Brian Odegaard

I'll log questions from our group discussion on Thursday and pass them along. We could even invite you to hop on a group lab meeting Zoom call in a future week to discuss it after we've read it, if you'd like.

We are discussing this in our lab meeting next week! Looking forward to reading it!

Saurabh Ranjan, my first PhD student, has some interesting new work investigating vividness reports from the VVIQ-2 and PSI-Q in humans and LLMs, using tools from psychological network analysis. See his thread for more details.

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg:
#psychskysci #neuroscience

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

A picture of our paper's abstract and title: The order of task decisions and confidence ratings has little effect on metacognition. Task decisions and confidence ratings are fundamental measures in metacognition research, but using these reports requires collecting them in some order. Only three orders exist and are used in an ad hoc manner across studies. Evidence suggests that when task decisions precede confidence, this report order can enhance metacognition. If verified, this effect pervades studies of metacognition and will lead the synthesis of this literature to invalid conclusions. In this Registered Report, we tested the effect of report order across popular domains of metacognition and probed two factors that may underlie why order effects have been observed in past studies: report time and motor preparation. We examined these effects in a perception experiment (n = 75) and memory experiment (n = 50), controlling task accuracy and learning. Our registered analyses found little effect of report order on metacognitive efficiency, even when timing and motor preparation were experimentally controlled. Our findings suggest the order of task decisions and confidence ratings has little effect on metacognition, and need not constrain secondary analysis or experimental design.

🚨 Out now in @commspsychol.nature.com 🚨
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Our #RegisteredReport tested whether the order of task decisions and confidence ratings bias #metacognition.

Some said decisions → confidence enhances metacognition. If true, decades of findings will be affected.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

NSF GRFP solicitation is up, deadline extended to November www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

The influence of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program really cannot be overstated. The fact that there is still no solicitation for this year is unfair to students and risks damaging the future of American science. Please take 30 seconds to sign the open letter to US STEM Leadership 🧪🌎

paper is up~

This study examines performance evaluation in perceptual detection tasks using response-time-based signal detection theory (SDT) analysis. A defining feature of detection tasks is the asymmetry between trials with stimulus presence and absence, often reflected in ....

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

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Flyer detailing information about the position, compensation, and requirements. If you need alt-text details to apply for this position, please email Steven Weisberg at steven dot weisberg @ uta dot edu for more information! We'd love to have you on board :)

🚨The SCANN Lab @ UTA is hiring a postdoctoral researcher!🚨

Topics: 🧭 spatial navigation, 🧠 fMRI, 🎮 VR, 👵 cognitive aging.

Start date: Nov 2025 (flexible).

Salary: NIH levels.

Details 👇

Our open-access article - Testing circuit-level theories of consciousness in humans - together with Yunkai Zhu, Carolina Fernandez Pujol, @dvwz.bsky.social, @jonescompneurolab.bsky.social, @tmarvan.bsky.social, and @danclab.bsky.social, was just published @cp-trendscognsci.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 ↓↓↓

Ultrasound system for precise neuromodulation of human deep brain circuits - Nature Communications Modulating deep brain structure can lead to therapies for neurological conditions. Here, the authors show a transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) system featuring a 256-element helmet-shaped trans...

Might focused ultrasound one day replace DBS?

UK Scientists built a 256-panel focused ultrasound helmet that can precisely target deep brain regions. Using theta-burst TUS, they stimulated the LGN and found visual cortex activity with effects lasting up to 40 minutes.

#neuroskyence #ultrasound

We are running a virtual hackathon for #hacktober! Info and signup here: jspsych.github.io/hackathon/virtual_2025.html

We will be hosting drop in office hours help during the hackathon, so this is a great chance to level up your jspsych skills!

Confidence judgements from fused multisensory percepts Distinguishing between reliable and unreliable internal sensory representations is crucial for a successful interaction with the environment. Precise estimates of the uncertainty of sensory representa...

Once multisensory information is integrated, participants cannot access the unisensory information to evaluate their perceptual decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am leading a workshop tonight for students in my department on how to apply for the NSF GRFP, but have not received answers from NSF to my questions about whether they are still funding applications in neuroscience and cognitive science, etc. If anyone has info please let me know.
(continued)

Implementation of the imagery transformation.

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... "Extensive work has shown that the visual cortex is reactivated during mental imagery"; #neuroscience

Psychologists, apply! Apparently we've mainly gotten CS applicants so far. I'd (selfishly) love to have a psychologist. Interests in AI in relation to e.g., implicit bias; cultural influences; fairness; perception; learning & memory; decision making etc. would be a good fit!

What are your pros/cons of using AI in science?

Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.

Decision-making modellers - any tips for interactive classroom demonstrations to teach about sequential sampling models (DDMs)?

Sure, it's fine to show an RT distribution but more fun to have the students do a few trials themselves and see outcomes. Online or offline games could work.

We have been working on a project where we try to "break" Weber's law, but to our surprise the law itself is pretty flimsy under standard conditions. I'm curious to hear any suggestions for a robust demonstration (specifically, where the just noticeable difference is proportional to magnitude).

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Slight change of schedule: the first session of the MIT Consciousness Club will be Friday September 19. All talks will be in MIT building 46 room 3310. Still working on a zoom option but that should end up happening. sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

The difficult constellation image is solved by generating candidate solutions with a GAN and refined using a genetic search conditioned on best fitting of the solution outline to the dots on the constellation image.

Could we understand vision as a type of problem-solving? In this new paper, we develop a computational model that iteratively refines the hypothesis about the visual input with evolutionary search.

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

work led by @tarunkhajuria.bsky.social

#visionscience #neuroAI

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

Okay everyone, things are getting serious. I’m going to teach research methods again, 1st year psychology undergraduates. What would you cover with respects to philosophy of science, the research process etc.? I’m not very happy with the textbook stuff so I’m open to all ideas!

Seems as good a time as any to re-share the "OpenLists" collection - an openly accessible set of lists of available resources in / for Cognitive Neuroscience!

Includes open M/EEG & iEEG datasets & open software / analysis tools, and resources for DSP, Python, git, etc:

openlists.github.io

New from Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social lab:

Mental rotation is often regarded as paradigmatic for #mentalimagery. But it turns out people often don't use imagery for mental rotation - & when they do it is often not useful (same viewpoint trials). #visionscience #psychscisky

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS
How the CCN Community Can Contribute

Recording now available:
hva-uva.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page...

Thanks so much to @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @smfleming.bsky.social, @larsmuckli.bsky.social, @cogcompneuro.bsky.social!