And it's out now in Cortex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Summary below 🧵

Excited to be presenting new EEG results from my PhD at this years @acnsau.bsky.social annual meeting in Melbourne. If you're interested in how priors affect multivariate stimulus representations in the brain come through to the Sensation and Perception stream this afternoon! #ACNS2025

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Margaret Jane Moore, Amanda K. Robinson, and Jason B. Mattingley: Expectation dynamically modulates the representational time course of objects and locations doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11

Just published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible… www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/10

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

My final Registered Report from my PhD is now out in Cortex! We investigated the role of dopamine & HD-tDCS in mind wandering & sustained attention. While stimulation had no effect, increasing dopamine reduced spontaneous thought and may protect against performance deficits. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!

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

New paper @ JOV! With Matt Oxner, Frank Schumann and David Carmel. 🧠 Perception of ambiguous motion is shaped by recent visual experience - but does this differ across the visual field? Yes! Full open access paper here (Gastrell et al., 2025, Journal of Vision): 🔗 doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 🧵

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

William James's take on psychophysics is *incredible*. Worth reading the whole quote. #psychSciSky #philsky #VisionScience "But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods,

Out now in AP&P!

Cognitive psych is often traced back to the 1950s. Psychology is often traced to Wundt's lab in 1879. Textbooks speak of "proto-psychologists" like Fechner & Helmholtz in the 1800s... Westerners all. Have you heard about Ibn al-Haytham, whose work predated them by 100s of years? 1/4

Excited to share my first paper: a novel visual illusion discovered by my co-authors Will Turner and Hinze Hogendoorn which we call the "Split-Stimulus Effect", in which a single flashed stimulus is perceived to be in two different locations simultaneously jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... [1/5]

New from my lab: "Priors for natural image statistics inform confidence in perceptual decisions" We used a natural image statistics approach to investigate the computations underlying perceptual confidence. 🧵 Article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“The PhD stipend is $33,511 … well below minimum wage of $47,627” “Universities can raise the stipend to a maximum of $52,352, but a ACGR survey found none have done so. The highest stipend is just over $40,000 … with the average at $34,244.” #RaiseTheStipend

🖨️ Fresh off the press! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We have shown that the brain processes visual input differently as a function of display density, violating predictions of dominant cognitive control theories.

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception: http://osf.io/e6tdy/

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None" osf.io/preprints/ps... (this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

An absolute pleasure to present some new data at ACNS 2024 in (mostly) sunny Newcastle. Here we showed that human observers judgements of simple motion stimuli broadly follow precision-weighted inference principles. @acnsau.bsky.social