When reading a line like "the glow of the flame briefly illuminated his face", most readers tend to build an image in their mind. 🧠 People with aphantasia, however, report that they do not. We wanted to know: Does this change how they physically read stories? (1/5)

are better-performing face recognition models more human-like? turns out: NO in terms of how we see/treat different faces as similar/different to each other, there seems to be tradeoff: better models are LESS human-like so they already work in some 'alien' ways... osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠📈🧠🤖🧠💻

Numerosity adaptation suppresses monotonic neural responses to numerosity displays in the early visual cortex, with more suppression for higher numerosity adaptors. Therefore, numerosity adaptation effects begin in early sensory stages of processing. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Happy to be on this new paper: "Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems" - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... The paper expands on some of the methodological points made in the Butlin et al. 2023 report on AI Consciousness.

More evidence of continuous flash suppression / binocular rivalry under anesthesia (in mice): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here rdcu.be/es8A1 we respond to the recent (unfair) editorial in Nature about recent criticisms of IIT theory of consciousness. We keep fighting for transparent and serious science. @hakwan.bsky.social @felipedebrigard.bsky.social @deanbuono.bsky.social

The brilliant @rastokke.bsky.social showing how shoddy evidence can spread like wildfire and how this has serious consequences #rEDTO25

Is vision modular or not? The debate continues. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

How can we resolve ambiguous visual input? To answer this question, Mooney images meets THINGS and large scale behavior! Amazing effort by an amazing crew in Granada, and happy to play a small part in it!

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel. buff.ly/ypISrtx

who says that science doesn't generate profit?

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

new preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... aphantasics reported to feel less 'absorbed' as they read stories, but they dwelled just as much on words that typically evoke imagery. so perhaps they just didn't realize they have (non-conscious) imagery too Ali Moharramipour's 1st paper as senior author 🧠📈

check out our METACOGNITIVE SCIENCE MEETING!! in collaboration with @cogcompneuro.bsky.social !! come one come all to Amsterdam in August!

We are extremely excited to announce the 4th edition of the Metacognitive Science Meeting (formerly known as the Perceptual Metacognition Satellite) - to be held on August 11th 2025, right before @cogcompneuro.bsky.social in Amsterdam! For info and how to submit: sites.google.com/view/metacog...

i used to have blog on consciousness. i just uploaded my final post there, in which i responded to Alex Gomez-Marin & Anil Seth's recent commentary on the scientific status of IIT. inconsciousnesswetrust.blogspot.com/2025/03/fina... so long, folks. the world is going nuts. pls take care. 🧠📈

Remember the controversy about IIT last year - I have great sympathy to the critical side? Well if you want to think a bit about what pseudosciences are and whether we can distinguish science and paeudoscience here is a new short book ffeee download. t.co/6YvZ1kwLti

Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...

Now longer and in nature neuroscience. Why I (and 60+ of my closest friends) think IIT is pseudoscience. Has no empirical evidence. Has no hope of future empirical evidence. Open and closed case in my view.

Analog computing with waves. It's a thing. It's powerful and way more energy efficient than digital computing. The brain doesn’t just discard those useful waves. Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... #neuroscience

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu). Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993). Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025. Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

Why hypothesis testing is not the way forward to understand brains: medium.com/@kording/hyp...

Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, alters perception and induces hallucinations. In this preprint, we show through visual illusions, fMRI and modeling that psilocybin affects contextual computations, a potentially general mechanism of psychedelics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to [email protected] by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

I am hiring a full time study coordinator for our EBI-BD study which uses EEG, cognitive testing, EMA, and wearables to study emotion-based impulsivity in bipolar disorder. Excellent position for someone who is interested in grad school! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula... The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵

informal announcement: we'll be doing a *cluster* hire of faculty in theoretical/computational neuroscience in the coming year(s). a senior/mid-career person could be selected to bring in 2-3 more ppl of their choosing (subject to committee approval), or we could otherwise hire together a group 1/

Worth also pointing out that there are many "tests so easy no AI system can pass them". Moravec's paradox remains. E.g., arxiv.org/abs/2404.12390

New article out from the lab led by graduate student Ronan O'Shea on the V1 representation of day and night vision. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Human have higher sensitivity in the lower compared to upper visual field. It turns out that macaques show the opposite pattern: www.cell.com/current-biol.... I'd hypothesize that this is evidence that neither of these effects is innate; instead, they both develop with experience. #VisionScience

Why does it feel good to be sure? In new work @voalan.bsky.social @andero.bsky.social and I bridge confidence and affect. In perceptual DM, we found a remarkably consistent association between both measures! ↓↓↓ link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

osf.io/preprints/ps... nice article, on why we may be totally wrong about aphantasia = imagery blindsight but i'm not sure i agree that for imagery representations to be perception-like, they need to be cross-decodable w/ normal perception. the brain can multiplex two sets of iconic signals 🧠📈

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents doi.org/10.1016/j.ti... #neuroscience

Weak and strong memories are equally reactivated during counterfactual learning, but only weak memories are modified: http://osf.io/js6qd/

"Faces with neutral expression appear to bear a negatively valenced expression and appear higher in emotional arousal when lit from below—an illusion of facial expression where none really exists." Illusory facial expressions caused by lighting direction. doi.org/10.1037/xge0... #PsycSciSky

NOW OUT in Scientific Reports! the latest from @mehdiorouji.bsky.social, me, and many others! Task relevant autoencoding enhances machine learning for human neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41... thread 🧵👇

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

THREAD This Is The Story Of The The Pernicious Rise of AI-Generated Papers and their Online Impact An Incomplete History Told In The Voice of Documentarian Adam Curtis 1/31

🚨 New paper out with @samnastase.bsky.social and @haxbylab.bsky.social! We use representational similarity analysis to test how well behavioral, semantic, and visual models capture cortical representational geometries when viewing naturalistic action videos: doi.org/10.1101/2024...

authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHSZ4sIRv... in this short letter in TICS, @matthiasmichel.bsky.social & @jorge-morales.bsky.social argue against the episodic memory deficit interpretation of aphantasia proposed by @andreablomkvist.bsky.social. a lack of imagery awareness may be all there is 1/2

This is the part where the most obvious disanalogy is brushed away as 'beside the point'. Empirical support can't be 'beside the point' when judging whether a theory is scientific or not.

This was their second choice, the first idea was “Galileo was also persecuted for his beliefs”

Nothing helps beat the pseudoscience label like humbly comparing your theory with no empirical support to the theory of general relativity 😂

Fascinating new blindsight piece from Beatrice de Gelder, Nicholas Humphrey, and my wonderful UQ colleague Alan Pegna, about their blindsight patient (TM) - who not only accurately detects colour but reports the 'experience' of colour, especially red #visionscience doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

Postdoc alert! Come work with me on an ESRC project on the role of narratives in the learning and retention of educational material. 2 year position, start date flexible but no later than 1st September. Application deadline 1st March. #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

How outrage drives the spread of online misinformation. New work from @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social with Bluesky luminaries @klonick.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, @williambrady.bsky.social and colleagues. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2829