direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... maybe there's a way to study metacognitive monitoring w/o collecting confidence? could be handy for studying animals and infants?

Wow, that went fast! The PhD position is already filled - still accepting applications for the postdoc position! Feeling sorry for all the really promising candidates we had to turn down - the quality of applications has been unusually high in this round!

Arrived @ #VSS2026 @vssmtg.bsky.social 😎🌴 If you're here - come check out my talk on Monday! Revisiting Iconic Memory with a New Experimental Paradigm Room 2 May 18th, 10:45 (1st talk) Super fun collaboration with @johnmorrison.bsky.social & my 1st study from @michaelshadlen.bsky.social lab 🤩

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

How fast agentic AI has changed our work is head-spinning and there's been a lot of debate in our lab. So we drafted guidelines to help navigate this new reality. Sharing here in the hope it’s useful for others & curious to hear thoughts schucklab.gitlab.io/ai-policy.html #AcademicSky #compneurosky

In a new preprint w/ @tianqizhan.bsky.social & @smfleming.bsky.social, we developed a new measure of metacognitive bias (over/under confidence in individual decisions)! doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🎯New preprint! The resource-rational dynamics of evidence accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Evidence accumulation isn’t stationary. It is dynamically controlled to trade off information gain against cognitive effort. With Jiang Mao, Tobias Donner @donnerlab.bsky.social, Alan Stocker

Cognitive Modelling Research in the Era of Agentic Large Language Models From equations to fitted models in minutes: how LLMs are changing computational cognitive science and how we should adapt My latest post on Medium medium.com/@stefano.pal...

Spread the word! We are recruiting for 6 new research professors at UC Davis' California National Primate Research Center. Open rank, open area, but must leverage 🐒 resources. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07561

Many claim memory biases toward percepts reflect corruption in sensory signals. We challenge this view by showing that ppl adapt their integration rationally w/ experience. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history | osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you're interested in doing a 2 year Schmidt "AI in science" postdoc fellowship in neuroscience/AI stuff with me starting in July or Oct 2027 take a look at this and get in touch soon. We've had a lot of luck recently getting these fellowships. www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-e...

"we show that [the lateral prefrontal areas] 8Av/45 encodes the color of a visual stimulus, regardless of its behavioral relevance." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On the inseparability of the prior and neural resources in behavioural bias www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Top-down effects (of knowledge) on perception observed under ambiguous (low-light) conditions psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab: Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex @nature.com "..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... very nice paper on a mice model of blindsight i'm not sure if i'm fully convinced by their saliency control, but maybe i'm just picking hair let me explain: (a thread to follow)

Linking working memory maintenance and readout in monkey sensory and prefrontal cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

can i repost this 1000x please? learning to develop "good" research questions is so important, and so undercut by the "move fast break things" vibe coding mentality. (yes, i also vibe code... for weekend projects!) shameless plug for my recent paper on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Each year, people speak 338 less words per day (on average). These effects accumulate. In 2019, people were speaking 28% less words each day than in 2005 (!). journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... "mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation."

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!