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.

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)