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 🤖👀

"Nature has had a long time to make things complicated. If you live in nature, you have a richer vocabulary of forms in your mind." ~ nice #shapeperception thought from sculptor Tony Cragg on the 3D shapes that are produced by natural vs industrial processes. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Ridiculous return from family xmas in Portugal: - due to a flight delay I got ping-ponged across the US for >60hrs (Lisbon-Newark-Houston-Chicago-LA-Auckland) - arrived 25hrs late - also they lost my luggage - also my partner is stuck in Lisbon waiting for new NZ visa Starting 2024 empty-handed 😕

(Please Repost!) I am seeking a postdoctoral fellow to work on unsupervised learning for studying human visual perception. 3 years with possibility of extension, deadline 31 Jan. Darmstadt is a thriving environment for cognitive science. Join us! www.psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de/perception/h...

Me trying to read an “easy introduction to Bayesian statistics”

My dad - polymath and prolific sci-fi novelist - now on Bluesky looking for fellow nerds 🙂

Also, they let you touch the opera house!

✅ USyd talk done ⬜ UMelb I'm on my way! Damn Sydney is really gorgeous!? Is never visited the campus or spent time outside the CBD before. Beautiful buildings, quirky streets, buzzing with life.

Mind blown! In Sydney you can just tap on and off the buses with any contactless bank card from anywhere in the world without having to register anything!? Why don't other cities know about this technology??

Think I might be the only person who knows the admin password on about five lab computers in Germany, and I've been in New Zealand for a year... (I vow to take this information to my grave.)

Auckland sky and coastline looking gorgeous from tbe airport this afternoon! I'm off to Sydney and then Melbourne to talk to collaborators and anyone else who's willing :)

For some non-science content, I'll be doing the #inktober2023 challenge by making 31 linocut prints in the next two months* *doing half-pace marathon version this year (one prompt every two days), cos I'm busy sciencing in Australia this Oct! I'll mostly be posting on Instagram @ lotsoftinyrobots

X is now charging $19.99/month for the Cloth Mother

Hello world! Room for another refugee from vision science twitter?