Tim Maniquet

Connecting the dots: Similar visual orthographic acquisition for Braille or line junctions - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Most written systems share basic shape features with natural objects such as line junctions, a commonality thought to be at the basis of fluent reading. Studies that compared reading acquisition for d...

Out now another piece of my PhD. In short, we show that learning a new script, with or without line junctions (├ v. ⠗), mostly relies on the linguistic mapping of one script to a pre-existing orthography, with limited contribution of the script's visual features
doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02788-1

What about other ROIs? Check out the full paper to learn about OFA, EBA, and PPA

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

These correlations have already been found before, but always using *multivariate* boundaries. Here, we show that *univariate* boundaries are enough to link category-selective ROIs to behaviour

This effect is very robust: it is found across keyboard-based and mouse tracking-based tasks, as well as in animacy classification tasks

As it turns out, there is quite some correlation to be found!

The best example: FFA, and a face categorisation task (is this a face? yes/no)

→ FFA is more active for a non-face image? We can predict slower RT
→ FFA is more active for a face image? We can predict faster RT

In this work, we tried to link univariate activity from category-selective ROIs to categorisation performance

We used a very simple *distance-to-bound* approach to ask whether activity in OTC can drive categorisation behaviour

🔥 We have a new preprint! 🔥
It's really nice, I recommend reading it

Here's a summary question: Can FFA activation predict RT to faces?

⏬ Check out the answer below ⏬

@hansopdebeeck.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's finally out! Our work with @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & @costantinoai.bsky.social is published.

We went looking for dissociations between types of recurrence in DNNs, but we found something quite different.. hopefully that can tell us somehting about our models!

rdcu.be/eLwBA

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away due to natural causes.

She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.

The 2nd VSS is even better than the first one, look how serious I was presenting my poster
#VSS2025 @vssmtg.bsky.social

For many of us, it doesn’t cost much to improve someone’s life, and we can do much more of it Most countries spend less than 1% of their national income on foreign aid; even small increases could make a big difference.

My latest article on Our World in Data, looking at foreign aid and the difference we can make with personal donations:

ourworldindata.org/foreign-aid-...