Bernhard Spitzer

🥳 I am incredibly humbled and grateful to share that our work, "Aligning machine and human visual representations across abstraction levels," has been published today in @nature.com ⬇️

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. Th…

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper using M/EEG to look at attractive and repulsive serial dependence in working memory, led by the excellent Jiangang Shan, with Jasper Hajonides.

“Kijk maar of je het in je agenda kan proppen” (7/7)

@fnkp.bsky.social using gen-AI to create awesome new experiment stimuli which nearly look alike visually, but depict completely different things. Fri, C135 (6/7)

Inés Pont-Sanchis combining EEG, eye-tracking, and computational models to examine working memory distractibility in Schizophrenia. Fri, C62 (5/7)

Frieda Born, who found long-term benefits of briefly *not* attending visual working memories, and takes it to fMRI to better understand why. Tue, A117 (4/7)

Fabio Bauer showing that contemporary vision models deal with visuospatial information about real world objects quite differently than humans do. Tue, A53 (3/7)

@hanzule.bsky.social finding *no* evidence for rhythmic dynamics during multi-item working memory — at least not in sustained orientation-dependent gaze patterns, which are strong and clear for up to 3 items. Tue, A127 (2/7)

Pushing past my social-media fatigue to spotlight our lab’s new posters at #CCN2025 in Amsterdam. Come say hi to: (1/7)

Thanks so much @alzietlow.bsky.social‬ for the warm welcome, excited to be here!

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity.

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

We have a position open - if you’re interested in ambivalence in (social)decision making, check it out: www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste...

Multiplexing of cognitive encoding by oculomotor networks leads to incidental gaze shifts
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#neuroscience

No April Fool's joke, one week left to apply!

Because some asked, we are an international team and English is the working language in the lab. German language skills are beneficial, but not essential.

Phase of firing does not reflect temporal order in sequence memory of humans and recurrent neural networks - Nature Neuroscience The temporal order of events in working memory is thought to be reflected by ordered neuronal firing at different phases. Here the authors show that this is not the case and that phase order is linked...

Science Alert 🚨: Our paper is now out in @natureneuro.bsky.social - We show that the firing phase of neurons in human MTL doesn’t reflect the order of events, challenging a long-standing theory of human memory.
nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01893-7

One week left to submit individual contributions for this year's 50th Psychology and Brain (PuG) conference in Würzburg. We look forward to receiving abstract submissions for accepted symposia as well as poster contributions www.pug2025.org

Two weeks left to apply!

That city crow putting pizza on my thyme had me thinking for the rest of the day

Treemap chart showing the fragmented landscape of psychological measures.

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting this summer? I am hiring for two PhD positions at the University of Witten/Herdecke.

Join us at the new chair of Biopsychology at @tudresden.bsky.social! Fully funded university positions, broad topics in cognitive neuroscience, plus you get to work with the fabulous adaptive memory and cognition group (link below) 
www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste... (tinyurl.com/y6tjbptj)

We are looking for 2 new colleagues - #professorships in
(A) Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy
(B) Work & Organizational Psychology
Join a lively and collaborative department @tudresden.bsky.social in #Dresden
- Please share -
@dgps.bsky.social #jobalert 📣
tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/a...

My favorite remote conference is coming back this year, and we are looking for a postdoc to join the team of organizers! If you LOVE working memory research and its wonderful community, join us!

BAMB! is happening again in 2025. Learn how to model your behavioural data, next to the beach in Barcelona! keynotes this year from @athenaakrami.bsky.social and Peter Dayan.

Comprehensive exploration of visual working memory mechanisms using large-scale behavioral experiment - Nature Communications Two decades of research on visual working memory have yielded substantial yet fragmented knowledge. Here, using a large-scale experiment with 40 million responses, the author provides evidence these f...

Impressive work from Liqiang Huang:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'd like to see how this generalizes beyond 4-item color memory (e.g., different set sizes, retention intervals, memoranda, cueing, etc.). I'd also like to see comparison with earlier models. This model has "only" 57 parameters!

Germany protesting

Nearly 250,000 people in Berlin showed up to protest fascism and the Musk backed AfD party.

Thank you @lipmpib.bsky.social‬

Cool new findings by @luiantaverra.bsky.social, @ondrejzika.bsky.social, and @nicoschuck.bsky.social on value transfer in aversive generalization:

Thank you Siawoosh!

🥳 indeed! Thank you for so much, Nico!