New paper from the lab in which we test whether DDM and confidence distributions can be used to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. We show that putative signatures of perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task.
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Would there be interest in a "scientific programming with agents" writeup? I'd build the same R package with different LLM agents, and see how far each gets. I'd evaluate and what a good prompting strategy is, and how we could train our future students who'll never code themselves.
Our paper (with Ashish Sahoo, who is on the job market for post-docs!), now published in Neuropsychologia, used AI approaches to relate navigation ability to hippocampal structure. Did it work?
News coverage: www.uta.edu/news/news-re...
Publication: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41443585/
We're looking for a postdoc starting this summer to join our efforts in understanding the capacity limits of cognition: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...
Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of?
In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …
Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!
www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch
How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience?
We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this.
Come along!
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...
The recording of Marco Tamietto's talk "Vision Without Awareness: from structures to networks" at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGNy....
Our new paper is out in Cognition! What determines whether confidence follows the classic "folded-X" pattern vs. the "double-increase" pattern? The answer lies in the type of stimulus manipulation. Big thanks to my advisor Doby @dobyrahnev.bsky.social and co-first author @herrickfung.bsky.social !
Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted.
see our comment:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues
Different species see the world as fast as they need to...
I'm very excited about the schedule of next week's workshop! 👇 Come join us via Zoom, in case of interest!
#ConSci
Flyer for 2026 edition of the European Summer School "Visual Neuroscience" in Rauischholzhausen castle, Germany.
The European Summer School "Visual Neuroscience" in Rauischholzhausen castle, Germany, is coming back in 2026!
Deadline: 8 March 2026
www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/rauisch/
Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy?
What does the term 'representation' mean to you?
We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields.
eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM
One community addressing the "species problem" is the Gordon Research Conference on the Frontal Cortex, which intentionally built itself on bridging connections between researchers studying human, NHP, and rodents of all kinds. www.grc.org/frontal-cort...
a while back i threatened to share this. finally online
for detection tasks we often systematically estimates sensitivity wrong. we need to control for unequal variance in models, but we often don't coz it needs extra data
now there's a virtually 'free' way to do it
www.cell.com/iscience/pdf...
A teaser figure showing the process of metamers rendered differentially (MRD). Target scene parameters are used to render a target scene. A new scene is initialized from some starting point, and renders are created from this scene. The loss between the initial and target scenes is measured. MRD allows the gradients wrt the loss to be propagated to the scene parameters (e.g. lighting, geometry or material) for gradient-based optimization.
Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4
arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307
Next session of the MIT Consciousness Club this Thursday, 12pm-1:30pm. Marco Tamietto will talk about his work on blindsight. More details here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con...
Restaurants, billboards, commercials… what brain circuits link context to appetite? 🧠🌎🍽️
Very happy to finally share a major update in our work exploring the hippocampus and lateral septum in calibrating food consumption! 🍩
Major thanks to our lab and collaborators! ⭐️⭐️
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇
Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic!
Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!
Excited to share our study in Neuron led by
@travisgoode.bsky.social, a K99 PDF (interviewing for Faculty) and Sahay lab team with collaborators at BROAD, Hopkins, and UW Seattle, defining a neural circuit that links prior experience with feeding behavior. Open Access: sahaylab.com/publications
(Mic check 1-2-3)
I'm on the job market🚨
I’m a social psychologist building computational models to study social cognition, attitudes, polarization, and how people update beliefs.
Evidence accumulation models, Hierarchical Bayes, Agent-based models, NLP, etc.
Interested in formal theorizing!
🧠 The Paris Brain Institute is launching a Call for Junior Group Leaders, inviting early-career scientists to establish their own independent research groups within one of Europe’s most dynamic neuroscience research centers.
👉 More information: parisbraininstitute.org/news/paris-b...
#Hiring #AI
Give it a try here!
self-model.github.io/pretendingNo...
This is finally out in NeuroInformatics "Enhancing fMRI Decoded Neurofeedback with Co-adaptive Training: Simulation and Proof-of-principle Evidence" shorturl.at/XCwve and the updated PyDecNef repo github.com/pydecnef/Pyd...
@hakwan.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social @neuroaure.bsky.social
If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.
if an animal fails visual metacognition (e.g. can't rate confidence meaningfully) & yet can do so in other sensory modalities, does it likely lack subjective visual experiences?
i.e. if the animal has normal visual experiences, & generally good metacog, can it fail visual metacog *somehow*? how?
The recording of Rachel Denison's talk at the MIT Consciousness Club, about the effects of attention on conscious perception, is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJvC....
This paper shows alignment between LLMs and brain data is outperformed by a null model. More evidence for the argument I've been making in talks lately that we shouldn't believe any computational paper that puts less effort into null than main model.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
