Meet our second keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Prof. Elaine Reese from the University of Otago will deliver a keynote lecture titled "Memory Development: From Basic Science to Applied Approaches."

Should I take 6 months of sabbatical in 2027, or 12 months of sabbatical in 2029? First time planning sabbatical/RSL, and not sure how to think about the tradeoffs. I'd mostly be using it for grant writing and visiting collaborators.

My friend and collaborator Kamila Jozwik is looking for a postdoc to work on some super interesting projects involving the representation of animacy and other, more subtle, semantic distinctions in the brain, especially during immersive VR/AR experiences. See link on the lab website for details!

Next up: Keynote Speaker Announcements. Introducing the first speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Prof. Hakwan Lau will present a keynote lecture titled "Prefrontal Mechanisms for Perception."

💼 Paid Opportunity: Join Neuromatch Academy and Climatematch Academy as a #virtual #TeachingAssistant this July. 8hrs/day, Monday to Friday during the course dates. ➡️ Learn more here: neuromatch.io/become-a-tea... ➡️ Apply before 15 March portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in #JobPosting #TA

Last week to apply for a 3yr postdoc with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself. Deadline is March 15th hmc-lab.com/TAMPostdoc.h...

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I had five wonderful years in Giessen, both scientifically and personally. The vision science research environment at JLU has gone from strength to strength. A really incredible opportunity if you're interested in experimental perception science!

**Postdoc position in human category learning** @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social. www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

REMINDER! Only 4 days left to apply for 500 AUD travel support to attend the EPC & APCV Joint Meeting 2026. ✅ The award is open to students at all levels. Apply now at visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

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).