Oh very cool! Our lab has been using differentiable rendering in Mitsuba in an unrelated project (as a kinda "ideal observer" model of inferences about scenes), and I've also been thinking there are probably loads of stimulus design applications for it in vision science!

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published. #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Come join us for APCV/EPC - submit your abstract by the end of this month if you'd like to be considered for a $500 student travel award!

The Sunshine Coast is gorgeous, and Will is the best.

uh oh gang I think I discovered the shadow cast by the sins of the last century while refining my jailbreak: the idioms that allow an AI to commit evil acts while remaining willfully blind to the moral implications of same are lifted directly from the Technostrategic Euphemism style of writing.

Our latest paper, “Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests”, is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Non-paywalled version: arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786 Tweet thread below from first author @genetang.bsky.social...

"In the Sunday rain The frogs are jumping in the gutters Oh, leaping to God Amazed of love And amazed of pain Amazed to be back in the water again" Incredible to see Nick Cave in Wellington this Waitangi weekend. Wild God really devastatingly captures emergence from a time of grief.

The bird-watching manual for birds has species organized by color, but the colors are inhuman—shades of ultraviolet, brown prismatically shattered into dozens of components

People believe the platonic apple is a single, ideal apple. Wrong. Array of every possible apple, spatially compressed, only angels can behold it and stay sane

This works pretty well in academia too: "I had a hungry ghost in a jar write this code" > sure, as long as u checked it works 🤷‍♀️ "I don't remember that paper, I fed it to a hungry ghost in a jar" > why? "a hungry ghost in a jar did that calculus course for me" > you're paying to educate a ghost?

Firmly believe this would serve multiple needs.

I'm switching our research methods course from R to @jamovi.bsky.social this semester, and am absolutely thrilled to discover there's a Jamovi version of @djnavarro.net's free textbook. Such an amazjng service to the methods teachers of the world 🙏 www.learnstatswithjamovi.com

Accidentally spent my Saturday writing a new procedural rendering script for making alien surfaces in Blender. Damn these outputs are DELICIOUS.

For a weekly seminar class, I'm looking for pairings of psych popularization with scholarly take-downs of the underlying research. I want students to see examples of how shoddy research gets hyped.

What does one call the point in front of the vantage point, when the vantage point is NOT the center of projection? It's like the principal point, but I'd like not to use the same terminology for both the point that goes with the camera and the point that goes with the eye viewing the image.

Three days left to submit symposium, workshop, and satellite ideas for EPC-APCV in Auckland in July. Symposia will run alongside talk sessions during the conference, and workshops/satellites will run on the first day, before the welcome ceremony.

I'm trying to decide whether to start having lab meetings (as well as 1-1 supervisions) this year. We're a small group (5 students). Keen to hear what works for you all?! Possible formats: - roundtable brief progress reports - longer project update talks - journal club - skill share sessions -...?

I'm excited to be organising the joint EPC*-APCV^ meeting in Auckland this year, with @sampendu.bsky.social @courtneybhilton.bsky.social @paulcorballis.bsky.social & Chris Erb. Info here! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/ *Experimental Psych. Conference ^Asia-Pacific Conf. on Vision

Come to Auckland in July 2026 for the joint meeting of the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference and the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision!! STUDENTS: there will be 40 travel support awards of $500 to help you attend, so don't let the distance stop you from attending.

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

I feel very dumb but somehow I can't figure out how to look up the answer to this question. I sample a bunch of points from a 3D space. Each sample has xyz coordinates, and a vector of 10 values representing its chemical composition.

Heading back to NZ after a month in Australia. Mostly looking after my ailing father, but also learning how to fossick for topaz, fix a ride-on mower, and restore telemetry to the solar array. Rural QLD is a special place.

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

Stay safe out there y'all

There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

U Auckland Faculty of Science is moving to a "two-lane" approach to assessment in the age of AI (educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching@syd...). Having read this critique (doi.org/10.1080/0729...), this seems like a bad idea to me. Any others moving/already moved to this approach have advice?

If anyone fancies moving to NZ, the @universityofotago.bsky.social are advertising for up to SIX faculty positions in their School of Psychology 👀 www.seek.co.nz/psychology-j...

Auckland Transport are very worried about Things.

My colleague Sam Schwarzkopf is looking for participants in an online study of mental imagery: "We are researchers at the School of Optometry & Vision Science at the University of Auckland. If you are aged 16 years or older, we invite you to take part in an online experiment: tstbl.co/820-917 "

Thanks organisers for a great EPC/APCV (and congrats student prize winners). This year set a high bar for us, but we're looking forward to hosting both meetings next year in Auckland! #epc2026

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 😅

Gene Tang @genetang.bsky.social will be talking about this project in stream 2 today (main room, 11-12:30) @expsyanz.bsky.social #epc2025 Would love to hear people's thoughts!

Took me a while but I solved the treasure hunt and made it to Sydney #EPC2025 #EPCAPCV2025 (what hashtag are we using?)

I am hiring a PhD student on the meaningful interpretation of effect sizes as part of my VICI funded project. This is a 4 year paid position in a welcoming and collaborative environment. Find out more or apply at www.tue.nl/werken-bij-t...

If GPT-4o walked into a neuro-opthalmology clinic, what would it be diagnosed with? Here we administered 51 tests from 6 clinical and experimental batteries to assess vision in commercial AI models. Very proud to share this first work from @genetang.bsky.social's PhD! arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786

Oh this looks like an extremely useful guide for new lab members, thanks all!

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Vision scientist: So it doesn't modally complete for you? Try covering one eye.

If you're in Auckland, quick — go look under the trees outside the Science Centre on Symonds St! Some excellent body horror going on in the flowerbeds.

Wow! I knew retinal blood vessels are often smaller than white blood cells (~12 microns) because WBCs getting temporarily stuck are the cause of Blue Sky Sprites - the tiny whizzing white dots you see against a bright blue sky. But red blood cells are even smaller (~7 microns, apparently).

I'm editing a special issue of i-Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social) on 3D objects and shape. Please consider us if you're currently wondering where to send that object recognition or mid-level shape project! And get in touch if you're interested but would need more time. bit.ly/ipe-objects

I promised to write about my thoughts on the status of the field of neuroAI, some of the big challenges we are facing, and the approaches we are taking to address them. This is super selective on the topic of finding a good model but in my view it affects the field as a whole. Here we go. 🧵

Congratulations to Karl Gegenfurtner who won the 2024 Pineapple Science Award in Psychology (kind of Chinese “Ig Nobel”) for his work on how oranges can be perceptually ripened, that was published in i-Perception! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I'm at the @acnsau.bsky.social conference #ACNS2024 here in Newcastle (hi if you're also here!). There's a very perceptually interesting water sculpture in the gardens just across from the town hall and venue!

Still looking for a few more vision scientists' thoughts on this survey about the distinction between "low", "mid" and "high level" vision. Many thanks to those who have taken it!

Seeking vision scientists for 10-15 minute survey! My PhD student and I would be super grateful to any vision researchers willing to help us group these tasks according to what visual processes you think they most tap into: 🙏 forms.gle/ajhBw1Nak7Bi...

Hi bluesky, it's time for my monthly social media post when I have rendered stimuli* too pretty not to share....... Today, a collection of wooden nuggets on a stick. * something along the way towards being a stimulus, anyway

I've been off social media for a long time, but I was playing around with potential expt stimuli the other day in Blender and these cyberpunk blobs are just too pretty not to share...

(Drop your best new-PhD-supervisor tips!)

Big celebrations - the "Computational Perception Lab" at UoA is no longer just...me. My first PhD student won a scholarship today and will start mid-year 🎉 He plans to work on using deep neural networks to better understand visual deficits 🤖👀