The call for commentaries on our BBS paper is out now (deadline October 15): shorturl.at/Hu3Yu. In the paper (shorturl.at/4Rbk6), we provide recommendations and outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing 👇

For >5 years, the International Sleep Replay Workshops (ISRW) have brought together scientists studying sleep & memory. The next ISRW will be on March 6th in Vancouver (before @cogneuronews.bsky.social). Follow the link for details and to join the mailing list.
isrw.bio.uci.edu

Pls repost! #sleep

"wake reactivation: I do not think it means what you think it means"

tell us what you think!

Amazing work @maorschreiber.bsky.social @francoisstock.bsky.social @nfaivre.bsky.social and @liadmudrik.bsky.social for leading this project, thank you!

📢Excited to share our paper, "Studying unconscious processing: Contention and consensus", published in BBS.
The paper is the result of a collaborative effort of 32 leading researchers in the field, from 10 different countries🌏

Check out the full ms👇
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Coming to #ASSC28? Check out our stuff! Examining theories of consciousness, testing the scope of unconscious processing, exploring intuitions about consciousness - and more! Looking forward to interacting with you there, and showcasing the great work of: >>

thank you!

do you indeed think it's not penetrability?

So, is perception cognitively penetrable? Can we use semantic priming to make you see a Kanizsa shape - or not see it?… we think we can! See this great work by Nataly Davidson Litvak and @amirtal.bsky.social that just came out!

Semantic priming can either increase or decrease perception of the Kanizsa illusion. This result supports cognitive penetrability, demonstrating top-down influences on illusory perceptual experience. @liadmudrik.bsky.social
@amirtal.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This work was co-authored by the wonderful and social-networkless Nataly Davidson Litvak, and supervised by the brilliant @liadmudrik.bsky.social

Taken together, our findings suggest that semantic primes can modulate visual perception — a good case for cognitive penetrability.

We think this adds a fresh contribution to the debate, while avoiding some of the common pitfalls in past studies. Let us know what you think!

In a final experiment we showed the opposite – priming the illusory shape (“triangle”) facilitated detecting the illusion,

so a semantic prime could also enhance the illusion.

In three studies, priming Pac-Man both via images and via words reduced detection of a Kanizsa shape by roughly a half (comparable to the level of reporting a shape in our control, when no shape was even there).

We formed the illusion using Pac-Man shaped items, and hypothesized that priming the idea of Pac-Man can bias people towards seeing a bunch of separate Pac-Men chatting instead of the single illusory contour in between them.

So we took the Kanizsa illusion and tried to affect it using prior knowledge.

In the Kanizsa illusion, a shape emerges from imaginatively filling in gaps between separate items.

In this debate, visual illusions have a special role.

They present a “wrong” perception, but knowing it’s wrong doesn’t make the illusion go away – suggesting that perception may be sealed off from cognition.

Cognitive Penetrability sounds like a solid 90s Schwarzenegger film but is in fact a longstanding debate in cognitive sciences –

do our thoughts, beliefs and feelings affect how we interpret what we see, or do they actually make us see the world differently?

Hi Bluesky!

I want to let you know about a cool new paper I had the honor of being a part of:

Semantic priming modulates the strength and direction of the Kanizsa illusion

rdcu.be/en0JZ