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...)

Reminder to submit Symposia & Workshops for #epc-apcv-2026 by 31 Jan 2026! Also announcing keynotes: - Hakwan Lau (IBS, South Korea - Elaine Reese (Uni of Otago, NZ - Corey Wadsley (Uni of Auckland, NZ) visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026 #psychscisky #visionscience #neuroskyence

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.

No. As we argue in the paper this is exactly -not- the case. The VVIQ is surprisingly useful and I say this as a long time critic of this test. Perhaps it just correlates with a lot of self-reports of things people think happen inside their minds - but even if that's the case this is important...

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg: #psychskysci #neuroscience doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Interesting piece on #aphantasia. But any conclusion about decoding #mentalimagery from aphants is confounded if we lump low-imagery people in with those who say they only have semantic representations. All 3 studies reviewed did exactly that. #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Ecem Altan's excellent study showing that adaptation to spatial frequency modulates pRF estimates now published: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... I mostly enjoyed the novel review process - except that @elife.bsky.social apparently did not publish our final reply to reviewers😒 #visionscience #neuroskyence

Thanks to all (co)authors & reviewers for their contribution to this study on #layer specific changes in #sensory #cortex across the #lifespan in #humans & #mice now out in @natneuro.nature.com Here is a short summary of our findings 1/6

these are forks

New from Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social lab: Mental rotation is often regarded as paradigmatic for #mentalimagery. But it turns out people often don't use imagery for mental rotation - & when they do it is often not useful (same viewpoint trials). #visionscience #psychscisky doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Opinion piece now published as part of special issue in Neuropsychologia: #visionscience #neuroskyence #psychscisky #illusions doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... Also, this happens to be my 100th publication. Join me for 🍺in OGH on Friday afternoon! 🙂

If you have 10-20 minutes (depends on how fast you are), would you please consider doing this online study on #mentalimagery? It contains a survey & an experiment where you look at pictures and you respond what you see: #psychscisky #neuroskyence #visionscience tstbl.co/820-917

I spent an hour this morning procrastinating by writing this one pager "(One of My) Problems with the Science of Aphantasia" osf.io/hr6w5/?view_...

Another thing that only just occurred to me now: These questionnaire scores (VVIQ and MEQ) are supposedly transformed into percentages, but they have values >100...

Ahem... While on the topic of #aphantasia & #mentalimagery: This preprint reports correlations between questionnaires & some measure of hippocampal asymmetry that explain 90-100% of variance. Whenever I see data like this, I'd immediately suspect a bug in the code. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I agree up to a point. Even with the "I literally see things before my eyes" responses we get in our survey I remain unsure if that's really what people mean. Although I'd also say that the duck-rabbit -is- an experience in eyes, while my mental image is in my head. So not sure about any of it.

The problem with this design is that it isn't an objective test of perception (and in fact their other work on this shows that this is about criterion shifts). But objective tests of perception may fail because they ruin the whole experience (I know because I've tried - but we keep trying...)

🤣

Yes this is the part I am always stumbling over as well. This is particularly a problem for all the so-called "objective" measures (which aren't objective). If we define them by using VVIQ or whatever self-report scores, then surely they are measures of those scores but not necessarily of imagery.

The whole problem with this entire field of research summarised in 216 characters! 😀

Post-doc in Dan Bush's Lab in UCL going: Dan is doing amazing research. This is a great opportunity: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

New #neuroskyence #visionscience by my excellent colleague Ecem Altan: We study higher-level processes in Ponzo-like illusions. In brief, inversion reduces the illusion & V1 activity reflects that difference, suggesting the V1 effect isn't just from feedforward processing: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Reposting this - still looking for more participants! Especially if you (think you) have #aphantasia or #hyperphantasia, we are very interested in hearing from you... Also if you have experience of #prophantasia (cc @kerblooee.bsky.social) #mentalimagery #visionscience #psychscisky

@vssmtg.bsky.social Will there be a smartphone app or online itinerary app for the VSS program this year as you had last year? I see the schedule & abstracts are on the website but there is no way to mark presentations to plan your days...

Paper finally published in JEP General! Individual variability in mental imagery vividness does not predict perceptual interference with imagery: A replication study of Cui et al., 2007: osf.io/preprints/os... A study cited over 500 times couldn't be replicated, even in extreme imagery... a 🧵 1/8

The IIT debate-debacle (also sometimes referred to as the "Consciousness Wars") continues with this letter: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Followed by a response by several IIT proponents: www.nature.com/articles/s41... And a rejoinder(?) by Gomez-Marin & Seth: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another great piece by Masud Husain about the Brazilish* nightmare that modern academia has become... (* Referring to the Terry Gilliam movie - not to be confused with Brazilian which refers to a South American country and its people)

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...

All right let's true this again: I'll soon submit this to a special issue on the neural processes underlying sensory illusions: In defence of empirical reductionism – Rejecting the hidden dualism of irreducible brain complexity doi.org/10.31219/osf... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #visionscience

Did u ever wonder if it makes a difference if you do your fMRI analysis in volume or in surface space? 🤔 For pRF mapping it turns out, projecting to the surface can bias your results towards the fovea! Our new paper shows why. Check it out! doi.org/10.1002/hbm.... #fMRI #visionscience #neuroscience

Our study on size illusions & different tasks for measuring them is now officially published in Vision Research: Shows different illusions likely involve separable processes & so do different tasks (adjustment vs 2AFC): doi.org/10.1016/j.vi... #visionscience #neuroskyence #psychscisky

Just made the mistake of erring back onto TwiXer & ended up in this rabbit hole of the original comments on the Monty Hall problem. Although in a way it is reassuring to see that discourse was evidently already this bad long before social media existed: 🤦🤦‍♂️😳 #StatsSky web.archive.org/web/20120429...

Here is a new, shorter version of our mental imagery survey. Please if you can spare a few minutes we would appreciate if you could take this & pass it along to others who might be interested. Thanks! tstbl.co/763-452 #neuroskyence #visionscience #psychscisky #aphantasia #mentalimagery

Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, alters perception and induces hallucinations. In this preprint, we show through visual illusions, fMRI and modeling that psilocybin affects contextual computations, a potentially general mechanism of psychedelics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

All right, this is the masterpiece after preregistering N=12 based on evidence threshold & then being asked to run 12 more observers. But fastest acceptance ever (a few hours). Soon to be out in Vision Research but final preprint available here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... #VisionScience #Neuroscience

Agreed - that is why these forms should be changed. We changed ours about 7 years ago, and neither ethics committees nor participants seem concerned by being informed that MRI (or EEG/MEG) is potentially identifiable.

It is the end of an era at Cortex. As the irreplaceable Sergio Della Sala has now stepped down as EiC, Rob McIntosh is taking over the reign, with a wholly reorganised editorial board. I'll try to do my best to support this new chapter: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our prereg study used sequential testing, ending data collection when main BF10>10 or <0.1. We reached that at the 2nd testing point with n=12. It surprised us, too, but that's the result. We were nonetheless asked to increase sample. What are people's thoughts? #PsychSciSky #VisionScience

We checked how easy it is to match up people's brain maps after spatial normalisation. Turns out very! Maybe that surprising to many in the field - but my impression has long been that people are a bit in denial about deidentifying data. #neuroskyence #visionscience doi.org/10.1101/2024...

I joined #UltimaDragons in 1998 (I think?) starting off with a different name but have been known as Ymochel Dragon ever since. My new approach to life these days is to drastically limit social media & Blue Sky is really exclusively for work. But I'm making an exception for my fellow wyrms... 🐉🐲

Let’s find all the #UltimaDragons on Bluesky. Or at least more #Ultima fans, and invite them to become #UDIC members. Who’s with me? Gallara Dragon -==(UDIC)==-

At long last, the article by Jenny Huang & me on the "universality test" for quantifying the statistical evidence of small-sample studies is published in Psychological Methods: doi.org/10.1037/met0... #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #neuroskyence Meri Kirihimete & enjoy your summer break y'all! ☀️🎄 🥂

Thanks to everyone who took that survey. This phase of data collection is now finished so the link is now deactivated. But we will soon run another (much shorter) survey to follow on from this. Stay tuned! 🙂 #psychscisky #neuroskyence #visionscience