Congratulations Ana on this superb dissertation!  Was a pleasure to read the thesis and be part of the i̶̶̶n̶̶̶t̶̶̶e̶̶̶r̶̶̶r̶̶̶o̶̶̶g̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶i̶̶̶o̶̶̶n̶̶̶ ̶̶̶c̶̶̶o̶̶̶m̶m̶i̶̶̶t̶̶̶t̶̶̶e̶̶̶e̶̶̶ defense board! :)

Talking today about whether attention can modulate retinal activity, come join! 👁️ #nvp25

This afternoon at #nvp2025, an entire session on cognitive #pupillometry 👁️ with talks by @anavili.bsky.social , @cstrauch.bsky.social and others. See you at 👉 12:00! #psychology

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

Celebration time 🥳 @liangyouzhang.bsky.social publishes the 1st empirical paper of his PhD! We show that numerosity adaptation (a seemingly high-level stim property) suppresses neural responses in early visual cortex; these adaptation FX increase as we progress thru the visual processing hierarchy.

Most of you know @suryagayet.bsky.social as a successful visual-attention researcher. But he also had an active #music career as a #rap artist. And like Jay-Z before him, he has briefly come out of retirement with a new album. Check it out—it's very good! 🎤🎶 open.spotify.com/album/7HrnAB...

Very proud of @dkoevoet.bsky.social's latest piece now accepted in Journal of Neuroscience, together with student Vicky Voet, Stefan van der @stigchel.bsky.social (all @attentionlab.bsky.social Utrecht) and Henry Jones & Ed Awh from Uni of Chicago.

If you are looking, or know someone who is looking - please forward them! I'm open to discuss the topic, but o.c. many ideas!!

Spatial attention and working memory are popularly thought to be tightly coupled. Yet, distinct neural activity tracks attentional breadth and WM load. In a new paper @jocn.bsky.social, we show that pupil size independently tracks breadth and load. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

Incredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'll show some (I think) cool stuff about how we can measure the phenomenology of synesthesia in a physiological way at #ECVP - Color II, atrium maximum, 9:15, Thursday. say hi and show your colleagues that you're one of the dedicated ones by getting up early on the last day!

A good reason to make it to the early #visualcognition session of today's #ecvp2025 👉 @anavili.bsky.social will talk about how attending to fuzzy bright/dark patches that have faded from awareness (through adaptation-like processes) still affect pupil size! ⚫👀⚪ Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Excited to present at #ECVP2025 - Monday afternoon, Learning & Memory - about how anticipating relevant visual events prepares visual processing for efficient memory-guided visual selection! 🧠🥳 @attentionlab.bsky.social @ecvp.bsky.social Preprint for more details: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#ECVP2025 starts with a fully packed room! I'll show data, demonstrating that synesthetic perception is perceptual, automatic, and effortless. Join my talk (Thursday, early morning.., Color II) to learn how the qualia of synesthesia can be inferred from pupil size. Join and (or) say hi!

Eye movements are cheap, right? Not necessarily! 💰 In our review just out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com, Alex Schütz and I discuss the different costs associated with making an eye movement, how these costs affect behaviour, and the challenges of measuring this… rdcu.be/eAm69 #visionscience #vision

Gaze heatmaps (are popular especially for eye-tracking beginners and in many applied domains. How many participants should be tested? Depends of course, but our guidelines help navigating this in an informed way. Out now in BRM (free) doi.org/10.3758/s134... @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

Jelmer Borst and I are looking for a PhD candidate to build an EEG-based model of human working memory! This is a really cool project that I've wanted to kick off for a while, and I can't wait to see it happen. Please share and I'm happy to answer any Qs about the project! www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add

We had a splendid day: great weather, got to wear peculiar/special clothes, and then Alex even defended his PhD (and nailed it!). Congratulations dr. Alex, super proud of your achievements!!!

Now published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social Open Access link: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

@vssmtg.bsky.social presentations today! R2, 15:00 @chrispaffen.bsky.social: Functional processing asymmetries between nasal and temporal hemifields during interocular conflict R1, 17:15 @dkoevoet.bsky.social: Sharper Spatially-Tuned Neural Activity in Preparatory Overt than in Covert Attention

Cool new preprint by Damian. Among other findings: eye pupillometry, EEG & IEMs show that the premotor theory of attention can't be the full story: eye movements are associated with an additional, separable, spatially tuned process compared to covert attention, hundreds of ms before shifts happen.

Where a person will look next can be predicted based on how much it costs the brain to move the eyes in that direction.

Very cool science here 😎 OK, I might be biased but still, reading out different cognitive strategies by combining EEG data, our reaction time decomposition method, and a deep learning sequence model is super cool! Congrats Rick for your first preprint 🥳

Where you look depends on the effort (measured through pupil size) associated with the eye movement (e.g., diagonal eye movements are more effortful than horizontal ones). Proud of this work! Spearheaded by @cstrauch.bsky.social and out in @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/digests/9776...

We show that eye-movements are selected based on effort minimization - finally final in @elife.bsky.social eLife's digest: elifesciences.org/digests/9776... & the 'convincing & important' paper: elifesciences.org/articles/97760 I consider this my coolest ever project! #VisionScience #Neuroscience

New preprint! We present two very large eye tracking datasets of museum visitors (4-81 y.o.!) who freeviewed (n=1248) or searched for a +/x (n=2827) in a single feature-rich image. We invite you to (re)use the dataset and provide suggestions for future versions 📋 osf.io/preprints/os...

Out in Psychophysiology (OA): Typically, pupillometry struggles with complex stimuli. We introduced a method to study covert attention allocation in complex video stimuli - effects of top-down attention, bottom-up attention, and pseudoneglect could all be recovered. doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70036

Presaccadic attention facilitates visual continuity across eye movements. However, recent work may suggest that presaccadic attention doesn't shift upward. What's going on? Our paper shows that presaccadic attention moves up- and downward using the pupil light response. doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70047

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

We used a brain "pinging" again and found that distractor suppression is reactive rather than proactive, meaning attention is first drawn to the distractor before being suppressed.

I had a great time defending my PhD last week, surrounded by friends and family!👩‍🎓💖 Next up: returning to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social to continue as a postdoc at the Gallant lab!🧠 Here's to new chapters 🥳🥂✨️

The pupil of the eye opens a remarkable window into the mind psyche.co/ideas/the-pu... By Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social for @psyche.co From mental effort to the content of a person’s imagination, these tiny apertures reveal far more than you might realise

A very brief introduction to #pupillometry 👁️ for a general audience by @cstrauch.bsky.social in #Psyche 👉 psyche.co/ideas/the-pu...

New popscience piece on why pupil size changes are so cool. psyche.co/ideas/the-pu... Included: an assignment that lets you measure pupil size. In my classes, this replicates Hess & Polt's 1964 effort finding without an eyetracker. Feel free to use it! #VisionScience #neuroscience #psychology 🧪

New popscience piece on why pupil size changes are so cool. psyche.co/ideas/the-pu... Included: an assignment that lets you measure pupil size. In my classes, this replicates Hess & Polt's 1964 effort finding without an eyetracker. Feel free to use it! #VisionScience #neuroscience #psychology 🧪

Pigeons navigate along idiosyncratic routes that improve between generations. Cumulative cultural evolution? This study shows that the same cumulative route improvements spontaneously emerge in simple artificial agents. Paper in @plosbiology.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1371/jour... (1/4; video at end!)

📣 Vacancy for Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science. Deadline January 6: international.au.dk/about/profil...

And don't forget to check out the python package www.github.com/gweindel/hmp

IT'S OFFICIAL! From today, @plos.org and its journals are no longer posting on Twitter/X. If you want to carry on hearing about great science in our journal, follow @plosbiology.org on Bluesky here: bsky.app/profile/plos...

Check out Damian's updated preprint showing that sensory input that matches working memory content can help us prioritize the items that haven't appeared yet. Only now with 4 experiments! #VisionScience #WorkingMemory

In a dynamic world, items appear, disappear, and reappear within seconds. In our latest preprint (now with an additional experiment) we show: the reappearance of maintained items guides the prioritization of non-reappearing memory items. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We often rely on the external world rather than fully loading memory- if it's easy to access external information at least. @tianyingq.bsky.social's new PBR metaanalysis across 28 exp shows: increases in access cost reliably push toward internal WM use. doi.org/10.3758/s134... #VisionScience 🧪

WORK! We're looking for an assistant professor behavioural and social sciences to work on the interdisciplinary theme 'Communication, Information, and Social Inequality in a Digital World'. Information & application here: www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

Our PNAS paper "Action similarity warps visual feature space in working memory" is out! www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10..... Thanks to @haslagter.bsky.social and Chris Olivers for guiding me through this project, and thanks to Luigi Falanga and Jannik Jeske for their great lab work. What a team! 🤩🤓

Want to keep track of AttentionLab's members? We have our own starter pack! Follow all or make a selection, up to you! Will update this list whenever more lab members join Bluesky 🙂 go.bsky.app/4yHiToK

Broadly agreed with this post arguing that open science reformers often overreach in their argument, particularly this bit. I've always thought that the *primary* arguments for openness are about respect, in particular for others' epistemic agency. Not just for scientists, but the public as well.

For more efficiency in science, we should improve infrastructure for open data and other research materials – reducing research waste by allowing secondary uses and improving synthesis – and rethink quality control via peer review at for-profit scientific journals. Not this AI scientist garbage.

Do you care about pupillometry? We need to rewrite its history in psychology. Now in TINS: A rediscovery of the forgotten early wave of pupillometry research – effort, covert attention, imagery all made visible by 1900 in a fascinating literature. authors.elsevier.com/a/1jKdtbotq3...