️Comprehensive documentation ☑️New non-confounded measure of metacognitive bias (meta-delta) I’ve just applied this model to my data - working nicely!

Visual #workingmemory peeps, you're going to love this. This is super challenging - might give you pause on how we are measuring color memory... My color memory is a 40.4/50. Please do worse so I feel better. dialed.gg?c=3PCHDE

🚨New preprint alert! 🚨 Do multimodal LLMs (VLMs) reason about high-level visual perception like humans do? We asked over 2000 human observers and 18 VLMs to describe scenes using 15 different tasks, ranging from general knowledge, affordances, affect, sensory experiences, and future prediction. 1/

The recording of Mel Goodale's talk at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kThw....

Super proud of @sjoerdmeijer.bsky.social who demonstrated that amygdala-TUS slows initial threat acquisition and enhances subsequent extinction. Great collaboration with @lennartverhagen.bsky.social and @deVoogdld.bsky.social ea. Thanks to @ERC.europa.eu. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In a new preprint, we use a combination of 2AFC and discrimination tasks to quantify sensory, decisional, and metacognitive noise in units of the physical stimulus. We find that, across two experiments, sensory and decisional noise are comparable, while meta noise is lower. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Please repost! We have one postdoc and one PhD student position open in my lab (starting from Sept 2026), neuroscience of decision making and learning. Join us @hhu.de in gorgeous Düsseldorf! For details please look here: www.psychologie.hhu.de/en/research-... @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social

Humans happen to have the same problem... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32483374/ Conclusion : AI is human? 🤪😱🤦

A cautionary tale...!

Tomorrow is the day! Register now for this Meet-the-Expert webinar that will explore what a sensory stimulus has to achieve in the brain to enter into conscious awareness and possible translations for the blind. 🔗: vist.ly/4vxgh #neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter

Want to work on a belief-updating Bayesian framework to understand how tests for consciousness can be applied to artificial systems? Do you want a stipend to go along with that work? And opportunities to meet like-minded peers and do all sorts of fun workshops? Yeah you do. Come join me 😀

There is little work on NHPs now. Instead almost all the work is on mice. I can understand that this can tell us about human metabolism. But cognition depends on complex neural circuitry. We need to know what cognitive capacities we share with mice and what capacities are unique to primates or us.

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

check out the faculty supervising *funded fellowship projects*! (yes, me included!) you won't want to miss this opportunity folks. seriously, it will be fabulous.

This Friday, there will be an online conference on inner speech and conscious thinking, organized by David Vanegas of the University of Antioquia. I'll be giving a talk on inner speech, LLMs, and the authorship of conscious thought. Details and attendance link here: www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=...

Next up: Keynote Speaker Announcements. Introducing the first speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Prof. Hakwan Lau will present a keynote lecture titled "Prefrontal Mechanisms for Perception."

Human vision maintains a rich representation of objects moving behind an occluder www.cell.com/current-biol... A special form of mental imagery?

any metacognition people looking at the effect of LLM usage on metacognitive sensitivity? (in any context)

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

Hey #visionscience friends - I'm looking to touch base with someone who knows lots about color, esp. contrast/assimilation effects. I'm working on a video about something and I'm worried I'm getting tangled up in part of the explanation. Thanks!

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence. w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk 🧠📈

New paper from the lab in which we test whether DDM and confidence distributions can be used to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. We show that putative signatures of perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Would there be interest in a "scientific programming with agents" writeup? I'd build the same R package with different LLM agents, and see how far each gets. I'd evaluate and what a good prompting strategy is, and how we could train our future students who'll never code themselves.

Our paper (with Ashish Sahoo, who is on the job market for post-docs!), now published in Neuropsychologia, used AI approaches to relate navigation ability to hippocampal structure. Did it work? News coverage: www.uta.edu/news/news-re... Publication: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41443585/

We're looking for a postdoc starting this summer to join our efforts in understanding the capacity limits of cognition: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of? In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch

How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience? We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this. Come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...

The recording of Marco Tamietto's talk "Vision Without Awareness: from structures to networks" at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGNy....

Our new paper is out in Cognition! What determines whether confidence follows the classic "folded-X" pattern vs. the "double-increase" pattern? The answer lies in the type of stimulus manipulation. Big thanks to my advisor Doby @dobyrahnev.bsky.social and co-first author @herrickfung.bsky.social !

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted. see our comment: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues Different species see the world as fast as they need to...

I'm very excited about the schedule of next week's workshop! 👇 Come join us via Zoom, in case of interest! #ConSci

The European Summer School "Visual Neuroscience" in Rauischholzhausen castle, Germany, is coming back in 2026! Deadline: 8 March 2026 www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/rauisch/

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy? What does the term 'representation' mean to you? We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields. eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

One community addressing the "species problem" is the Gordon Research Conference on the Frontal Cortex, which intentionally built itself on bridging connections between researchers studying human, NHP, and rodents of all kinds. www.grc.org/frontal-cort...

a while back i threatened to share this. finally online for detection tasks we often systematically estimates sensitivity wrong. we need to control for unequal variance in models, but we often don't coz it needs extra data now there's a virtually 'free' way to do it www.cell.com/iscience/pdf...

Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307

Next session of the MIT Consciousness Club this Thursday, 12pm-1:30pm. Marco Tamietto will talk about his work on blindsight. More details here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con...