Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o. Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

New preprint out together with @mheilbron.bsky.social We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Our new EEG + modeling work using the beads task is now preprinted osf.io/preprints/ps..., led by Christina Dimitriadou @rhulpsychology.bsky.social

Interested in #EEG #FPVS #FaceLearning? *An Ecological and Objective Neural Marker of Implicit Learning of Unfamiliar Identities* Preprint 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... @bfh-ch.bsky.social University of Malta @snsf.ch

Hot off the press: 1st ever #FPVS #EEG investigation into #SuperRecognizers Congrats to my amazing collaborators Jeff Nador, Kim Uittenhove & Dario Gordillo and thanks to all #police SRs & control participants! @bfh-ch.bsky.social, EPFL, @snsf.ch, Polizei Berlin link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

It's a pity we have to write conclusions for papers and can't just fade them out, like musicians do.

EEG shows illusory faces in objects initially resemble real faces then shift to object-like representations, with task demands determining which identity guides behavior. @amandakrobinson.bsky.social @jesstaubert.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

really fun to be reading critiques of "AI" from the 90s, 80s, 70s, and 60s that perfectly identify all the core questions the field still hasn't resolved and anticipate exactly where we're at now

I'm going to finish this manuscript by the end of the week, I told myself

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

Reconstructing sounds from #fMRI data is limited by its temporal resolution. @ykamit.bsky.social &co develop a DNN-based method that aids reconstruction of perceptually accurate sound from fMRI data, offering insights into internal #auditory representations @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4fhNw1Z

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

Navigating the value space during choice Rhesus macaques represent choices as navigation trajectories in a value space using a grid-like code www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Reward expectation modulates #attention & #DecisionMaking but are these mediated by common or distinct mechanisms? This study shows that spatial manipulation of #reward expectation modulates sensitivity, while choice-based manipulation affects decision making @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4eDPERq

Facial muscle activity can shape how we recognize emotions. Using electrical stimulation and EEG, the study found that activation of smiling muscles makes people more likely to see neutral faces as happy. @themisefth.bsky.social @sebkorb.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How smart are #NonHumanPrimates? This study shows that #macaques can learn to rearrange members of 5-object sequences to non-adjacent positions, suggesting that they form non-spatial cognitive maps of item relationships during learning, a hallmark of #intelligence @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40fZIKi

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? We’re not clear on what intelligence is, at all

How about using LLMs to check if referee reports raise legitimate concerns or are just gatekeeping? This I could get behind.

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

Peer review is to science like democracy is to government: "the worst form of government, except for all the others.” It's far from perfect and could potentially be improved. But that it does not do anything for science trustworthiness is an incredible exaggeration.

AI vision is insanely good nowadays—but is it really like human vision or something else entirely? In our new pre-print, we pinpoint a fundamental visual mechanism that's trivial for humans yet causes most models to fail spectacularly. Let's dive in👇🧠 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05253]

If you work with perceptual confidence judgments, you may be interested in our CNCB model of confidence ratings. Joint work with Vincent de Gardelle. Uncorrected proofs here: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... (🧵 1/4)

How do we flexibly categorize objects under changing task requirements? Our new paper in Nature Communications (@serences.bsky.social & @nuttidanuttida.bsky.social) examines this: www.nature.com/articles/s41... see 🧵👇

Perspective changes everything. [Ars Mathermatica]

Delighted to share paper number three from Annika’s PhD: STAR Protocol to study how expectations guide predictive eye movements and information sampling in humans 👀 doi.org/10.1016/j.xp... star-protocols.cell.com/protocols/4134

Nice tutorial on how to do signal detection analyses in R with the brms package @matti.vuorre.com osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exciting news! 🎉 A new LSE center led by @birchlse.bsky.social will explore the science of animal emotions. "They will look at ways animals are treated by humans in areas like science, tech and farming, and explore ways to improve practices..." www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/ar... #sentience

"from 1965 to 2020, nearly half the variation in publication trends among 293 North American male passerine & near-passerine birds was explained by 3 factors subject to human bias: aesthetic salience (visual appeal), range size (familiarity) & number of universities within ranges (accessibility)"

recently posted a new preprint (the first of my postdoc 🎉) where we implemented normalization across space *and* time, allowing us to capture several neural and behavioral findings! I'll be presenting this work at VSS in a couple of months too for those attending www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

Convergent vocal representations in parrot and human forebrain motor networks (commonalities with speech-related motor cortices in humans found in budgerigar, but not in zebra finch, a songbird capable of more limited vocal learning) 🧪🧠🦜 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💡 When making choices—like picking a flat, a job, or a romantic partner—when should we stop looking and commit? Our new study from @rhulpsychology.bsky.social published in Communications Psychology explores how biased expectations about future options shape our decisions. 🧵👇

I notice papers that test lots of measures, acting like they are interested in all of them and therefore they need no multiple comparison correction. Can one say a measure is a priori merely because the study included it in the first place? Should anything ever be corrected then?

Back to basics: Any reasons psychology likes omnibus F tests plus corrected post hocs even with strong a priori hypothesis about effect direction? Surely that's exploratory procedure? Why not just test hypothesis direction directly with planned comparison? Other fields (e.g., neuroimaging) do.

DNNs can predict human similarity judgments—but why? In a new #XAI study, we introduce Alignment Importance Scores (AIS), a method that improves AI-human alignment and generates heatmaps highlighting the image features that drive this alignment. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I have sinusitus and terrible new varifocals and have to mark students posters with tiny text. I need to continuously mark for 10 hours a day until Thurs because I've been given so little time and I'm slow because I'm sick and it is giving me such a blinding headache that I can't sleep.

Ever worked in a corporate, academic, scientific, or government setting and ran into something like this? Corporate-speak so dense it bends reality? I thought I'd share something light given our current chaos. Please share your examples! 💼 🗣️ #CorporateJargon #WorkplaceHumor #BuzzwordBingo 🧪🔬🧬

it is grimly hilarious that, given the immense, decades-long fetishization of "leadership" and "leadership skills" in business-oriented academia and politics, even unto the formation of leadership institutes, there should turn out to be no leaders in any positions of power

NEW 🧵 Is human intelligence starting to decline? Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s What should we make of this? www.ft.com/content/a801...

To avoid the toxic Twitter experience I tried to follow mainly scientific content on BS and news content minimally. But politics is rapidly encroaching and is now maybe >50% of the posts I see. It's understandably in response to science cuts in the US, but this isn't really why I signed up to BS.

"Survey measures of metacognitive monitoring are often false" - N = 273 study examines self-reported metacognition scales vs task based measures and finds a negative correlation at best. Interoception research really needs to realise this... link.springer.com/article/10.3... #psychscisky

Nature An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...