Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

Als een 🦚 zo trots om *Een wereld vol denkers* door heel Nederland in de boekhandels te zien liggen! Een ontdekkingsreis door de gedachtewerelden van mens, dier, plant en #AI! #boeken #wetenschap #psychologie #biologie

A good reason to make it to the early #visualcognition session of today's #ecvp2025 👉 @anavili.bsky.social will talk about how attending to fuzzy bright/dark patches that have faded from awareness (through adaptation-like processes) still affect pupil size! ⚫👀⚪ Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Important work for pupillometry researchers! Check out the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵3/3

Namely: maybe these inducers also affect arousal and through that route behavior. Joshua Snell and @anavili.bsky.social rigorously tested this and found that the technique is solid: red and blue inducers affect pupil size, but do not appear to affect behavior by modulating arousal. 🧵2/3

Blue light strongly constricts the pupil—thanks to ipRGCs—but can we use it to manipulate pupil size without messing with behaviour? In a simple 2x2 (background color x task difficulty), we (w/ Joshua, Luise @vuamsterdam.bsky.social) show that background color affects pupil size, but not behaviour!

Through experience, humans can learn to suppress locations that frequently contain distracting stimuli. Using SSVEPs and ERPs, this study shows that such learned suppression modulates early neural responses, indicating it occurs during initial visual processing.
www.jneurosci.org/content/jneu...

Thank you Karl Gegenfurtner and Doris Braun for two fantastic talks last week in our department!

Good news for #pupillometry people! Ana Vilotijević is now on Bluesky: @anavili.bsky.social You might know her from work with @sebastiaanmathot.bsky.social that targetted intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, e.g. doi.org/10.1093/cerc... and doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Welcome @anavili.bsky.social 🤗

Kicking off Bluesky with some très bon news: I’ve moved to Paris to work with @claudialunghi.bsky.social at @normalesup.bsky.social for three months! Looking forward to great science, questionable French, and an unhealthy relationship with croissants 🥐🇫🇷👩‍🔬