Paul Linton

Flyer for 2026 edition of the European Summer School "Visual Neuroscience" in Rauischholzhausen castle, Germany.

The European Summer School "Visual Neuroscience" in Rauischholzhausen castle, Germany, is coming back in 2026!

Deadline: 8 March 2026

www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/rauisch/

Tues, Mar 31, 4PM "Conscious and Unconscious Vision"
Register here: tinyurl.com/bdet7a5c
@columbiauniversity.bsky.social @lintonvision.bsky.social

I'm grateful for the opportunity to sit down with @davideagleman.bsky.social to spread optimism about the next steps in brain research & their impact on understanding brain and mental disorders.

For a bolus of that excitement, start at 32:50, where David nails a summary of it (in 3.5 minutes).

Sorry for the wait (been to China for 4 weeks between the years), but I finally managed to update the pre-print with more results and the code is now also available on: github.com/ag-perceptio...

If you run into issues, let me know.

The elusive nature of consciousness A writer grapples with neuroscience’s hardest problem

My review of Michal Pollan's book on consciousness: www.science.org/eprint/FTJG7...

In praise of artifice - Nature Neuroscience Nature Neuroscience - In praise of artifice

This debate goes back 20+ years, well beyond the scope of today's NeuroAI. I’m sure you know this classic www.nature.com/articles/nn1....

I'd love to hear where @nicolecrust.bsky.social @movshon.bsky.social stand on it today.

Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests - Nature Machine Intelligence Tangtartharakul and Storrs use standardized neuropsychological tests to compare human visual abilities with those of visual language models (VLMs). They report that while VLMs excel in high-level obje...

Our latest paper, “Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests”, is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Non-paywalled version:
arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786

Tweet thread below from first author @genetang.bsky.social...

YouTube video by MIT Consciousness Club Marisa Carrasco - Perception/Action Dissociations as a Window Into Consciousness

Marisa Carrasco's talk "Perception / Action Dissociations as a Window into Consciousness" at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available online: youtu.be/7g6wodPclqs.

I have news! After 4 fabulous years at Northeastern, this July I will be moving to Duke—with tenure! It’s hard to convey how grateful I am to everyone who has made this possible: from old professors in Mexico and mentors in the US to students, colleagues, and, of course, my amazing wife and family.

Amazing congratulations Jorge! That’s so awesome 😊 You’re really carving out such an incredible path

Lesions Causing Aphantasia are Connected to the Fusiform Imagery Node The absence of visual mental imagery, called aphantasia, occurs congenitally in up to 3% of the general population, but the brain regions responsible for aphantasia remain uncertain. Rare cases of acq...

Happy to be part of this new paper analyzing lesion-induced aphantasia, now accepted in Cortex. One more reason to believe that the Fusiform Imagery Node is important for the conscious experience of mental imagery. Here: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....

Diagram shows the top-down view of a linear perspective camera rendering a 3D scene onto a 2D image. Text asks what to call the point directly opposite the true vantage point, when the vantage point is NOT at the center of projection used to project the scene.

What does one call the point in front of the vantage point, when the vantage point is NOT the center of projection? It's like the principal point, but I'd like not to use the same terminology for both the point that goes with the camera and the point that goes with the eye viewing the image.

What about the "on-axis" point on the picture surface? Since everything else would be "off-axis"?

Frontiers | Early Visual Processing of Feature Saliency Tasks: A Review of Psychophysical Experiments Visual attention has an undeniable impact on our perception. Human brain is unable to process all of the information it faces with in a scene so, the most sa...

Psychophysics to understand the visual cortex: frontiersin.org/journals/sys... - another paper by a great group from Tehran whose webpage is gone now.

Grazie mille @floridi.bsky.social and Italy in New York!

🚨 New paper out in Science Advances 🚨
With @suryagayet.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social, in two fMRI studies we investigate mental object rotations that are driven by the scene context, rather than purely by cognitive operations. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Good news from NIH!

Michael Chiang has apparently been reappointed as Director of the National Eye Institute

www.nei.nih.gov/about/our-mi...

Perceptual clustering in auditory streaming Author summary Perceiving the world requires humans to organize perceptual stimuli according to the likely sources that generated them, requiring inference about these sources and their relationship w...

As we were celebrating psychophysics the other day, here is a fun example in the multi-source auditory domain. So beautiful. So clean. Bayes all the way. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

We're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered.

For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...

Now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: our short response to @neurosteven.bsky.social & Edward de Haan's recent paper on the binding problem. We argue that the binding problem arises because of tradeoffs faced by any information processing system, including the brain and DNNs. shorturl.at/RGXzt

tangential, but one of the most remarkable episiodes in the history of science to me is that fact that people in the 19th century correctly inferred the basic facts about the physiology of color vision by doing math on our color phenomenology

Psychophysics has always been great.

1000 Hurts Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Are we on the cusp of a Psychophysics renaissance?

super excited to share my preprint with @meganakpeters.bsky.social stimulus familiarity shapes hierarchical structure learning and metacognitive dynamics🚀😊!!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Matthias Michel, Consciousness doesn't do that - PhilPapers The question of which mental functions require consciousness has recently come to the forefront because of its relevance for investigating animal consciousness. Finding out that an animal can perform ...

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

This new tool could tell us how consciousness works Transcranial focused ultrasound, a noninvasive brain imaging tool, may help researchers gain knowledge about human consciousness.

MIT News article about our new paper providing a roadmap for using transcranial focused ultrasound for consciousness research: news.mit.edu/2026/new-too... (Original article here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41270981/)

Striking example characterizing a paradoxical decoupling between the retinal image and perception. Thanks @josiedangelo.bsky.social for all the hard work to get this paper past the finish line.

jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

The Places We Make Memories Help Us Inscribe Them Psychology researchers used virtual reality and MRI technology to better understand how locations help us encode memories.

Nice article from Columbia News on our new paper about neural representations of places and remembered items - including a video of the creative VR environment made by @xrmasiso.bsky.social ! news.columbia.edu/news/places-...