Brian Odegaard

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.

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...

🧵👇

Come check out our poster session at 11 tomorrow to find out how LLMs approximate symbol systems for abstract reasoning icml.cc/virtual/2025...

If you're at ICML, check our work on AlgEval, toward algorithmic understanding of generative AI. I couldn't make it in person but am excited to say @taylorwwebb.bsky.social is there presenting our spotlight paper.
P.S. If you see Taylor congratulate him on his professorship!
arxiv.org/abs/2507.07544

There is much enthusiasm, in principle, for adversarial collaborations (ACs), a scientific conflict resolution technique that encourages investigators with clashing models to collaborate in designing studies that test competing predictions. Adversarial collaborations offer the promise of breaking deadlocked debates, resolving disputes, and providing a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of a research domain. In practice, however, adversarial collaborations are more the exception than the rule, and there is almost no evidence on how scholars who have ventured into ACs assess the experience. To understand these perspectives, we surveyed and interviewed 29 scholars who participated in 13 AC projects. The data revealed that interpersonal conflicts were generally minor, that these projects required more upfront effort than typical collaborations, but benefited from high-quality results and more thoughtful post-publication debates. Rather than producing a clear “winner,” the most common outcome was a deeper understanding of the problem space through the integration of opposing perspectives. Although the generalizability of these findings is limited by a sample consisting only of scholars who completed an AC, they nonetheless highlight the value of ACs as a tool for advancing scientific inquiry and offer practical guidance for scholars and journals exploring this approach.

29 scholars reflect on their participation in adversarial collaborations:

“Rather than producing a clear 'winner,' the most common outcome was a deeper understanding of the problem space through the integration of opposing perspectives”

Open Access: doi.org/10.1007/s111...

#MetaSci #Methodology 🧪

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 progress has been made through psychophysical studies...

Excited to share this preprint on the possibilities of using transcranial focused ultrasound for identifying the neural substrate of conscious perception:
arxiv.org/abs/2507.08517

With Daniel K. Freeman, Seung-Schik Yoo, and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social.

Very excited about Alejandro's first paper as a graduate student in my laboratory! Check out his thread describing recent efforts investigating representational geometries for similarity properties. With @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @vincenttd.bsky.social. Looking forward to feedback on this one!

Very happy to have played even a small part in this awesome work!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper @pnas.org with Lola Beerendonk, Jan Willem de Gee, Simon van Gaal and others, on pharmacological shifts of performance. We combine psychophysics and pupillometry with computational modeling to provide interesting insights linked to PV-SST-VIP circuits: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Oooooo where in Greece????

Shared and diverging neural dynamics underlying false and veridical perception We often mistake visual noise for meaningful images, which sometimes appear as convincing as veridical percepts. This suggests considerable overlap between the mechanisms that underlie false and verid...

New MEG paper by @jhaarsma.bsky.social and @dotproduct.bsky.social‬! Same design and behavioural results as our 7T layer fMRI study (www.jneurosci.org/content/43/4...), but now shedding light on the temporal dynamics of the sensory signals underlying false percepts. #neuroskyence

New pre-print with Rebecca Brady on mathematical models to simulate audio-visual reaction time tasks.
This debutant paper has three main goals:
1. To simulate different mechanisms of multisensory integration and compare with the behavioural findings 1/8

I am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Focused ultrasound neuromodulation of mediodorsal thalamus disrupts decision flexibility during reward learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.03.657634v1

What do neuroscientists mean by the term representation? A group of neuroscientists and philosophers discuss the use and misuse of the term “representation” across the cognitive sciences.

Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public).

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

President Trump’s FY26 budget for #NSF will slash funding for the agency by 56.9% and funding for Social, Behavioral, and Economic sciences by 67.6%

These cuts will end US STEM leadership, weaken national security, and set-back individual prosperity and well-being.

Dog-sled going past the Le Château Montebello.

Main public room in Le Château Montebello decorated for Christmas. The building is the world's largest "log cabin".

Le Château Montebello is situated on the banks of the Ottawa river, separating Quebec and Ontario.

Group photo the school of 2018 at the Winter school on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

CIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost.
cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪

#neuroskyence What are your favorite papers on the idea of redundancy in the brain? E.g. how a different neural circuit can step in when the "original" is damaged? Or just how the same function can be executed in different ways within the same brain?

As our lab starts empirical work on this topic, we look forward to feedback and discussion about these ideas!

As AI systems begin to permeate many domains of everyday life, we think it is critical to evaluate how their metacognitive sensitivity can be evaluated, and how this information can be presented to individuals that may need to use it. 8/

We argue that as AI metacognition improves, we must be able to measure its metacognitive sensitivity (how well confidence tracks task accuracy) to know when to trust its advice, and how to combine human and AI judgments. 7/

We discuss how this insight generalizes to human-AI joint decision-making. We lay out a framework that can be tested in future work to explore how task performance, confidence, metacognitive bias, and metacognitive sensitivity may influence human joint decision-making with AI. 6/

And further, the joint metacognitive sensitivity in a pair tracks the magnitude of the overall benefit. 5/

Previous research in the human joint-decision making literature shows that sharing confidence judgments helps pairs of individuals with similar performance levels come to better decisions than single individuals. 4/

We argue that the key component for knowing when to trust AI and how to integrate its advice is metacognitive sensitivity. 3/

In a world where AI systems are everywhere—healthcare, driving, education—deciding when to trust them is more important than ever.

But there is a problem: people often trust confident AIs, even when they’re wrong. 2/

Metacognitive sensitivity: The key to calibrating trust and optimal decision making with AI Abstract. Knowing when to trust and incorporate the advice from artificially intelligent (AI) systems is of increasing importance in the modern world. Rese

Led by postdoc Doyeon Lee and grad student Joseph Pruitt, our lab has a new Perspectives piece in PNAS Nexus:

"Metacognitive sensitivity: The key to calibrating trust and optimal decision-making with AI"

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

With co-authors Tianyu Zhou and Eric Du 1/

Confidence reports during perceptual decision making dissociate from changes in subjective experience - Communications Psychology Using explicit measures of subjective experience and a Bayesian ordinal modeling framework, this study shows that confidence reports in perceptual decisions are influenced by nonperceptual biases.

Using explicit measures of subjective experience & Bayesian ordinal modeling, this study shows that confidence reports in perceptual decisions are influenced by nonperceptual biases.
@n41c0.bsky.social @fahrenfort.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social @juliaha.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research.

NSF Astronomy was cut by 53%

Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79%

Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO.

#GiftLink ⚛️🔭

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj