E whiti ana re rā! It may be cold but glorious day in Auckland! Ready for some #neuroscyence #visionscience #psychscisky at #APCVEPC26 Enjoy the conference, everyone! :)

Auckland is unusually cold this week but hope it stays crisp and pleasant so you all get to enjoy the scenery, not just the excellent science! 🙂

IT'S CONFERENCE WEEK! 🎉 Welcome to Auckland, NZ for APCV/EPC2026. Whether you're giving a talk, presenting a poster, or simply taking it all in, we're glad to have you here. Tag us with: #APCVEPC26

This is excellent - and if you use the online version it should deal with any of the inevitable schedule changes were aren't planning to make... 😏

Our final schedule and abstract booklet are now available to download from our conference website: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026

Join us on 1 July, 12:00–3:15 PM, for the Synaesthesia Science & Community Forum. Explore the latest research in consciousness, sensory neuroscience, auditory cognition, and phenomenology through talks and discussion. See here for more details: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

Join Professor Gina Grimshaw on 2 July, 6:00–7:30 PM, for a public lecture discussing how emotions shape attention, memory, decision-making, and human connection. Register now on: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

D-10! See you all soon at APCV & EPC 2026. A reminder of what's happening on the first day: 🔬 A workshop on image processing 🎨 A satellite event on synaesthesia 🎓 An ECR panel on navigating academia & industry The welcome ceremony will start at 17:30 NZT

I know this was a labour of love (and blood, sweat, and tears) by my great colleague Susanne Stoll: the first ever tactile maps of the human finger tip! ☝️ #neuroskyence (not really #psychscisky or #visionscience but tagged it anyway 😉) doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

A reminder that the conference schedule is now live on our website at visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/ We look forward to seeing everyone soon! #EPCAPCV26

All speakers should have received information about the session & timings of their presentations at #epc-apcv-2026 by now! A preliminary (searchable) schedule is available on the website: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026 Remember to register by the end of 15 May for early-bird rates!

Final days for Early Bird registration! Register now and take advantage of discounted pricing.

Another reminder that our Early Bird Registration closes next week (15th May 26). All presenters, including speakers and discussants, please register by then.

Congratulations to the brilliant Dr Ecem Altan who has official graduated with her PhD today! Moving to a foreign country to start a PhD in early 2020 must have taken much patience & perseverance - but it turned into a fantastic thesis in the end... Ka pai! Tebrikler!

The last trickles of sand are slipping through the hourglass... 😏⌛ #EPC-APCV-2026 - Do it now. It's gonna be awesome! 🙂

The sands of time are running out... Submit your abstracts while you can! 🕚⌛ (But ideally not all at the same time right before midnight because I'm the poor sod who must read them all 😏)

⚠️ LAST CHANCE to submit your abstract. Submissions close 30 April 2026.

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Deadline is fast approaching! Come on, get your abstracts in and swap the thermal & political heat of the northern hemisphere for some New Zealand winter cool 🙂

❗Last week before the abstract submission deadline for APCV & EPC 2026❗ Abstracts are due on 30 April 2026. Please also note that all presenters—including speakers and discussants in symposia—must register for the conference by the early-bird deadline on 15 May 2026.

I hate Outlook so very much... 😒🤦

⚠️ Reminder: 2 weeks left until the abstract submission deadline for APCV & EPC 2026. Abstracts are due on 30 April 2026. Please also note that all presenters—including speakers and discussants in symposia—must register for the conference by the early-bird deadline on 15 May 2026.

Article slamming preprints cites *nine* preprints. You can't make this stuff up.

Meet our final keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Dr Corey Wadsley from the University of Auckland will present a keynote lecture titled "Stopping safely: Physiological underpinnings of response inhibition."

Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos... I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...

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."

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."

I missed all this kerfuffle last year becuase I was preoccupied with other things but gawd this is some bullshit. I'm glad now that I didn't submit my last paper to a Wiley journal as I had considered...

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

⚡SYMPOSIA SPOTLIGHT #3 We are wrapping up our Symposia Spotlight with more featured sessions and speakers. We look forward to seeing you there!

⚡SYMPOSIA SPOTLIGHT #2 More symposia highlights from our upcoming conference!

Though it should be said, even if that person ate that entire chocolate bar it'd still be only a bare fraction of the dose needed (probably need to eat 15ish of that quantity). Also I might be wrong but this picture doesn't look like it was taken during "physically and mentally exhausting" 🤣

⚡SYMPOSIA SPOTLIGHT #1 We are super excited to announce a series of symposia taking place throughout our conference. Here is a preview of some featured sessions and speakers. Of course, there is more to come. Stay tuned!

🚨 FINAL REMINDER. The Student Travel Award application closes tomorrow. This is on a first come first served basis, so don’t miss your chance to secure funding for your travel to EPC & APCV 2026!

I have absolutely nothing to say about this, other than that I once wrote "subjective experience" in a paper and then had a reviewer eviscerate us by telling us that "all experience is subjective". And while I am inclined to agree I still haven't fully decided. It's a widely used term in any case. 🤔

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/

The Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) and Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) are holding a joint meeting in 2026, to be held at the University of Auckland from July 1-4. Abstract submissions now open! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

📢 Workshop announcement. We are super excited to announce the workshop Perceptual Inferences, from philosophy to neuroscience, organized by Alexander Schütz and Daniel Kaiser. 📍 Rauischholzhausen Castle, near Marburg, Germany 🗓️ June 8 to 10, 2026. 1/4

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.

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.

Very proud and pleased that Poutasi Urale, the first PhD student I supervised since starting in Auckland has now graduated! Good way to start the holidays! 🙂🎓 (And no, this is not my academic gown...)

If you calculated noise ceilings (NC) based on split-half reliability - e.g. to compare models - this one is important! Seems many published studies miscalculated it, overestimating model performance. First, let's make this crystal clear: NC = 2*r / (1+r) where r is split-half correlation.

It is our great honour to announce the APCV Keynote at #epc-apcv-2026: Prof. Hakwan Lau from the Institute for Basic Science in Korea! The call for member-initiated symposia & abstracts is now open: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026 #psychscisky #visionscience #neuroskyence

Here is a short piece in the Conversation about the Spoon Illusion: doi.org/10.64628/AA.... #psychscisky #neuroskyence but not-really #visionscience

Let me present the Spoon Illusion 🙂🥄 This has been in the works for over a decade when we were just goofing around testing sound localisation in my in-laws' kitchen... But we finally managed to do some reasonably controlled experiments on this. #psychscisky #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1177/0301...

In this preprint, we concurrently fit the HRF alongside pRF parameters doi.org/10.1101/2025... - HRF varies between visual areas - HRF also varies with pRF stimulus designs (due to nonlinearities?) - Esp. when fitting complex models this can skew results a lot! #visionscience #neuroskyence

The Ponizsa illusion - Kanizsa triangle produces Ponzo illusion, but oddly it inverts apparent depth: the longer line looks closer! Also has an inversion effect like we studied in Altan et al 2025 Proc Roy Soc (doi.org/10.1098/rspb...) but it's also in reverse! 🤔 #visionscience #psychscisky

SAVE THE DATE! Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology (EPC) & Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) Joint Meeting from 1-4 July at the University of Auckland, NZ. #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #neuroskyence More information to follow! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

This is exactly the problem inherent with so much #mentalimagery research: without any objective external reference to validate this, it is no better (& most likely worse...) than simply asking people how clear & detailed their imagery is. Because it is literally the same question in disguise.