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Dr. Angelica Lim

@petitegeek.bsky.social

3.3K followers 1.5K following 260 posts

Computing Science prof in multimodal embodied AI, emotion, interaction at SFU in Vancouver 🇨🇦🇵🇭 Director of the Rosie Lab www.rosielab.ca Robotics nerd. Previously at SoftBank Robotics 🤖 FR/JP

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Jun 27

Hi all!👋 This year, my sabbatical will focus on learning more about the brain, esp. neural mechanisms behind social theory of mind & affect. This includes its breakdowns, e.g. psychosis, hallucinations and delusions related to ToM. I'll be posting what I learn along the way. Thanks for connecting! ☺️

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 4d

Doing final checks on my Intro to Programming book and I'm really psyched about it. It takes an approach to learning programming that reflects my journey in learning French and Japanese. If you can learn a second language, you can learn Python! Out in Spring! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Python Practice Lab

A guide to learning basic programming by writing fun, working programs that gradually become more complex

press.princeton.edu

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 4d

Illusions are so fascinating. Apparently we perceive words as taller if we know them (as opposed to pseudo-words) and perceive words as *louder* if we know them, too. journalofcognition.org/articles/10....

Listening to Foreign Languages: Pump Up the Volume! | Journal of Cognition

journalofcognition.org

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Marta Gerosa @martager.bsky.social · 13d

Interested in brain-body interactions but unsure where to start?

🎮 Choose your character

👩🏻‍🔬👨🏽‍🔬 Current scientists: a new review by @michaelgaebler.com A. Villringer & V. Nikulin

🧒🏼👧🏾 Future scientists (and people of all ages): our scicomm article with @agatapatyczek.bsky.social & @el-rei.bsky.social

Michael Gaebler @michaelgaebler.com · 13d

In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...

Trends in Neurosciences @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social · 15d

'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Sahib Khalsa @skhalsa.bsky.social · 21d

What if many psychiatric disorders share the same hidden glitch in how the brain infers reality? In a new volume, Al Powers and I gather experts to examine how disrupted sensory inference across #vision, #touch, #proprioception and #interoception might unify our understanding.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 16d

"the frame problem broadly refers to the difficulty of teaching a machine to make smart decisions based on relevant information without having it explicitly consider every irrelevant detail." Is De Sousa (et al)'s suggestion that emotions solve the frame problem not considered useful for AI?

Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Malcolm Campbell @malcolmgcampbell.bsky.social · 19d

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 21d

Also, can we appreciate these animations of how cargos are transported across microtubules on an axon? 🤯 There are even different types of transports that perform obstacle avoidance youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8

Kinesin protein walking on microtubule

YouTube video by em2134x

youtu.be

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 21d

For example, last week was on vesicular trafficking and axonal transport. And now, this paper has now become mostly legible \o/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36252719/
Next week is on mitochondria. How is it useful to my research? Might not be, but it feels nice to start to see the bigger picture.

Axonal transport deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders - PubMed

Axonal transport is a major cellular process that mediates bidirectional signaling between the soma and synapse, enabling both intracellular and intercellular communications. Cellular materials, such ...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 21d

As an engineer, it's fascinating to take a translational neuroscience course from @sfuneuro.bsky.social. This term, the goal is start to fill in the blanks - how do we go from molecules to behaviour? www.sfu.ca/neuro-instit... Super compelling!

www.sfu.ca

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 22d

Interesting tidbit I learned: 90% of SCZ patients don't have a parent with the diagnosis.

// Oof, probably a contributing factor to late diagnosis: parents don't know the symptoms and can't identify when psychosis happens until it's severe

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 22d

This week, I'm reading Strong Imagination by @danielnettle.bsky.social, recommended to me by a biology colleague working on schizophrenia. It's fascinating to read research spanning biological evidence to social science.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Matan Mazor @matanmazor.bsky.social · Mar 21

Our "I would have seen it if it were there" paper — a collaboration with @ranimo.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social — is now out in Psych. Review.

There’s a lot in this paper, but here are what I see as the 3 main takeaways:

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

The title of the paper, "Beliefs about Perception Shape Perceptual Inference: An Ideal Observer Model of Detection", with the author names, and Fig. 1: a schematic of an inverse optics account of vision.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 29d

Week 1 of a molecular neuroscience course - I don't know what I don't know. Also, it seems I don't know a lot ☺️

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 29d

Jesus, just a warning if you get into this book -- I cried about 7 times reading it. Also noted down 7 cool papers to follow up on (no correlation)! But damn, it hits you in the feels.

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 29d

One question that Rust brought up in her book was "what is the adaptive purpose of SZ?" I have a book by Dan Mettle discussing this on my reading list (I think the theory is creativity) but I also wonder about inferring intent in the search for mates. Seems like a pretty strong motivation.

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 29d

Participants predicted the action of their partner more quickly when they were passionately in love
psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-...

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 8

Also, something that I am surprised to read about only now (or maybe I forgot), is that mirror neuron activity is only relevant when observing an intentional action (e.g. raising hand to eat), not an action by itself (e.g. raising hand near mouth).

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 8

For example, she writes about studies investigating the insula and activations of love (anterior insula) vs desire (posterior insula)

www.cambridge.org/core/books/n...

Neuroimaging of Love in the Twenty-first Century (Chapter 4) - The New Psychology of Love

The New Psychology of Love - December 2018

www.cambridge.org

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 8

Next up on my sabbatical journey is this book by Stephanie Cacioppo. It's simultaneously intellectually invigorating and heart wrenching.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 6

Fascinating study by Agnieszka Wykowska's group that shows that resting state EEG can predict whether an individual treats a robot as intentional agents or mechanistic artifacts
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The human brain reveals resting state activity patterns that are predictive of biases in attitudes toward robots

Biases toward treating robots as intentional agents or mechanical artifacts show a distinct neural activation pattern at rest.

www.science.org

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 6

Thanks!!

Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Sep 6

Paper from OpenAI says hallucinations are less a problem with LLMs themselves & more an issue with training on tests that only reward right answers. That encourages guessing rather than saying “I don’t know”

If true, there is a straightforward path for more reliable AI through better training.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 6

And does encoding require an action taken (and corresponding reward), or does this also occur in an unsupervised task?

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 6

This is very cool. Does this also take into account variable length chunks?

Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · Sep 6

This looks super interesting, thanks for sharing!!