Congrats!!

Do you want to measure pupil size while participants move their eyes around 👀? We offer a straightforward solution to gaze-induced distortions on pupil size measurements in our newest paper!

Dissociating Spatial Attention and Working Memory Storage with Pupillometry Abstract. Extant work establishes a close relationship between spatial attention and working memory (WM) storage. Indeed, spatial representations of memorized items emerge spontaneously, even when…

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1).
If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

@cstrauch.bsky.social

Hey bluesky 👋 really excited about this one! 👀

How reality is simulated by your brain | Surgya Gayet | TEDxEindhoven YouTube video by TEDx Talks

My first TEDx talk just came out. It's always fun to talk about your own research area to the general audience, and its even more fun when you are lucky enough to be supported by such a platform. Happy to hear your thoughts :-)

youtu.be/UyUclyHx8d8?...

Thanks to @ruthrosenholtz.bsky.social for the thought-provoking article. I'm looking forward to reading all the other commentaries and the full reply!

Our commentary @stigchel.bsky.social on Ruth Rosenholtz' Visual Attention in Crisis paper is now available:
doi.org/10.1017/S014...

We argue that effort must be considered when aiming to quantify capacity limits or a task's complexity.

Congrats!! 🎉

Celebration time 🥳 @liangyouzhang.bsky.social publishes the 1st empirical paper of his PhD!

We show that numerosity adaptation (a seemingly high-level stim property) suppresses neural responses in early visual cortex; these adaptation FX increase as we progress thru the visual processing hierarchy.

This paper is now published in Journal of Neuroscience!

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Planning on running a RIFT study? In a new manuscript, we put together the RIFT know-how accumulated over the years by multiple labs (@lindadrijvers.bsky.social, @schota.bsky.social, @eelkespaak.bsky.social, with Cecília Hustá and others).

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Big thanks to @henryjones.bsky.social for his help with the simulation analysis! And of course thanks to all other co-authors Vicky Voet, Ed Awh, @cstrauch.bsky.social @stigchel.bsky.social.

Also thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable input.

Highlighting a supplementary analysis we added: Prior work showed that cross-decoding asymmetries can sometimes be driven by SNR differences between conditions instead of 'true' neurocognitive effects. We simulated EEG data and showed that SNR is unlikely to account for our cross-decoding results.

Filled with a bunch of extra analyses, this is now accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience @sfn.org! You can have a sneak peak here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain Abstract. The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)sc...

🧠 Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

(still uncorrected proofs, but they should post the corrected one soon--also OA is forthcoming, for now PDF at brainandexperience.org/pdf/10.1162-...)

Thanks Sebastiaan!!

Thanks to everyone that contributed to project @henryjones.bsky.social, Stefan Van der Stigchel and Ed Awh. Also a special thanks to @dsuplica.bsky.social for helping out with the data from Exp. 3!

In all experiments, we found a consistent pattern: pupil size tracked attentional breadth and WM load independently. This converges with recent EEG decoding work demonstrating a dissociation between spatial attention and working memory gating.

We analyzed pupil size - which reflects both spatial attention and WM load - data from three experiments wherein attentional breadth and working memory load were manipulated independently. For example, using dot cloud stimuli the spatial extent of stimuli were orthogonal to the number of clouds.

Spatial attention and working memory are popularly thought to be tightly coupled. Yet, distinct neural activity tracks attentional breadth and WM load.

In a new paper @jocn.bsky.social, we show that pupil size independently tracks breadth and load.

doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

Very excited to announce my first paper is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using EEG, we identify an item-based measure of storage in working memory that generalizes across auditory and visual items.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1ljFF3QW8S...

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #workingmemory

Dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in early visual cortex Task-irrelevant yet salient stimuli can elicit automatic, bottom-up attentional capture and compete with top-down, goal-directed processes for neural representation. However, the temporal dynamics und...

🧠 Excited to share that our new preprint is out!🧠
In this work, we investigate the dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in the early visual cortex using rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT).

📄 Check it out on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Sensory eye dominance varies over the horizontal axis of the visual field: left eye dominance for the right visual field; right eye dominance for the left visual field.

Surely you know about eye dominance. You probably don’t know it’s not a unitary phenomenon: in this paper I show that sensory eye dominance varies over the visual field. In the Discussion I propose an explanation for why this variation might exist. Curious? Read it here: doi.org/10.1167/jov....

Had a blast at last week's symposium! Inspiring to hear all the talks about EEG and attention.

I presented on the neural correlates of saccade preparation and covert spatial attention. Check out the preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Last week's symposium titled "Advances in the Encephalographic Study of Attention" was a great success! Held in the KNAW building in Amsterdam and sponsored by the NWO, many of (Europe's) leading attention researchers assembled to discuss the latest advances in attention research using M/EEG.

In this new preprint, in review @elife.bsky.social, we show what processing steps make up the reaction time using single trial #EEG modelling in a contrast #decision task.

In this 🧵 I'm telling the story behind it as I think it is quite interesting and I can't write it like this in the paper...

Thrilled to share that I successfully defended my PhD dissertation on Monday June 16th!

The dissertation is available here: doi.org/10.33540/2960