Benjamin Lowe

And it was an absolute treat to run! Thanks everyone who attended :)
#ACNS2025

A presenting displaying a triplet task structure for face recognition.

Tim Cottier @tvcottier.bsky.social introduces a novel face triad task to explore whether super-recognisers decipher the identity, valence or gaze of faces. When asked which face is distinct out of the three, super-recognisers preference identity information more than controls! #ASPP2025

Road trippin’ to ACNS 2025, Melbourne!

@matthewod.bsky.social
@tvcottier.bsky.social
(Plus Ella and Seri)
@acnsau.bsky.social

YouTube video by The Australia Institute Decades of neoliberalism have broken our universities

Maybe a bit of a downer, but I think this conversation may be of interest to a bunch of people on here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbK...

Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it

Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction Abstract. Cortical activity shows the ability to recover from distractions. We analyzed neural activity from the pFC of monkeys performing working memory tasks with mid-memory delay distractions (a cu...

New paper! After a distraction, rotating traveling waves steer brain processing back to where it should be.
State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction
direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...
#neuroscience

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending'

A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s behind a potential scientific brain drain.

A wonderful paper!

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!)

Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov....

1/11

Principles for proper peer review

For all the knucklehead reviewers out there.
Principles for proper peer review - Earl K. Miller
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...
#neuroscience

@sulfaro.bsky.social literally what we were just talking about!

One of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.

My petty gripe: not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it’s stealing my em dashes too The humble em dash is being used as a tell that something is written by a large language model. But it’s James Shackell’s favourite piece of punctuation, and he’s not ready to lose it

I feel seen—and heard: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing

Just published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible…

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/10

Throw hands and then give hug. Good on ya, Will!

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

Looking forward to this!

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Convenience AI Sabina Leonelli & Alexander Martin Mussgnug12 Abstract: This paper considers the mundane ways in which AI is being incorporated into scientific practice today, and particularly the extent to which AI is used to automate tasks perceived to be boring, “mere routine” and inconvenient to researchers. We label such uses as instances of “Convenience AI” — that is situations where AI is applied with the primary intention to increase speed and minimize human effort. We outline how attributions of convenience to AI applications involve three key characteristics: (i) an emphasis on speed and ease of action, (ii) a comparative element, as well as (iii) a subject-dependent and subjective quality. Using examples from medical science and development economics, we highlight epistemic benefits, complications, and drawbacks of Convenience AI along these three dimensions. While the pursuit of convenience through AI can save precious time and resources as well as give rise to novel forms of inquiry, our analysis underscores how the uncritical adoption of Convenience AI for the sake of shortcutting human labour may also weaken the evidential foundations of science and generate inertia in how research is planned, set-up and conducted, with potentially damaging implications for the knowledge being produced. Critically, we argue that the consistent association of Convenience AI with the goals of productivity, efficiency, and ease, as often promoted also by companies targeting the research market for AI applications, can lower critical scrutiny of research processes and shift focus away from appreciating their broader epistemic and social implications.

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly.

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

Thanks @bealebrains.bsky.social!

FYI I've published similar results previously :)
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

The Latency of a Domain-General Visual Surprise Signal is Attribute Dependent Predictions concerning upcoming visual input play a key role in resolving percepts. Sometimes input is surprising, under which circumstances the brain must calibrate erroneous predictions so that perc...

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days!
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level?
✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

I spoke yesterday with a lovely university student I know in Gaza who sent the message below.
His instagram page shows his beautiful English and charisma, and the dire situation he is in: www.instagram.com/jehadkmiri/
Please consider donating to his family here:
www.paypal.com/donate?hoste...

It’s frankly absurd that we’re at the point where this critique needed to be written

I think a lot of people studying neural expectation have been skeptical of literal interpretations of PC for a while now. Again, this is not same as saying the brain doesn’t integrate prior knowledge with sensory input when resolving precepts.

I’m excited to see where the field goes next :)

IMO (now that this canned of worms has been opened), I think the field would really benefit from moving away from evoked responses and towards pre-stimulus and/or state-based activity characterising how predictions themselves are signalled (rather their errors!)

The envelope has been pushed forward and now we can think about what these data mean within the broader literature. It’s exciting!

I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!

New paper out in @plosbiology.org w/ Charlie, @phil-johnson.bsky.social, Ella, and Hinze 🎉

We track moving stimuli via EEG, find evidence that motion is extrapolated across distinct stages of processing + show how this effect may emerge from a simple synaptic learning rule!

tinyurl.com/2szh6w5c

my NIH grant was terminated today - the grant that pays my rent and my bills and my loans and my health insurance - because I study how to improve the lives and wellbeing of queer people #episky #medsky