Sebastiaan Mathôt

Hoe kiezen rechters nieuwe rechters? Slordig, stellen sollicitatie-experts - De Correspondent Nederland loopt goede kandidaat-rechters mis doordat de selectieprocedure matig is ingericht. Dat valt te concluderen uit nieuw wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Het goede nieuws: de rechters gaan aan de slag met de kritische feedback.

Uitstekend stuk over wetenschappelijk onderbouwde sollicitatie-/ selectieprocedures (in dit geval voor kandidaat-rechters). ✅ intelligentietests en meetbare criteria. ❌ Intuïtie en ongestructureerde interviews.
decorrespondent.nl/16800/hoe-ki... #psychologie

Beautiful detailed renderings of many different ant species (including insides) #biology #science #ants www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/s...

Application Form Senior Editor Clinical/Associate Editor Social Section Collabra: Psychology Starting from 1 July 2026, Collabra: Psychology is on the look-out for a new senior editor for the clinical section as well as several new associate editors for the social section. If you are interest...

🚨 Call for Editors: Join the Collabra: Psychology team! We're looking for a senior editor for clinical psychology, plus several social psychology associate editors. Interested? Please fill out our application form before 30 April 2026.
@improvingpsych.org docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Een Wereld vol Denkers in De Standaard. "(…) geen pasklare antwoorden op indringende vragen, maar zijn boek is een stevige aanzet om intuïties los te laten en te durven denken over denken." #psychologie #boeken #wetenschap #biologie
www.standaard.be/media-en-cul...

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language

Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

Algoritme van de samenleving - Wat heeft een mier aan AI YouTube video by De KNAW

Lezing ‘Wat heeft een mier aan AI?' 🐜 🤖 - Op 27 januari gaf Sebastiaan Mathôt een lezing over zijn boek 'Een wereld vol denkers’, waarin hij het begrip ‘intelligentie’ ruim toelichtte.

📽️ Bekijk de lezing hier: youtu.be/5AWt641DlJI?...

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

6 bad doodles with text under each one. horseshoe crab is literally the animal horseshoe crab. shoehorse crab is a crab riding a shoe, cowboy style. crabshoe horse is a horse wearing literal crabs as shoes. shoecrab horse is a horse telling a crab to go away. crabhorse shoe is a pair of shoes, left one crab shaped, right one horse shaped. horsecrab shoe is literally the same pair of shoes, flipped.

#InvertebrateShitposting as per @joabaldwin.com's request

The Dream of the Butterfly

Here's a striking visual illusion - the 9 purple dots.

Focus your eyes on the top left dot. That one is more purple than the others, right? Now try another dot... that one becomes the purple one! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41744429/

I see what you mean now: human-created agents for a specific task. That's probably real, but to me the PNAS letter implied more: AI bots scanning the internet for tasks and then doing them. More or less like already happens on forums. But that's probably not happening for online experiments (yet).

I feel it's important to be specific here. Just saying that it's agentic doesn't say much about what's actually happening, nor what kind of experiments could be affected by this.

But in concrete terms (and I realize you haven't seen the actual agent in action), how do you think this works? Do you think the LLM write a simple JavaScript program based on its understanding of the experiment code, and then this sub-programs runs the actual experiment?

However, current vision LLMs are way to slow to give even remotely realistic response times. So clearly this is not what actually happened in your study. Probably, something in-between these scenarios happened. And I'm wondering about the specifics?

On the other hand, a vision LLM can also genuinely participate by using the browser as a human would, which means visually processing stimulus displays and emitting key presses in response. This is not trivial, but probably possible. To me, your letter implies that this is what happened.

Not quite. I mean the following: an LLM can (of course) 'participate' in a response-time task by simply generating a list of numeric values, possibly through a script that samples from a distribution, and then submit these as responses. This is trivial and of course not what you mean.

@attentionlab.bsky.social How was this task implemented? Did the AI bots actually perform the task as a human observer, i.e. by processing visual input and responding?

@attentionlab.bsky.social identified (what look like) #AI bots in an online response-time task (Posner cuing). Give-aways are normally distributed RTs and lack of serial-dependence effects. Pretty troublng. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

dx.doi.org/10.1177/0301... 3/3

dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... 2/3

Non-image-forming vision as measured through ipRGC-mediated pupil constriction is not modulated by covert visual attention Abstract. In brightness, the pupil constricts, while in darkness, the pupil dilates; this is known as the pupillary light response (PLR). The PLR is driven

And these manuscripts show how you can actually use this technique to test fundamental research questions: dx.doi.org/10.1093/cerc... 1/3 👇

A confound-free method to manipulate pupil size in psychological experiments - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Researchers are increasingly showing interest in the ways in which various cognitive processes are influenced by the size of the pupil. However, this realm of research is complicated by the pupil’s no...

🚨Pupillometrists!

Reviewer2: “But what if changing pupil size unintentionally affected arousal?” 👁️

Now we give you the answer! In collaboration with Snell lab www.snelllab.eu, we show that you can safely manipulate pupil size, via ipRGC activation, without unintentionally altering arousal!

New preprint! We mapped out how ‘diffuse’ predictions affect neural representations. We show predictions reshape the geometric layout of the neural representations by compressing the representational spread and stabilize the neural code by reducing the neural variance during memory encoding.

Are you interested in psychological experiments, but feel a little unsure about programming. Try OpenSesame. Not only has it a user-friendly GUI, it is also connected to SigmundAI, an AI assistant that can basically make the experiment for you! Super cool stuff by @cogsci.nl

And don't forget to follow 👉 @veerahelmisofia.bsky.social 👈 if you're interested in #pupillometry, #eyemovements, and #visualperception!

🚨 New #Review #Preprint 🚨 Veera Ruuskanen proposes a new, concrete framework to understand how and why pupil size 👁️, neural activity 🧠, and behavior 💃 interact. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology #neuroscience #pupillometry #perception

SigmundAI.eu can now implement complete psychological experiments in #OpenSesame. From scratch based on verbal description. Astonishing how far #AI has come 😵‍💫 #psychology

Boek: Yu Hua, De onvindbare stad, vertaling Annelous Stiggelbout

Annelous Stiggelbout vertaalde Yu Hua’s 文成 (Wénchéng) als De onvindbare stad. Op ons verzoek licht ze haar vertaling toe. Lees over de eerste zin, het ombouwen van de Chinese zinsstructuur en grondig en moeizaam of vlot vertalen: athenaeumscheltema.n...

This is indeed a very cool exploratory visualization. Veera Ruuskanen and I are actually just about to finish a review where we include a similar plot as an interactive visualization of correlations between bold signal and pupil size cogsci.nl/pages/pupil-...

sigmundai.eu now searches and downloads scientific articles from #OpenAlex, A big improvement over the shaky Google Scholar connector. And new support for #Claude 4.6 Sonnet and Opus!