Igor Utochkin

We see the forest, but what do we know about the trees? Our perception of ensembles may be richer than previously thought. Read more in a post by @ankosov.bsky.social on a new #psynomPBR paper by Vladislav Khvostov @khvo100v.bsky.social, Árni Gunnar Ásgeirsson, & Árni Kristjánsson buff.ly/3NCjHIz

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Preprint can be found here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Check our new Psych Science paper w/Daniil Azarov & Daniil Grigorev. Although an ability to recognize a familiar object among new ones clearly depends on how many and which objects there are, we show a remarkable stability of underlying "representational spaces"
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

Very excited to announce my first paper is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using EEG, we identify an item-based measure of storage in working memory that generalizes across auditory and visual items.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1ljFF3QW8S...

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #workingmemory

For the cross-stimulus effects, I thought that the adaptor could reduce contrast sensitivity

I wonder what would happen if the stimulation is the same but the question is low-level - like "which color patch is more saturated"?

Also, do you think participants really have the value information about an entire multi-color display almost with no practice?

Cool idea. Your poster grabbed my attention at VSS this year. The exp with cross-dimensional transfer is smart.

I still cannot stop thinking about low-level explanations... I can speculate some in each experiment, but I can be biased by the individual stimulus examples in the figures

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

PhD position — Rademaker lab

Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add

Searching for a postdoc to work on 2 newly NIH-funded projects using intracranial EEG with TMS and direct electrical stimulation to investigate hippocampal networks supporting episodic memory. Research Scientist could also work for post-post-doc candidates. Plz spread!
cnoir.bsd.uchicago.edu/join/

Seems like visual awareness of ensemble information goes beyond summary statistics. Vlad Khvostov and colleagues show that people can report the prevalence of each specific feature in a set of objects and the shape of a feature distribution can be recovered from these reports. Neat!

Congrats Janna!

Thanks Will!

Check our preprint to learn more about why memorability inherently predicts asymmetric recognition, and what this means for memory theory. 4/4

We could accurately predict asymmetric performance from measuring “memorability” properties of individual items. The combination of items tendencies to cause true or false recognition drives their confusability when tested together. We found it with some fun signal-detection modeling. 3/4

For instance, 93% participants who memorized the carpet from the picture above correctly recognized that carpet when it was tested against the handbag. But only 64% of those who memorized the bag could recognize it against the carpet. In fact, both the carpet and bag are to blame in each case! 2/4

In a new preprint with Nick Chiang and Wilma Bainbridge, we show that our visual recognition memory is often asymmetric, and sometimes even hugely asymmetric. These asymmetries are consistent across people, and we know how to predict them
osf.io/preprints/ps...
1/4

Full-time Research Assistant / Lab Manager - HigherEdJobs Jobs in higher education. Faculty and administrative positions at colleges and universities. Updated daily. Free to job seekers.

🚨New job alert! My lab is hiring a lab manager. Perfect position for a graduating senior who is interested in full-time research before applying to graduate school. #Neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #MLSky Apply here: www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?...

We are accepting applications for the new round of IACCP SPARK grants! Apply by April 30 for up to $1000 to fund networking, capacity-building, and other initiatives to promote cross-cultural psychology. Read more about the grant here: www.iaccp.org/about-us/res...

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky

Probably Hippocrates is a sort of hypocrites in their view

Book cover: orange yellow background, and generated tree in front

If you would like to teach theoretical modeling skills to your psychology or cognitive science students, or would like to learn these skills yourself, check out our open online textbook: computationalcognitivescience.github.io/lovelace/

Working Memory Symposium We will return this summer for WMS 2025! Tentative date: July 8-11Click here to apply for a postdoc organizor!(Application Deadline: March 16th)

The Working Memory Symposium will return in 2025 (Tentative date: July 8-11)! We are now seeking a new post-doc organizer to join our organizing team. To apply, fill out the google form linked on our home page (www.wmsymposium.org) by March 16!

Did you ever wonder how much you can trust your Bayes Factor estimates? Klaus Oberauer, @frederikaust.com and I did and investigated variance, bias, and computational costs for estimating Bayes Factors via bridgesampling and the Savage-Dickey density ratio.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Great news, Philipp! Congratulations!

SDT, when it's really used as a predictive (and mechanistic perhaps?) theory and not as yet another formula to estimate performance, does great predicting job with no or maybe just a few auxiliary assumptions (is unequal variance of signal and noise counted?)

2/2 Likewise, we were able to decode from EEG ensemble changes to attended but not unattended ensembles.

It's an old debate as to whether ensemble summary statistics can be discriminated without attention at all (because it's so seemingly effortless). Our results suggest a likely 'no' answer

The role of attention in basic ensemble statistics processing The visual system can represent information about multiple objects in the form of ensemble statistics, such as their mean feature. Although ensemble r…

1/2 This project started in my old lab and taken over by
@icevislab.bsky.social. @antonlukashevich.bsky.social showed that attended ensemble mean changes easily detectable and causing a large P3, fail to produce a signal (i.e. ERP component MMN) when unattended
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...