And it's out now in Cortex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Summary below 🧵

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference! 🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Summary 🧵 below 👇

And it was an absolute treat to run! Thanks everyone who attended :) #ACNS2025

Tim Cottier @tvcottier.bsky.social introduces a novel face triad task to explore whether super-recognisers decipher the identity, valence or gaze of faces. When asked which face is distinct out of the three, super-recognisers preference identity information more than controls! #ASPP2025

Road trippin’ to ACNS 2025, Melbourne! @matthewod.bsky.social @tvcottier.bsky.social (Plus Ella and Seri) @acnsau.bsky.social

Maybe a bit of a downer, but I think this conversation may be of interest to a bunch of people on here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbK...

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

New paper! After a distraction, rotating traveling waves steer brain processing back to where it should be. State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction direct.mit.edu/jocn/article... #neuroscience

A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s behind a potential scientific brain drain.

A wonderful paper!

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11

For all the knucklehead reviewers out there. Principles for proper peer review - Earl K. Miller jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8... #neuroscience

One of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.

I feel seen—and heard: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Just published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible… www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/10

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

Looking forward to this!

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

I spoke yesterday with a lovely university student I know in Gaza who sent the message below. His instagram page shows his beautiful English and charisma, and the dire situation he is in: www.instagram.com/jehadkmiri/ Please consider donating to his family here: www.paypal.com/donate?hoste...

It’s frankly absurd that we’re at the point where this critique needed to be written

I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!

New paper out in @plosbiology.org w/ Charlie, @phil-johnson.bsky.social, Ella, and Hinze 🎉 We track moving stimuli via EEG, find evidence that motion is extrapolated across distinct stages of processing + show how this effect may emerge from a simple synaptic learning rule! tinyurl.com/2szh6w5c

my NIH grant was terminated today - the grant that pays my rent and my bills and my loans and my health insurance - because I study how to improve the lives and wellbeing of queer people #episky #medsky

Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy

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.

Climate science 👀

Excited to share my first paper: a novel visual illusion discovered by my co-authors Will Turner and Hinze Hogendoorn which we call the "Split-Stimulus Effect", in which a single flashed stimulus is perceived to be in two different locations simultaneously jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... [1/5]

Collaborating with @rin-krichilsky.bsky.social and Kanako Shimizu, we put together what's basically a top-ten list of ways to help foster trans inclusivity and awareness within our scientific and academic communities and would love if you could help share the guide!

“The PhD stipend is $33,511 … well below minimum wage of $47,627” “Universities can raise the stipend to a maximum of $52,352, but a ACGR survey found none have done so. The highest stipend is just over $40,000 … with the average at $34,244.” #RaiseTheStipend

✨New paper @commsbio.bsky.social !! Using MEG/EEG, we investigated domain-general cognitive systems in human brains implemented by aperiodic and oscillatory responses. Great collaboration with @alexwoolgar.bsky.social , John Duncan, and Nadene Dermody. rdcu.be/d34pt