Can context-sensitivity improve human–machine alignment in VFMs? We show that incorporating context improves modeling of human similarity decisions.

🎉Accepted to ReAlign ICLR!
Now on @arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2604.13883
Joint first-authored work with amazing Frieda Born. 1/5

The Obleser lab will be hiring soon!

New postdoc (fully funded) and
new PhD or part-time postdoc position (soft-money funded).

Spread the word. Start in Sept/Oct.
Watch out for official announcements!
Please be in touch.

auditorycognition.com
obleserlab.com
hoerhanse.de
lemmi.uni-luebeck.de

💥New paper out! Why do some people generalise threat more than others? We show that anxious people generalise more strongly, even after accounting for perceptual mistakes.

A huge (!) thanks to @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social and @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social

We are looking for a new colleague in work and organizational psychology - full professor position @tudresden.bsky.social

- Please share -

@dgps.bsky.social
tud.link/qt3r1g

Long-term effects of working memory retrieval from prioritized and deprioritized states - Communications Psychology Testing items in working memory improves long-term memory, especially for deprioritized items. This benefit shows when WM retrieval requires continuous recall, suggesting self-generated reports streng...

Briefly not attending something may help you remember it later 🪄: new paper led by phenomenal PhD student Frieda Born (not on Bsky) out now in Comms Psychology:

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Illustration of the hypothesized flows of information between perception, memory and cognitive control in a conceptual model of working memory. Stimuli attributes are processed to varying degrees of abstraction and parts of these representations can be loaded into working memory under the guidance of cognitive control. Familiar stimuli such as the letter B activate visually abstract representations while less familiar stimuli are limited to sensory representations. Information can be shifted both up and down levels of the perceptual hierarchy to build either more or less abstract representations of either perceived or imagined stimuli. Working memories can be shifted into or out of the hierarchy as needed.

We recently published a theoretical review about how compositional and generative mechanisms in working memory provide a flexible engine for creative perception and imagery.

Pre-print:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Full professorship in general psychology open @tudresden.bsky.social
We are a lively department with a fantastically equipped neuroimaing center. DM me with questions.
@dgps.bsky.social @dgps-fgal.bsky.social @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social
tu-dresden.de/vacancy/12517

Humans can infer global relationships from local comparisons, but how do we adapt when these relationships change? New work by the brilliant @tgham.bsky.social used RL modelling to find out 👇

🥳 I am incredibly humbled and grateful to share that our work, "Aligning machine and human visual representations across abstraction levels," has been published today in @nature.com ⬇️

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. Th…

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper using M/EEG to look at attractive and repulsive serial dependence in working memory, led by the excellent Jiangang Shan, with Jasper Hajonides.

“Kijk maar of je het in je agenda kan proppen” (7/7)

@fnkp.bsky.social using gen-AI to create awesome new experiment stimuli which nearly look alike visually, but depict completely different things. Fri, C135 (6/7)

Inés Pont-Sanchis combining EEG, eye-tracking, and computational models to examine working memory distractibility in Schizophrenia. Fri, C62 (5/7)

Frieda Born, who found long-term benefits of briefly *not* attending visual working memories, and takes it to fMRI to better understand why. Tue, A117 (4/7)

Fabio Bauer showing that contemporary vision models deal with visuospatial information about real world objects quite differently than humans do. Tue, A53 (3/7)

@hanzule.bsky.social finding *no* evidence for rhythmic dynamics during multi-item working memory — at least not in sustained orientation-dependent gaze patterns, which are strong and clear for up to 3 items. Tue, A127 (2/7)

Pushing past my social-media fatigue to spotlight our lab’s new posters at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam. Come say hi to: (1/7)

Thanks so much @alzietlow.bsky.social‬ for the warm welcome, excited to be here!

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We have a position open - if you’re interested in ambivalence in (social)decision making, check it out: www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste...

Multiplexing of cognitive encoding by oculomotor networks leads to incidental gaze shifts
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#neuroscience

No April Fool's joke, one week left to apply!

Because some asked, we are an international team and English is the working language in the lab. German language skills are beneficial, but not essential.

Phase of firing does not reflect temporal order in sequence memory of humans and recurrent neural networks - Nature Neuroscience The temporal order of events in working memory is thought to be reflected by ordered neuronal firing at different phases. Here the authors show that this is not the case and that phase order is linked...

Science Alert 🚨: Our paper is now out in @natureneuro.bsky.social - We show that the firing phase of neurons in human MTL doesn’t reflect the order of events, challenging a long-standing theory of human memory.
nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01893-7

One week left to submit individual contributions for this year's 50th Psychology and Brain (PuG) conference in Würzburg. We look forward to receiving abstract submissions for accepted symposia as well as poster contributions www.pug2025.org

Two weeks left to apply!

That city crow putting pizza on my thyme had me thinking for the rest of the day

Treemap chart showing the fragmented landscape of psychological measures.

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting this summer? I am hiring for two PhD positions at the University of Witten/Herdecke.

Join us at the new chair of Biopsychology at @tudresden.bsky.social! Fully funded university positions, broad topics in cognitive neuroscience, plus you get to work with the fabulous adaptive memory and cognition group (link below) 
www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste... (tinyurl.com/y6tjbptj)

We are looking for 2 new colleagues - #professorships in
(A) Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy
(B) Work & Organizational Psychology
Join a lively and collaborative department @tudresden.bsky.social in #Dresden
- Please share -
@dgps.bsky.social #jobalert 📣
tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/a...