Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."
"If everyone thinks technological trends are inescapable, they probably will become so. That is why those serious about the human prospect should reject the rhetoric of fatalism and demand something more substantial."
...and for those who argue that this transformation is "unavoidable": www.technologyreview.com/1998/03/01/2...
Strong agree - doing things faster is not doing them better. Especially if you're not doing them at all. I too refuse to join that ship and agree we should fight to change flawed incentive systems rather than cave to them by slowly surrendering our ability to think for ourselves.
Pressure to use genAI for #ECR is quite high, I feel it weekly... ethical, ecological, economical, privacy- and cognitive-related worries keeps me from joining that ship.
I need more time to research not something that creates the illusion of reasoning, if that costs grants or positions, let it be.
This whole thread is a very important insight as to why getting information from an LLM, even if you are dutiful and vigilant, corrodes your ability to ascertain what is true or not
** LLMs do not provide the info you need in order to evaluate truth. **
Very happy to share this new paper, published in @elife.bsky.social, the last one stemming from a PhD chapter 🥲. In it, @spk3lly.bsky.social and I show that an early V1 signal (the C1) can have direct influence on a perceptual decision.
Here's the link: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Check out our new paper which isolates a human brain signal that specifically tracks the growing urgency to commit to a choice pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41611534/. This one was a long time coming! Sterling work from @harveymccone.bsky.social and a bunch of past lab members!
Applications for BAMB! 2026 are officially open!
Join us in Barcelona (July 12–23) to master the art of behavioral modeling with our incredible faculty:
@meganakpeters.bsky.social
@marcelomattar.bsky.social
@khamascience.bsky.social
@thecharleywu.bsky.social
Apply now here: www.bambschool.org
Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not.
The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...
#hiring
Come work with us to better understand the neuronal mechanism underlying perceptual consciousness!
18 months postdoctoral position at INSERM in Grenoble, France.
⌛Application deadline 10 March 2026.
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/408445
Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻
Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems.
See below for + details and retweet 🙏
New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)
Our #sEEG study is now published in Nature Communications: rdcu.be/eIkoG! 🧠
Key finding: We discovered neural evidence accumulation for visual perception that's independent of report preparation—recorded from >3000 channels across 3 experiments!
#Neuroscience #Consciousness #OpenAccess
Overall, our results highlight how prominent neural decision signals may take different shapes in different contexts, and how probing them using tasks that depart from conventional ones can provide important insights into their functional roles. Thanks for reading this far!
These results align with recent work in an expanded judgement task under volatility, where the CPP following individual tokens shows transient evoked activities that scale with context-optimal belief updates:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Model-based simulated EEG data
A simple bounded accumulation model could capture the key behavioural patterns in our data, and model-based simulations were able to reproduce the condition-specific profiles of the neural data (CPP & MBL) following each pulse 👇
Our participants sometimes terminated decisions early, tending to use the second pulse less than the first one, and CPP amplitudes following each pulse reflected this differential weight on choice (i.e. small CPP, small weight on choice), also capturing condition-specific differences in the effect.
This transient pattern of activity stands in contrast to motor beta lateralisation (MBL), which keeps track of the total sum of accumulated evidence throughout the intervals between pulses and until response.
We show that when noisy evidence for a single decision comes in temporally separate pulses, the centroparietal positivity (CPP) tracks multiple rounds of evidence accumulation, falling back down to baseline during the intervals in between pulses when no relevant info is presented.
Check out our reviewed preprint, now out in eLife!
With @spk3lly.bsky.social, @redmondoconnell.bsky.social and Anna Geuzebroek
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
While we work on improving the [solid] paper based on the reviews, here are the key take-home messages:
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 ↓↓↓
Will you be at #ICON2025 in Porto?
Then drop at our symposium on "Decision Signal(s) In The Electro-encephalogram" (SY23, Thursday at 13.45) with @redmondoconnell.bsky.social @nunezanalyzed.bsky.social @tarrynbalsdon.bsky.social @hcp4715.bsky.social organized by Leendert van Maanen and Jelmer Borst
Excited to be in Porto for #ICON2025! I will be at poster session 2 tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon (P2.20) talking about evidence accumulation and choice-encoding centroparietal signals in the human EEG. Come say hi!
📢Fully Funded PhD position in Barcelona!
I'm excited to announce that I’m opening a PhD position at @idibaps.bsky.social, Barcelona!
We'll investigate the role of bodily signals in autobiographical memory, using virtual reality, EEG and TMS, in healthy volunteers and patient populations.
Excellent piece.
We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it.
"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."
Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in @Nature.com:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +
New paper from the lab indicates some surprising differences in visual cortical contributions to two popular VEP types.
In it, Kieran uses some of his brilliant tricks from last year's paper:
Check out our new multisensory decision study!
We tackle a decades-old Q: does faster detection of bimodal targets come from a race or co-activation between modalities? And also a vital, orthogonal Q: is it one decision process or two?
A1: co-activation
A2: two!
Read here: rdcu.be/eASYd