Davide Gheza

Plato's Cave allegory, illustrated. the shadows on the cave wall are captioned "increasingly insane and extreme positions", the prisoners labeled "internet users", the figures holding the shadow's shapes labeled "algorithms", the fire labeled "random internet users expressing their idiosyncratic beliefs". the space above the cave is labeled "literally just outside" and the philosopher freed from the chains of the physical world labeled "guy who logs off"

from "Classical Studies memes for Hellenistic teens" on FB

James Swanson, one of the earliest researcher who promoted amphetamines in the 90’, in this piece by @nytimes.com on a.d.h.d. and stimulants. “there is no long-term effect. The only long-term effect that I know of has been the suppression of growth.“

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/m...

However, these results are contingent on whether the task features can be decoded. Activity-silent, or 'bursts' of proactive processes sprinkled in the ITI and not time-locked to the stimulus, may not appear with our method. Therefore, the proactive unicorn is still galloping even in our task.

I'll plug this in: we run the Multi task with EEG and, adapting Kikumoto's decoding+RSA method, we can see a change in distractors' coding compatible with the distractor-specific adaptation reported in our recent NHB. This 'looks' like reactive, given it shows up 500ms post-stimulus.

Increased attention towards progress information near a goal state - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review A growing body of evidence across psychology suggests that (cognitive) effort exertion increases in proximity to a goal state. For instance, previous work has shown that participants respond more quic...

we've seen goal gradient like effects emerge in cognitive effort tasks but how does attention to goal progress ?

a new study from our lab, by Sean Devine and others, uses eyetracking to answer this question

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Striatal stimulation enhances cognitive control and evidence processing in rodents and humans Developing an animal model of human brain stimulation therapy reveals that striatal DBS enhances the brain’s ability to process conflicting evidence.

Striatal stimulation enhances cognitive control and evidence processing in rodents and humans
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#neuroscience

Distractor-specific control adaptation in multidimensional environments - Nature Human Behaviour Gheza and Kool show that, in multidimensional environments, people allocate attention to individual distractors on the basis of their interference with the current task. They develop a neural model th...

Three new CDML publications to start off 2025!

First up: research on multidimensional control from @davideghez.bsky.social in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social! Across three behavioral experiments and with computational modeling, Davide shows that people adapt control in a distractor-specific fashion.

This is awesome! Congratulations!!

We've got an excellent line-up in both philosophy and neuroscience for our first conference! Submit your abstracts by Feb 1 and join us in St. Louis in early May!

It's out!
Our work on multi-dimensional control adaptation landed on @naturehumbehav.bsky.social
Free access to the full text here: rdcu.be/d5pt1

Big shout-out to @wouterkool.bsky.social for sharing the venture and for setting the bar that high in mentorship!

For a quick recap, linked thread

Design tips for reproducible studies linking the brain to behaviour Sampling schemes for reproducible brain-wide association studies.

Great conversations with @ndosenbach.bsky.social while preparing this Nature News & Views on the new Kang et al. Ready to have the same with everyone here. Thoughts? What other practice should be investigated to help BWAS reproducibility?
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Open letter of psychologists and neuroscientists for peace in the Middle East We, psychologists and neuroscientists from around the world, call the international community to urgently put pressure towards an immediate ceasefire in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, to demand that t...

Psychologists and neuroscientists are calling for international pressure towards immediate ceasefire in Israel, Palestine & Lebanon, respect for international humanitarian law, end of the occupation, and release of all hostages.

Read & join us by signing here: tinyurl.com/PsychLetter

Free Neuroscience Textbooks and Online Tutorials Free Neuroscience Textbooks and Online Tutorials (Compiled by Carlos Aizenman, Brown University, Dept. of Neuroscience) Maintaining a current list of digital educational resources is tricky. Softwar...

Do you teach neuroscience? Here’s a list I’ve compiled of mostly free online neuroscience textbooks, simulations and datasets you can use for your course! If I’m missing something, let me know so I can add it! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

#psynom24 is coming up. On Fri 22nd I will be talking about cognitive control with multiple distractors, including ↓
Hold your amphibians!

Some resources i've curated for the cognitive and computational neuroscience communities on bluesky! First, a twin set of starter packs. go.bsky.app/2n84SRM

Society for Mathematical Psychology Online conferences, news, membership functions, and information about the Society

The *registration* for this year's satellite meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology at Psychonomics in New York City will *close Sunday, November 10!* If you plan to attend, register by Sunday for free on the meeting website: mathpsych.org/conference/17/

Overall, this suggests that attentional gains for multiple sources of information can be adapted in parallel.

This opens the questions of how ‘multidimensional’ conflict is represented in the brain.

Check out the discussion of our preprint for some speculation.

With a neural network model, we show that you need multiple, distractor-specific conflict monitors.

In short, humans can simultaneously adapt attention towards multiple sources, based on their individual ‘compatibility’ history.

(Lasagne never helped writing a great epitaph. Life stories did)

We observe within-dimension adaptation, but absence of cross-dimension adaptation.

Put simpler, participants adapted attention to a given dimension based selectively on the congruency history of that dimension with the cued task.

a.k.a. ‘spaghetti plot’. It would be lame if it wasn’t how we actually refer to this effect.

Control adaptation in the MULTI produces parametric congruency sequence effects.

You are robust to congruency effects the more you have been previously exposed to incongruence (flatter, lighter lines).

(Check out @hritz.bsky.social’s new paper for a related, convergent, finding!)

The congruency of non-cued dimensions spans from 0 (all incongruent) to 3 (all congruent). This leads to parametric effects on responses to the cued dimension.
Also, interference comes from everywhere: Any non-cued dimension interfere with any cued task (as in the best families).

In our new MULTI paradigm, two stimuli differ across 4 dimensions. Your need to find the instructed feature for a given cued dimension (aka ‘write the epitaph’).
The three other dimensions can either facilitate or interfere (i.e., your sister and your aunt).

Families can be large.

Could you compose your cousin's epitaph while your sister shares his life stories, and also suppress your aunt’s push for more lasagne?

Distractor-specific control adaptation in multidimensional environments bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

New preprint!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our environments are complex and ever changing. We report behavioral data and neural network simulations showing that, in multidimensional environments, humans adapt attentional control in a dimension-specific way.

w/ @wouterkool.bsky.social

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