Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Samuel Recht

Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · Jun 9

Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out.
I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines".
You can download the entire book for free:
library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · Jun 10

like a metacognitive evaluation? in my understanding metacog is at best weird, but more likely just not even present in most if not all LLMs. they don't do anything like "decide when more context is needed" anything like we do.

not an LLM expert but i do know abt metacog!

arxiv.org/abs/2504.14045

Metacognition and Uncertainty Communication in Humans and Large Language Models

Metacognition, the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own knowledge and performance, is foundational to human decision-making, learning, and communication. As large language models (LLMs) become i...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · Jun 10

Great work by Changde Du from Huiguang He's lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. How similar are visual and conceptual representations in (multimodal) large language models to those found in humans? It turns out quite similar!
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Human-like object concept representations emerge naturally in multimodal large language models - Nature Machine Intelligence

Multimodal large language models are shown to develop object concept representations similar to those of humans. These representations closely align with neural activity in brain regions involved in o...

www.nature.com

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Matthias Guggenmos @mguggenmos.bsky.social · Jun 4

We have a PhD position for an upcoming project in metacognition research in Potsdam / Berlin. A great opportunity for those interested in cognitive modeling of confidence and EEG.

More information at coconeuro.github.io/phd2025

Kindly share this opportunity with potential candidates - Thanks!

Computation and Cognition @ HMU Potsdam

coconeuro.github.io

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Harrison Ritz @hritz.bsky.social · Jun 3

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dissociable habits of response preparation versus response initiation - Nature Human Behaviour

Du and Haith show that behaviour can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · May 22

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow.

It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America.

All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida @n41c0.bsky.social · May 22

Very happy this is finally out 🎉. In this paper, we show that conf. reports are biased by a visual illusion, an asymmetrical base rate and a payoff scheme. Crucially, we show that only the visual illusion affects subj. experience, suggesting decision bias leaks onto confidence reports.

Communications Psychology @commspsychol.nature.com · May 22

Using explicit measures of subjective experience & Bayesian ordinal modeling, this study shows that confidence reports in perceptual decisions are influenced by nonperceptual biases.
@n41c0.bsky.social @fahrenfort.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social @juliaha.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Confidence reports during perceptual decision making dissociate from changes in subjective experience - Communications Psychology

Using explicit measures of subjective experience and a Bayesian ordinal modeling framework, this study shows that confidence reports in perceptual decisions are influenced by nonperceptual biases.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Peter Kok @peterkok.bsky.social · May 22

Our study using layer fMRI to study the direction of communication between the hippocampus and cortex during perceptual predictions is finally out in Science Advances! Predicted-but-omitted shapes are represented in CA2/3 and correlate specifically with deep layers of PHC, suggesting feedback. 🧠🟦

Communication of perceptual predictions from the hippocampus to the deep layers of the parahippocampal cortex

High-resolution neuroimaging reveals stimulus-specific predictions sent from hippocampus to the neocortex during perception.

www.science.org

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Andrey Chetverikov @achetverikov.bsky.social · May 21

New preprint! Serial dependence is assumed to be attractive, but some studies consistently show repulsion. We tried to replicate a surprising repulsive serial bias that switches to an attractive one when people get distracted during the memory maintenance. It worked! osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

a screenshot of the preprint first page, with the text:

Between repulsion and attraction in serial biases: Replication of Chen & Bae, 2024

Juni B. Akselberg, Sara B. Cardona, Mikkel Dybvad, Lise Martine Karlstad, Malin Langemyr, Ingrid A. Mellingsæter-Jokic, Mats K. K. Moe, Amalie C. Solvang, and
Andrey Chetverikov
1 Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen
2 Department of Psychosocial Science, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen
Abstract
What you see depends on what you have seen before, and commonly your perception is drawn toward the past. Such attractive biases, known as serial dependence, are well established for many visual features. Interestingly, Chen and Bae (2024, Cognition) recently reported a repulsive serial bias in a pointing direction estimation task that switched to an attractive one in the presence of a distracting task. At the same time, an analysis of response trajectories revealed a repulsive bias during response execution, irrespective of the condition. These surprising findings prompted us to attempt a replication. We confirmed the main findings of Chen and Bae. However, we also demonstrated that the overall direction and magnitude of the bias are relatively stable for a given observer, regardless of the condition. Furthermore, we found that already the very first moment in the response trajectory differed between conditions, showing a predominantly attractive bias for trials that ended with attraction. The results confirm the robustness of the original findings and pose a challenge for a simple Bayesian model of serial dependence, highlighting the need for computational models that can explain both attractive and repulsive biases.
Keywords: serial dependence, bias, direction estimation, orientation, visual working memory, Stroop, attraction, repulsion, mouse tracking, stimulus history effect, perceptual decision-making, replication

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Reposted by Samuel Recht

Sophie Herbst @herbstso.bsky.social · May 15

Episode II of how are durations stored in working memory:
Besides replicating our previous findings, we find that
alpha power reflects a universal signature of WM load and mediates recall precision, even for abstract information like duration
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🔽 co-authors below

Alpha power indexes working memory load for durations

Timing, that is estimating, comparing, or remembering how long events last, requires the temporary storage of durations. How durations are stored in working memory is unknown, despite the widely held ...

www.biorxiv.org

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Doby Rahnev @dobyrahnev.bsky.social · Apr 30

Great to see our research, led by @johannakuci.bsky.social, covered in The Transmitter. One of the more surprising findings to have come out of the lab.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Apr 18

Neuroscientists should embrace variability in neuroimaging studies, according to researchers who showed that decision-making is associated with subtypes of brain activity.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/behavior/dur...

During decision-making, brain shows multiple distinct subtypes of activity

Person-to-person variability in brain activity might represent meaningful differences in cognitive processes, rather than random noise.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Kobe Desender @kobedesender.bsky.social · Apr 30

Dynamic modulation of confidence based on the metacognitive skills of collaborators! Now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social New work from
@felixhermans.bsky.social Simon Gaia @majafr.bsky.social
and me! Paper here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40262423/ Details ↓↓↓

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Ivan Tomic @ivntmc.bsky.social · Apr 28

I'm super excited that our new preprint titled "Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning" with Rodrigo Raimundo and Paul Bays (@bayslab.org) is finally out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n
#visionscience #compneurosky #neuroskyence

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Pascal Mamassian @mamassian.bsky.social · Apr 22

If you work with perceptual confidence judgments, you may be interested in our CNCB model of confidence ratings. Joint work with Vincent de Gardelle.

Uncorrected proofs here:
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

(🧵 1/4)

relationship between sensory evidence and confidence evidence

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Ling-Qi Zhang @lingqiz.bsky.social · Apr 24

Very happy to see our work finally in print!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

TLDR: Tilt illusion is not a bug, but a feature of a well-designed visual system that maximizes information capacity adaptively based on spatial context. (1/6)

The tilt illusion arises from an efficient reallocation of neural coding resources at the contextual boundary | PNAS

The tilt illusion—a bias in the perceived orientation of a center stimulus induced by an oriented surround—illustrates how context shapes visual pe...

www.pnas.org

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Laura Dugué @lauradugue.bsky.social · Apr 24

Very proud of João VX Cardoso from the #DugueLab for the first preprint of his PhD on a computational model of traveling waves. Work in collaboration with David J. Heeger and Hsin-Hung Li.
@erc.europa.eu

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

Attention induced perceptual traveling waves in binocular rivalry

Cortical traveling waves -smooth changes of phase over time across the cortical surface- have been proposed to modulate perception periodically as they travel through retinotopic cortex. Yet, little i...

www.biorxiv.org

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Noam Sarna @noamsarna.bsky.social · Mar 17

Hey Bluesky! I’m excited to share my new preprint with @matanmazor.bsky.social and @ruvidar.bsky.social, where we show that surface-level questionnaire filling behaviours drive correlations between mental health and metacognition (confidence ratings). osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/14]

a close up of a man wearing glasses and a hat with abc family on the bottom

ALT: a close up of a man wearing glasses and a hat with abc family on the bottom

media.tenor.com

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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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Julian Matthews @quining.bsky.social · Jan 17

Lovely/comprehensive review of metacognition and functional neurological disorder; a condition that demands a metacognitive interpretation: doi.org/10.1093/brai...

The emerging picture aligns with findings in psychopathology more broadly—metacognitive performance is often equivalent to controls.

Going ‘meta’: a systematic review of metacognition and functional neurological disorder

Sadnicka et al., overview experimental data that has examined metacognition in patients with functional neurological disorders (FND). Interestingly, most s

doi.org

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Kobe Desender @kobedesender.bsky.social · Jan 20

Why does it feel good to be sure? In new work @voalan.bsky.social @andero.bsky.social and I bridge confidence and affect. In perceptual DM, we found a remarkably consistent association between both measures! ↓↓↓

link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Metacognitive confidence and affect – two sides of the same coin?

Decision confidence is a prototypical metacognitive representation that is thought to approximate the probability that a decision is correct. The perception of being correct has also been associate...

www.tandfonline.com

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Doby Rahnev @dobyrahnev.bsky.social · Jan 16

My article "A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition" is finally out in Nature Communications 🎉 If you work on metacognition and think you know the psychometric properties of your favorite measure, you may be surprised.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition - Nature Communications

Measuring metacognitive ability is one of the enduring challenges in cognitive science. The current paper develops formal tests of the quality of different measures and assesses how current metrics pe...

www.nature.com

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Samuel Recht @sam.re · Jan 11

Thanks a lot, Marlene! 🙂

Reposted by Samuel Recht

Nature Reviews Psychology @natrevpsychol.nature.com · Jan 7

How aggregated opinions shape beliefs

Review by Kerem Oktar & Tania Lombrozo

Web: go.nature.com/40lJX56
PDF: rdcu.be/d5tor

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Virginie van Wassenhove @virginievanw.bsky.social · Jan 6

Please, spread!

🧠 Competitive PhD funding is available for neuroscience projects in the Parisian region. Consider your options 👇

dim-cbrains.fr/en/phd-progr...

@c-brains.bsky.social

DIM C-BRAINS

Cognition and Brain Revolutions: Artificial Intelligence, Neurogenomics, Society

dim-cbrains.fr

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Daniel Yon @danieljamesyon.bsky.social · Jan 2

How can sharing our uncertainty with others alter our confidence when we're alone?

Delighted to share the lab's new paper, with Einar Andreassen and @cdfrith.bsky.social. Particularly pleased as it's Einar's first!

Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵👇

#PsychSciSky
#neuroskyence

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