My review on the "Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making" is now published. I think that this will be useful to both experts and newcomers to the field.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Posts by Samuel Recht
Novelty is not just about whats new, but also what feels new given past experience. New study from Sophia Becker in Wulfram Gerstner’s @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social lab posits a model showing how similarity between familiar and novel stimuli shapes exploration and learning - doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
We’re hiring!
Interested in conducting research on cognitive control, multitasking and aging with @gethinhughes.bsky.social, @sarahdepue.bsky.social and me?
We are looking for a PhD candidate to join our lab @cogtex.bsky.social at KU Leuven.
RTs much appreciated!
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...
This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab:
Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex
@nature.com
"..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.
ICYMI, our new paper: Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41...
There is substantial variation across people in navigation ability, which is shaped by multiple factors. A Review in Nature Reviews Psychology organizes these factors and discusses the cognitive and neural mechanisms of their influences on navigation. 🔒
In a recent University of Oxford Podcast, Professor Cathy Creswell spoke about the role of philanthropy in sustaining a global research university.
Professor Creswell discusses how a gift of £27 million has been used to establish the Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research.
tinyurl.com/2cj5xhmw
***Please forward to interested colleagues***
The call for symposia (deadline 15 April) and abstracts (deadline 1 May) for Biomag 2026 in Beijing (23-25 Aug) is now open:
biomag2026.scimeeting.cn
Neural correlates of subjective sleep depth and subjective sleepiness. Scalp topographies illustrate the results of GLME models assessing the relationship between EEG activity (delta power, gamma power, and gamma/delta ratio) and subjective sleep depth (top half) or subjective sleepiness (bottom half). The top rows show the main effects of each brain activity index; the bottom rows show the interaction between brain activity and conscious experience (CE+CEWR vs. NCE). Significant interaction effects were found for subjective sleep depth but not sleepiness.
Perceived #sleep depth is generally thought to reflect reduced brain activity. @giuliobernardi.bsky.social &co show this relationship weakens during #dreaming, suggesting that dreaming helps sustain the subjective experience of deep sleep @spacelabimt.bsky.social @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4v8OxkH
New preprint!🚨
How do people learn how to search the visual world?
Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.
In a new preprint, we use a combination of 2AFC and discrimination tasks to quantify sensory, decisional, and metacognitive noise in units of the physical stimulus. We find that, across two experiments, sensory and decisional noise are comparable, while meta noise is lower.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?
Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory.
Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New lab paper! 🧠
Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements.
plos.io/4dwJhR8
Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏
Anxiety is associated with increased generalisation of threat to similar stimuli. This paper dissociates perceptual mistakes from value generalisation and links stronger value-transfer to trait anxiety.
@nicoschuck.bsky.social
@ondrejzika.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.
⚛️ Introducing CREATE, a benchmark for creative associative reasoning in LLMs.
Making novel, meaningful connections is key for scientific & creative works.
We objectively measure how well LLMs can do this. 🧵👇
Trying to imagine the looks on the faces of the people I worked with at Google in 2018 if you’d told them that in 7 years their flagship product would be sending users to commit terrorism at airports
and that no one will do anything about it
Our crowdsourced megastudy comparing a diverse set of 12 single-session interventions for depression is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com!
Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/e6pzz (no paywall)
We also published a brief non-academic piece about the study today: theconversation.com/free-10-minu...
We are looking for a new colleague!🧠🇨🇭🦩
A new post doc position is available in our lab - check the link for more details!
www.unige.ch/fapse/womcog...
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...
📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!
Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?
In short, yes!
🚨New pre-print🚨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?
When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.
Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow.
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
Interested in cognitive maps? Wondering how you should best train your participants? Luckily for you, we have investigated just that! Very excited to share a preprint from my PhD in which we show how initial training curriculum affects the cognitive maps we form
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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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...
Cognition is not steady state.
Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience
🧠 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