Matthieu de Wit

Clear out toys now!

Love being reminded to do this every year. It's a win/win all round

If you want to implement an AI tutor, you need to study it’s performance in naturalistic settings with the kinds of context windows that student learners will provide. You can’t begin with a well formulated question about a single topic.

Students don’t know how to formulate questions well at first.

Symposium: Neurocognitive Functions of Mind Join us this week for a symposium on the new book, Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, edited by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini!

Symposium: Neurocognitive Functions of Mind

Join us this week for a symposium on the new book, Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, edited by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini!

Vicente Raja brings ecological psychology to neuroscience Neuroscientists should pay attention to the principles of Gibsonian ecological psychology, such as affordances, ecological information and resonance.

In the latest episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, Vincente Raja suggests that neuroscientists should pay more attention to the principles of Gibsonian ecological psychology, such as affordances, ecological information and resonance.

#neuroskyence

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

Book cover of “What Is Life? Revisted” by Daniel J. Nicholson, in the Cambridge Elements: The Philosophy of Biology series. Against a black background, the title is surrounded by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of marine organisms—radial, symmetrical forms in vivid blues, oranges, reds, and greens.

New Element in the Philosophy of Biology series—free to download until Oct. 24! @djnicholson.bsky.social uncovers Schrödinger’s motivations for writing "What Is Life?", revisits its central arguments & examines the book’s lasting impact on cell & molecular biology👇 www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Wow! If this holds up, it will be a triumph of science (i.e., of many hundreds of dedicated scientists over decades) over a devastating disease.

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

HOME | SPAN The Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience (SPAN) is a new philosophical and scientific society dedicated to providing a forum for collaborations between philosophers and neuroscientists. The Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience seeks to foster, build, and maintain strong interdisciplinary relationships in the joint endeavor to understand the mind and brain.

I am super excited to be giving my talk "Characterizing neural function in ecological neuroscience" at the inaugural Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience conference @socphilneuro.bsky.social in St. Louis in May! Check out the incredible line-up of speakers and symposia: www.philandneuro.com

While Bluesky as a social network isn't quite the same as Facebook and Instagram, it works well enough for me while I wait for replacement services offered by companies other than Meta.
(7/9)

... If they are not, I message them on Whatsapp and send along a link to Signal, inviting them to join me there. I then continue to chat with them via Whatsapp for as long as needed.
(6/9)

Importantly, I am taking my time as I am switching over, in this way making sure I do not lose contact with my friends. For example, when I want to send a friend a Whatsapp message, I check if they are on Signal. If they are, I just message them on Signal. ...
(5/9)

It was easy for me to stop using these services and to start using alternatives that are not enabling Trump. Instead of Whatsapp, I use Signal. Instead of Chrome, I use Firefox. Instead of Google, I use DuckDuckGo, Instead of Facebook/Instagram/X, I use Bluesky.
(4/9)

So, I stopped using Facebook on the day Zuckerberg announced that he would end Facebook's fact checking program in response to Trump's reelection. I also stopped using the other services of Meta (Instagram, Whatsapp), as well as X/Twitter, and Google, for similar reasons.
(3/9)

"I hope you will take the time to read my post about why I'm logged out of Facebook:
I'm doing this because I do not wish to support tech companies that help Trump and his government perform their hostile take-over of the United States and endangerment of the world.
(2/9)

I do not wish to support tech companies that help Trump and his government perform their hostile take-over of the United States and endangerment of the world.
So, I stopped using Facebook on the day Zuckerberg announced ..
2/6)

Nice! Gonna give it a listen

Poster for workshop: Introduction to cognitive ethnography

Poster for Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3

Poster for workshop on Computational creativity, embodiment, and problem solving

🚨 Call for contributions!

We are hosting Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3 at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, June 18-21, 2025

We are accepting abstract submissions for talks, posters, and brief ideas!

Deadline: March 14, 2025

radicalembodiment3.github.io

Cultural and learning differences in the Judd illusion - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in the perception of illusory Judd drawings point to variability in the pickup of informational variables. Two sources for these indivi...

Here is some empirical evidence and theoretical development of this idea: link.springer.com/article/10.3...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (2/2)

I think the variability in susceptibility to the illusion has to do with where people look and/or direct their attention - and, with that, which optical variables they exploit - when they make their estimates. (1/2)

Colorado Supreme Court: Only humans have the right to liberty Today the Nonhuman Rights Project issued the following statement in response to the Colorado Supreme Court’s opinion in our elephant rights…

No other being but humans has a right to liberty “no matter how cognitively, psychologically, or socially sophisticated they may be.” A very disappointing ruling and a step backward from the NY ruling. Sadness ensues. #animalethics #animallaw

Very excited this paper is now out in Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #causalsky

🚨Abstract submission now open for the European Workshop on Ecological Psychology, 15-18 July 2025, in Leeds UK 🚨

Abstracts: due Friday 14th March, 2025
Early Registration: by Wednesday 30 April (open shortly)

Please share widely!

www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/events/confe...

New Preprint! 🧐
We explored the ecological idea of resonance using virtual reality and Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MOBI). It was challenging both technically and in terms of data analysis, but we are quite happy with the results. Check it out! ⬇️
doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/

Re-read this classic and love how Dewey describes perception as an act that is continuously transformed by new experiences (e.g. after touching 🔥, a child sees-light-that-means-pain-when-touched)—unifying stimulus/response, and framing perception as innately multisensory & memory-dependent (in 1896)

A note on AI usage A note on AI usage I genuinely want you to succeed in this class. One of my very favorite things about my job as a professor is when students are succeeding and I feel like I helped. I want you to suc...

hey bluesky, in case anyone's interested, I wrote this for my students about why I don't want them to use anything AI in my classes. It interrupts the course calendar part of the syllabus, coming immediately after the first day there's a writing assignment assigned.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Frontiers | Context-sensitive computational mechanistic explanation in cognitive neuroscience Mainstream cognitive neuroscience aims to build mechanistic explanations of behavior by mapping abilities described at the organismal level via the subperson...

My colleague Heath Matheson and I have tried to develop the notion of context-dependent/sensitive mechanistic explanations of brain-behavior relationships in the linked paper. At least to our minds we are moving beyond saying "it's more complicated than we thought" here.

Collective Action In Science Diamond Publish one diamond open access article in 5 years

Do you also see problems with the for-profit academic publishing system? Take action with us! Publish one(!) pub with diamond open access in 5 years after the pledge activates. Activation happens when a critical mass is reached. freeourknowledge.org/2024-01-30-c...

Remember when we talked about this on the other site instead of facing threads of random blue-checks? We are finally starting to do it here 🥹

By the way, my take is that affordances are "motifs", so the concept is helplessly vague... and that's good! It helps us talk and guides us to good places.

Separating minimal from radical embodied cognitive neuroscience Mougenot and Matheson (2024) make a compelling case for the development of a mechanistic cognitive neuroscience that is embodied. However, their analysis of extant work under this header plays down im...

Also available here: arxiv.org/abs/2410.01830

Post the LAST SENTENCE of your last article.

"Webb's (2019) groundbreaking work on understanding the neural contributions to cognition in materially embodied, embedded models of crickets and other insects provides an example of such a method."