I've been trying to think through my misgivings about machine psychology. I think it's reasonable to argue that cognitive science should try to understand all cognitive systems, including machines. And it would be useful to know the biases of agents we are interacting with or delegating work to.

$600 million dollar bet by Astera Foundation to solve consciousness via reading and writing of neural activity led by Doris Tsao. astera.org/neuroscienti...

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

If we look back at old science papers, what percentage drew incorrect conclusions? I don't mean how many had data that turned out to be flawed, but how many used good data to claim something that later turned out to be Wrong? I suspect the percentage is quite high but it would be hard to check.

New paper: Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception. With Dan Freeman, @brianodegaard.bsky.social, and Seung-Schik Yoo. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Delighted to share our new Perspective article @natrevneuro.nature.com, led by the great @edoardochidichimo.bsky.social : "Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination". With @loopyluppi.bsky.social, Pedro Mediano, @introspection.bsky.social, Victoria Leong and Richard Bethlehem.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This study aimed to investigate how working memory interacts with perception at the behavioral level. We examined whether working memory modulates subjective perception when the general capacity for perceptual processing is kept constant. 1/

Folks: a few weeks ago, I came across a post on bsky about genAI in the classroom, linking to a google doc that was essentially "Yes, we thought about that" for *all* the ways to combat cheating with genAI. "Don't do cop shit" was a repeating theme. I have tried so hard to find it, but failed. Help?

Adults who were required to use #GenAI to answer LSAT questions did better than a no-AI control group, but the GenAI group also exhibited greater metacognitive inaccuracy. I'd like to see some conceptual replications before drawing firm conclusions. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

If you're interested in auditory neuroscience and doctoral work, reach out! I'm one of the mentors listed for CSD's (@ucf.bsky.social) new PhD program and would love to recruit a kind, curious, and enthusiastic new member of the conscious audition and scene analysis (CASA) lab. tinyurl.com/m9www9rc

Correlation detection as a stimulus computable account for AV perception, causal inference & saliency maps in mammals elifesciences.org/articles/106... Image- & sound-computable population model for AV perception -> Used simulation to model psychophysical, eye-tracking & pharmacological experiments

"How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making"! Now out in @commspsychol.nature.com w @annikaboldt.bsky.social & Yishu Sun Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence #Metacognition #Confidence

Nothing in teaching gives me anxiety like trying to get across the Baddeley & Hitch working memory model. Any tips to make it intuitive to undergrads? especially the episodic buffer?

In my #Neuropsychology course, I use many patient videos to give examples of various consequences of brain injury. Some of these are really excellent and can be tricky to find, so I thought I'd share this doc with links to some of my favorites - a brief 🧵with some highlights. (more to come later!)

🚨🚨 New tenure-track job posting! 🚨🚨 The University of Florida is hiring an Assistant Professor in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, with an open research focus. Job ad here: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53... Here's some info about why you should apply to this job! 1/

Finally had a chance to read this study on conceptual alignment in human communication. Using a clever repeated reference game, it provides quantitative evidence that interaction drives people to converge on a shared, generalizable conceptual space: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05566 @rdhawkins.bsky.social

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

This paper in @cp-iscience.bsky.social led by Laura Doll and Alexander Gutschalk @uniheidelberg.bsky.social was published last year, but I'm highlighting it again b/c I think it's really cool and has all the things: M/EEG, pupillometry, awareness ratings, SDT. #consci 🧠💻 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

🚨 TT job alert! 🚨 The University of Florida is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology; open to ALL AREAS within social psych. Review begins 10/10. Job ad here: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53... I'm co-chair of the search committee and happy to answer questions! 🧵

Our spotlight article on Goueytes et al. (2025) study is now online at Trends in Neurosciences: "Pre- and post-decision signals of certainty in changing minds", by P. Barttfeld, @ncomay.bsky.social, I. Embon & @guillermosolovey.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

Saurabh Ranjan, my first PhD student, has some interesting new work investigating vividness reports from the VVIQ-2 and PSI-Q in humans and LLMs, using tools from psychological network analysis. See his thread for more details.

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg: #psychskysci #neuroscience doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

🚨 Out now in @commspsychol.nature.com 🚨 doi.org/10.1038/s442... Our #RegisteredReport tested whether the order of task decisions and confidence ratings bias #metacognition. Some said decisions → confidence enhances metacognition. If true, decades of findings will be affected.

NSF GRFP solicitation is up, deadline extended to November www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

The influence of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program really cannot be overstated. The fact that there is still no solicitation for this year is unfair to students and risks damaging the future of American science. Please take 30 seconds to sign the open letter to US STEM Leadership 🧪🌎

paper is up~ This study examines performance evaluation in perceptual detection tasks using response-time-based signal detection theory (SDT) analysis. A defining feature of detection tasks is the asymmetry between trials with stimulus presence and absence, often reflected in ....

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio. led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

🚨The SCANN Lab @ UTA is hiring a postdoctoral researcher!🚨 Topics: 🧭 spatial navigation, 🧠 fMRI, 🎮 VR, 👵 cognitive aging. Start date: Nov 2025 (flexible). Salary: NIH levels. Details 👇

Our open-access article - Testing circuit-level theories of consciousness in humans - together with Yunkai Zhu, Carolina Fernandez Pujol, @dvwz.bsky.social, @jonescompneurolab.bsky.social, @tmarvan.bsky.social, and @danclab.bsky.social, was just published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social.

Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o. Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

Might focused ultrasound one day replace DBS? UK Scientists built a 256-panel focused ultrasound helmet that can precisely target deep brain regions. Using theta-burst TUS, they stimulated the LGN and found visual cortex activity with effects lasting up to 40 minutes. #neuroskyence #ultrasound

We are running a virtual hackathon for #hacktober! Info and signup here: jspsych.github.io/hackathon/virtual_2025.html We will be hosting drop in office hours help during the hackathon, so this is a great chance to level up your jspsych skills!

Once multisensory information is integrated, participants cannot access the unisensory information to evaluate their perceptual decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am leading a workshop tonight for students in my department on how to apply for the NSF GRFP, but have not received answers from NSF to my questions about whether they are still funding applications in neuroscience and cognitive science, etc. If anyone has info please let me know. (continued)

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... "Extensive work has shown that the visual cortex is reactivated during mental imagery"; #neuroscience

Psychologists, apply! Apparently we've mainly gotten CS applicants so far. I'd (selfishly) love to have a psychologist. Interests in AI in relation to e.g., implicit bias; cultural influences; fairness; perception; learning & memory; decision making etc. would be a good fit!

What are your pros/cons of using AI in science? Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.

Decision-making modellers - any tips for interactive classroom demonstrations to teach about sequential sampling models (DDMs)? Sure, it's fine to show an RT distribution but more fun to have the students do a few trials themselves and see outcomes. Online or offline games could work.

We have been working on a project where we try to "break" Weber's law, but to our surprise the law itself is pretty flimsy under standard conditions. I'm curious to hear any suggestions for a robust demonstration (specifically, where the just noticeable difference is proportional to magnitude).

Slight change of schedule: the first session of the MIT Consciousness Club will be Friday September 19. All talks will be in MIT building 46 room 3310. Still working on a zoom option but that should end up happening. sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

Could we understand vision as a type of problem-solving? In this new paper, we develop a computational model that iteratively refines the hypothesis about the visual input with evolutionary search. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... work led by @tarunkhajuria.bsky.social #visionscience #neuroAI

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

Okay everyone, things are getting serious. I’m going to teach research methods again, 1st year psychology undergraduates. What would you cover with respects to philosophy of science, the research process etc.? I’m not very happy with the textbook stuff so I’m open to all ideas!

Seems as good a time as any to re-share the "OpenLists" collection - an openly accessible set of lists of available resources in / for Cognitive Neuroscience! Includes open M/EEG & iEEG datasets & open software / analysis tools, and resources for DSP, Python, git, etc: openlists.github.io

New from Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social lab: Mental rotation is often regarded as paradigmatic for #mentalimagery. But it turns out people often don't use imagery for mental rotation - & when they do it is often not useful (same viewpoint trials). #visionscience #psychscisky doi.org/10.1016/j.co...