Excited to share that our MEG project is now out in Current Biology! We show how visual content codes relate to motor oscillations in telling time.
Huge thanks to Quirin Gehmacher, Peter Kok, Matt Davis and Clare Press (bsky links below).🧵
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Check out Benjy’s new paper, the first from his postdoc in the lab! 👁️ 🧠
It reveals how our inferences about what’s present and absent in the external world are calibrated by perceiving w/ others. And we come to detect what our partners can. Thread below 👇
@benjyb.bsky.social
@leverhulme.ac.uk
your paper looks really cool Christian! I've been thinking about how our results might relate to perceptual development, so I look forward to reading it properly :)
and tagging the great @danieljamesyon.bsky.social as it didn't seem to work in my initial post!
In the preprint, we lay out a number of potentially exciting implications these results may have for topics as broad as models of consciousness, cultural anthropology of sensory experiences, and social cognition 🧠
Matching effects were significantly weaker in a non-social version of the task.
We also show that ‘matching’ behaviour is amplified by the social framing of the task, with significantly weaker matching found in a non-social task.
Critically, this effect persisted once participants performed the task alone again – suggesting the impact of joint decision making percolated into participants’ private cognition, and was not merely tied to the explicit reporting of awareness to another agent.
Plots showing the effect of 'threshold matching', where participants match their threshold for detecting the presence of targets to their partner.
Across multiple experiments, we show that participants ‘match’ their awareness reports to their partner – such that those with liberal partners become more liberal and those with conservative partners become more conservative.
Description of methodology showing the creation of partners with specifically liberal or conservative biases to reporting the presence of targets
The partners were programmed to have either a higher or lower threshold for reporting the presence of a target than participants.
Illustration of task paradigm, showing a detection task performed individually, followed by joint with a partner, before being done alone again.
To probe this, we asked participants to do a simple perceptual detection task on their own, with a partner, and then on their own again.
But as of yet, it's unknown whether our social interactions can influence perhaps the most fundamental of all perceptual judgements: did I see anything at all?
In other words, can social interactions influence what we report becoming aware of in the first place?
Over the last half-century, psychologists have suggested social pressure can influence how we describe the way our percepts look. For example, is this line longer than that line, is this patch greener than that patch?
Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of?
In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
Happy to have the preprint of my work in @philcorlett.bsky.social's lab out 🎊 read below to see how experienced volatility influences social hallucinations in paranoid perception
Screenshot of tweet from Huberman that reads: “The other is that dog breeds w/different shaped heads are predictive of their demeanor and intelligence. And while I don’t! believe in Phrenology I now do pay some attention to how the shapes of peoples heads relates to their intellect and steadiness, or lack thereof.”
In response to announcement that he will be a new CBS contributor, Andrew Huberman tweeted “I’ve always gone issue-by-issue on health & science, spoken to experts w/a range of takes & presented where I see the center of (data) mass pointed. I’ll do the same with @CBSNews”. In Sept he posted this:
So excited to see this lovely paper with @benjyb.bsky.social, @matanmazor.bsky.social and @giuliacabbai.bsky.social published in @nconsc.bsky.social!
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
Out now in @nconsc.bsky.social 🧠😶🌫️
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk
More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p...
#cogsci #neuroskyence
I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.
They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
super excited to say that the first paper from my PhD has been published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 🧠!!
“I could have done otherwise”: the neural bases of counterfactual representations -> doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe
1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖
And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.
A post on X by Kyle Langford, with a composite photo showing him standing outside the gates of Auschwitz, and the caption: "My zero unemployment plan", with an emoji of factory chimneys.
I know there's a risk of amplifying the fascist horror show, but I think we need to be aware of just how far things are going, especially as this man is a Republican candidate for governor of California. All the old safeguards are being deliberately torn down, and the unspeakable normalised.
There is still so much we don’t know about the brain’s ability to deal with absence, and we hope this study goes some way towards revealing the different ways we are able to represent ‘nothing.’
These findings help extend previous distinctions between perception and cognition to the case of absences and, at least in adult humans, suggest that abstract concepts of absence are not rooted in more primitive representations of sensory absence.
Moreover, this was in spite of low-level visual similarities between perceptual and non-symbolic absences, which could otherwise drive spurious generalisation between the two domains.
We built on these results to study how numerical and perceptual absences related to each other – finding surprisingly strong evidence for distinct neural representations of different types of absence.
