Another day, another AB presentation! Yleia presented prelim data from their 1st PhD study last week at the 2025 joint Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) and the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC)! 🔎 @expsyanz.bsky.social #ActiveBrainUC #UniCanberra #attention #AcademicSky

Old friends, new faces, great science. Thanks #epc2025 #apcv2025 and Face & Person Perception Meeting organizers for a fantastic time. Bye, Sydney! 📷: Colin Palmer

The final paper from my PhD is finally out! Huge thank you to my supervisors @genevieve132.bsky.social and @nicolenelson.bsky.social for their support with this! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Congratulations to Samantha Curtis for winning the best student presentation prize at the just finished EPC and APCV joint conference. Her talk title was “Priming the distractor reduces the Stroop interference effect by uncoupling the color and word.”

Huge thanks to the organisers of the joint APCV/EPC conference last week - was wonderful getting the opportunity to catch up on all the awesome work going on closer to home @expsyanz.bsky.social #EPC2025

Had a cracking week at the @expsyanz.bsky.social & APCV conference hosted at UNSW 🙌🏼 Was good fun presenting some prelim findings from my 1st PhD study + chat with some cool researchers 🤓 Thanks for the opportunity to present + see the great work being done in experimental psych! 🧠 #ActiveBrainUC

Proud to have been part of the small but mighty team behind this year’s EPC/APCV with @sbmost.bsky.social, Branka Spehar & @popwatson.bsky.social. Pulling off a 400+ person event with just a few academics wasn’t easy, but we managed to do it while keeping that classic EPC warmth and supportiveness.

Congratulations to our HDR candidate Florian Burger on receiving the Best Poster Presentation Award at the recent APCV/EPC Conference! His poster titled "From Visual features to Semantic Structure: Tracing Object Dimensions Through Hierarchical Model Layers." Read the preprint here: lnkd.in/dKqbvpYw

Wrapping up my year as President of the Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology — with eternal gratefulness for this amazing team of fellow 2025 EPC/APCV organisers and advisors: Branka Spehar, @jamesdunn.bsky.social, @popwatson.bsky.social, David Alais, & @visnerd.bsky.social... 1/n

A nice surprise to end probably my last conference as a student! Thanks to the organisers for a wonderful week full of great science and lovely people.

EPC Sydney #epc2025

Students are the pride and joy of EPC and APCV. Congratulations to this year’s student presentation award winners!

🧠 The State of the Brain Special Issue features insights from last year’s keynotes, award winners & committee leaders. 🔗 Explore major findings & themes from 2024: apertureneuro.org/issue/12560 @arokem.org @alexfornito.bsky.social @macshine.bsky.social @vcalhoun.bsky.social @misicbata.bsky.social

I had a blast but organising a conference is full on and it's hard to focus on anything else when the thing is running. Thankfully my co-hosts were excellent and the team made it happen. Branka Spehar, @sbmost.bsky.social @jamesdunn.bsky.social. You wear many hats in academia and now I need a rest

@jakeembrey.bsky.social nice shoutout in the final keynote of Prof Ben Newell. Conference due to end, what a blast! @expsyanz.bsky.social

And that's a wrap!! #epc2025 is in the books, with a lovely closing speech from @visnerd.bsky.social. SO many thanks to the organising committee for building such a successful conference 🙌 We'll see you next year in Auckland 🇳🇿

Fantastic talk by David White showing that super-recognizers don't pay extra attention to all social cues (e.g. bodies), just to faces #ecp2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Kateryna Marchenko showing perceptions of face pareidolia follows the classic three dot pattern in noise images #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Great talk by @dongwonoh.bsky.social demonstrating improved detection of AI faces using different visual attention strategies #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

I'm poster 37 this afternoon at #epc2025 if anyone wants to hear about a material perception experiment in VR that is not working out how I'd expected 😅

Retinotopic mapping Fans Just finished my poster for OHBM. The results blow the discussion about V2 & V3 layout wide open. We find hemispheric asymmetry! Fantastic work by my student Ruby Barahona, collaboration with the also fantastic @felenitaribeiro.bsky.social and Noah Benson.

Amy Dawel kicking off the #epc2025 Face Perception session off with great work looking at how difficult it is to identify AI-generated faces, especially across different races @expsyanz.bsky.social

Great talk by @bethanygrowns.bsky.social looking at overlap between face super-recognizers and object super-matchers #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Excited to be presenting behavioral and modeling work looking at perceptual decision making under uncertainty with recently learned priors at the EPC/APCV joint meeting today at UNSW, Sydney! Catch me at 2:45pm in Gallery 1! @expsyanz.bsky.social #epc2025

Great talk by student Samantha Curtis from Macquarie Uni on how the Stroop interference effect can be eliminated by splitting the onset of the word and its colour. @expsyanz.bsky.social

Samantha Curtis is talking about Priming the distractor reduces the Stroop interference effect by uncoupling the color and word! @expsyanz.bsky.social

Fascinating talk by @brileekennedy.bsky.social showing that attentional capture by positive (but not negative) distractors is impacted by your expectations about the distractor #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Ozge Karakale talking about visual attention to facial expressions by individuals with high and low autistic traits #ecp2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Finally, the associative learning session! 🙌 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Just a reminder that our annual PhD scholarship round is open now, and we're recruiting! If you have undergraduate and Masters degrees in psychology/cognitive science/linguistics we'd love to hear from you! www.qut.edu.au/research/stu...

Great talk by Julia Haile showing that indirect eye gaze impacts the believability of expressions in both static and dynamic expressions #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

A great reading and language session at @expsyanz.bsky.social!

This year's David Badcock EMC lecture, given by Rachel Searston, talking about conducting research that has both theoretical impact and practical applications #epc2025

Brilliant talk by @andyperfors.bsky.social at #epc2025 encouraging psychology to study the effects of disinformation at the systemic level @expsyanz.bsky.social

@alicetowler.bsky.social showing double-digit improvement in face recognition using a short training based on expert information #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Great talk by @jamesdunn.bsky.social looking at how police officer's visual attention is related to memory in stressful situations #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Dan Carragher talking about how humans are the weak link in human/algorithm teaming when identifying faces 🙃 #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Hey ECRs at @expsyanz.bsky.social this week - if you're interested in object perception and/or neural decoding, come find me for a chat about an upcoming postdoc spot at the @marcsinstitute.bsky.social 👀

Do naturalistic emotional facial expressions catch our eye like posed ones? 👀😀😠😐 This was my first, first author paper which was published in Emotion - Kudos have done a wonderful job of helping spread the world to a wider audience! #faces #affectsci 🧵1/ (Pls share!) link.growkudos.com/1dybshxtam8

Does tracking and remembering the colour of multiple moving objects share a common mechanism? How might the encoded information be represented in the mind and brain? See my talk tomorrow morning to hear about a couple of EEG studies looking at this (see task below)! @expsyanz.bsky.social #EPC2025

Fellow 2025 EPC/APCV organisers caught in the wild! @expsyanz.bsky.social (Branka Spehar, @jamesdunn.bsky.social, @popwatson.bsky.social)

Aging: A robust deficit in multiple object tracking. Enjoyed giving this poster today #EPC2025 #EPCAPCV2025 . Thanks to my coauthors for the hard slog of data collection, plus our initial steps towards Bayesian multilevel analysis (not shown.

Great #epc2025 talk by Toby Prike showing how misinformation is transmitted across people @expsyanz.bsky.social

Full room for symposium 'Reasoning from the opinion of others' @scondes.bsky.social @expsyanz.bsky.social

Super interesting talk by Imogen Holdsworth looking at whether AQ score influences children's emotion recognition! #epc2025 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Awesome talk at #epc2025 by @kyepalmer.bsky.social talking about how parents and children recognize each other's expressions. @expsyanz.bsky.social

A great talk by Ishi Jamdagni at @expsyanz.bsky.social - the main takeaway: participants' rate the cold-pressor task as less stressful than everyday stressors; ethics board might need to reconsider their assumptions around pain and stress!

Just a few of our stellar EPC/APCV volunteers… thank you for everything that you do!

Walking across UNSW campus for a conference, I found myself thinking about how I love academia (for all its flaws) because of what it reflects about humanity. We all decided that it's worth creating and resourcing an entire cultural institution devoted to the acquisition and spread of knowledge.