We're hiring! Looking for a postdoc to work at UNSW Sydney, studying impacts of reward and information on attention, using eye-tracking, EEG, and modelling - with Kelly Garner, Daniel Pearson and me. Application link below, please spread the word!
external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/53...
We have over 100 abstracts submitted already and are expecting a big spike in these last couple of weeks!
EPC/APCV are very rarely in NZ (last was 15yrs ago). If you're kiwi, this is a great opportunity for a nearby international conference. If you're not, this is your chance to see beautiful NZ :)
Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron!
Here is a download link (free for 50 days):
authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH...
Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social
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Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...
I. Would take it while it still exists. Many universities, including UQ, have dispensed either sabbatical. There is no guarantee there will be any such thing in 29
🔊 New preprint 🧠 for the first time we show congenital #aphantasia has physical brain anatomy alterations.
Surprisingly, they have structurally intact #visual pathways. Structural alterations instead found in the fronto-temporal and cingulate systems.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani, Anina N. Rich, and Alexandra Woolgar:
Spatiotemporal characterisation of information coding in the multiple demand network
doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
I don't care if you call the operations that lead to these impressions binding, or Big Bob's adventure in perception - so long as there is an attempt to explain the perceptual experience. I am not impressed by assertions we need not understand how these impressions form as they are somehow mistaken
Another wrong assertion that feature integration is a motivated assertion. I just want to understand why things look as they do, and I am aware of a bunch of situations where things look as they do as incorrect combinations are combined in perception. That's observation not a mistaken starting point
You and I both : )
ECVP?
With that said, I'm very happy you and others are studying human vision from a different perspective, as that might bring new knowledge. Well worth a try. But your dismissal of there being any process of feature integration is going to rile people who are aware of striking illusory conjunctions
I am more impressed by existence proofs, and would only need see one flying pig to take interest in how a pig might take flight. I am also interested in how striking and persistent illusory conjunctions arise, and think a good theory of human vision should both explain them, and why they are rare.
So, you don't resile from not considering how striking and persistent illusory conjunctions might be caused when arguing against the existence of a binding problem, because in your preferred framework for studying human vision, these should not occur or be rare. That seems circular.
Meet our second keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026!
Prof. Elaine Reese from the University of Otago will deliver a keynote lecture titled "Memory Development: From Basic Science to Applied Approaches."
Our paper on double decisions in working memory tasks is now published in Computational Brain and Behaviour!
When you give people a second chance, it reveals a lot about the contents of their memory.
Led by @paulmgarrett.bsky.social
@psychunimelb.bsky.social
rdcu.be/e8SLX
I still think people should study artificial systems to see if lessons can be learnt, and that we should conduct abstracted studies to stress a system that evolved for other purposes - but be mindful of conceptual pitfalls in each context, and try to account for all (not some of) the evidence
One can make a similar argument about generalizing from an artificial system to biology. As artificial systems do not face the same constraints, and those constraints may determine the functional architecture of a system, we may be misled by studies of artificial visual systems.
There is a risk there - but I would argue there is a bigger risk in ignoring evidence. If we dismiss evidence as irrelevant as it was extracted by an abstracted protocol, our models and theories of vision will only be partially informed. We need both types of research in my opinion.
I think we also agree that illusory conjunctions tend to occur in unnatural conditions when the system is under stress. But I think we can learn about the functional structure of a system from those conditions - just as we can learn from considering how it is optimised to its typical diet
I don't think you really disagree with that, as this approach is inherent in your own work. If we disagree, I think it is only about how important it is to consider reports of misbinding when considering if there is a binding problem
No. Sometimes it has resulted in elegant studies that have revealed truths about the human visual system. Our understanding of the basics of colour vision, motion perception, population-based coding, and so on have all resulted from studies where we try to model perceptual decisions.
The 'binder' is a human observer. I would like to know what their visual system is doing to promote the impression that features that are not physically paired are nonetheless perceptually coupled.
I am agnostic about the framework that generated the 'misbinding'. That, indeed, is the question. Why do people have the impression that these features are bound in perception - what set of computations could promote that impression? But we should not ignore the impression - that is perceptual data
Nonetheless, they serve as an existence proof. If features can be misbound, there must be a process that binds them. If I were writing a review on the binding problem, I would want to address that
Definitely worth pursuing. But while pursuing, we need to consider all the evidence, not just the evidence that suits our current arguments.
True, but we can learn a lot about a system by stressing it. Psychophysics has a rich history of discerning the computational structure underlying perceptual decisions from investigations using an unnatural visual diet - often adaptation.
It may be an existence proof of a given architecture in a self-supervised system, but its relevance to human vision is tenuous. We know these systems are not behaving like the human visual system does, and we know that these systems do not have the same biological constraints.
I don't think you are representing Lennie's position clearly here. He did not relocate the binding problem. He was explicit that there is no such problem as the different features of a visual stimulus are never meaningfully segregated
Here is a more recent study of this illusion - which is well known amongst vision scientists, although perhaps not quite as well known as it should be...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I can assure you that this Nature paper was not a bogus article, and in lab conditions and in countless demonstrations I have seen of this effect, the stimulus has been well calibrated & compelling. This animated gif is a lot less than optimal (not sure why the colours are so desaturated)