Doby Rahnev

Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception Identifying what aspects of brain activity are responsible for conscious perception remains one of the most challenging problems in science. While pro…

New paper: Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception. With Dan Freeman, @brianodegaard.bsky.social, and Seung-Schik Yoo. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congrats Chaz!!! Also, lovely kids :)

Human-like individual differences emerge from random weight initializations in neural networks Much of AI research targets the behavior of an average human, a focus that traces to Turing's imitation game. Yet, no two human individuals behave exactly alike. In this study, we show that artificial...

No two humans behave exactly alike. But what about neural networks? We found early evidence that human-like individual differences in behavior emerge from networks trained with different initializations. Here’s a peek at our results—to be presented at UniReps & DBM @NeurIPS. Full paper on the way!

My lab at Boston University has open positions for a postdoc and PhD students. We study visual perception, attention, and decision making with a focus on temporal dynamics. Check out our recent work here sites.bu.edu/denisonlab/ and email me if you're interested in learning more

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce…

🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉

The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

It looks like stimulus manipulations can be divided into "task-defining" and "auxiliary". The manipulations from each group have very different effects on accuracy vs. confidence. And all auxiliary manipulations seem to work in basically the same way. Really cool stuff by @herrickfung.bsky.social.

Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…

Glad to see my first-year project is out!

In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.

1/n

Internal World Models as Imagination Networks in Cognitive Agents What is the computational objective of imagination? While classical interpretations suggest imagination is useful for maximizing rewards, recent findings challenge this view. In this study, we propose...

World models are a highly speculative topic in AI as well as in cognitive science. I’m excited to share my manuscript on investigating internal world models using imagination networks in humans and LLMs! 🧵1/n

arxiv.org/abs/2510.04391

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio.
led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Do you ever compute d' in detection tasks? Because of unequal variance, d' is biased in such tasks and you can't fix the bias without confidence ratings. In this preprint led by Kiyo Miyoshi and @hakwan.bsky.social, we show how to use RT instead of confidence to fix the d'.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o.

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

Want to exclude a study from a review or meta-analysis because you don't like it but don't have an objective reason for the exclusion? Fear not. Here's the paper you need to cite.

New lab preprint led by Medha Shekhar in collaboration with @axc.bsky.social. We investigate what drives confidence in decisions of real-world complexity (perception and memory questions about short videos). It turns out confidence is influenced by so many factors!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Super excited to kickstart our Metacognitive science satellite meeting, just before the CCN conference in Amsterdam! Organised with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @stvemillertime.bsky.social

Congrats Chaz!

Congrats, Liad! BBS papers are so much work but also so much fun!

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

This is promising to be a very exciting event. If you're going to CCN or just want an excuse to come to Amsterdam, make sure to check it out.

Home This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. About this meeting The Metacognitive Science Meeting grew out of an ...

Still time to register for our Metacognitive Science satellite at @cogcompneuro.bsky.social on 11th August!

metacognitivescience.org

We have an exciting lineup covering computational, neural and AI approaches to metacognition, plus keynotes from Uta Noppeney and @ingmarposner.bsky.social 🥳

Super cool work, Matan.

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵👇

What does our conscious perception of this set of berries consist of? If you heard about Ensemble perception, you could say: “It’s too much info for our poor attention/working memory systems, so instead of storing all the individual features, people just represent the average and variability.” 1/5

Can you upload a human mind into a computer? A neuroscientist ponders what’s possible Science has done many things that seem miraculous. Why not transfer your consciousness to a machine?

“Mountainhead” has me revisiting this topic.

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!

I'd love for mind uploading to become a reality much sooner. I just don't think that anything under 100 years is realistic. But of course, such long-term predictions are incredibly difficult. I think that on Bluesky, most people would think that 200 is too optimistic!

Can you upload a human mind into a computer? A neuroscientist ponders what’s possible Science has done many things that seem miraculous. Why not transfer your consciousness to a machine?

My short take on when we'd be able to do mind uploading. My speculation: between 100 and 200 years from now. theconversation.com/can-you-uplo...

Another wonderful VSS, including the first "Confidence dinner" - nice to see a vibrant community studying visual metacognition. Next up, the CCN Satellite on Metacognitive Science (abstract being accepted until May 27): sites.google.com/view/metacog....

Proud to play a small role in this null result - from the excellent and thorough @carolinephelps.bsky.social. No effect of chronic or acute pain on working memory in the Sternberg task.

Home This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. About this meeting The Metacognitive Science Meeting grew out of an ...

(2) the Metacognitive Science Satellite w/ @smfleming.bsky.social @luciecharlesneuro.bsky.social and @dobyrahnev.bsky.social
sites.google.com/view/metacog...

come join CCN & talk about neuroscience, consciousness, metacognition, & the role of philosophy in pushing the whole CCN enterprise forward!