Tijl Grootswagers

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

We're looking forward to seeing you this week at the joint meeting of the 𝘈𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 and the 𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢-𝘗𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯!

Don't forget to tag us on your conference-related Bluesky posts, so we can help you share with our wonderful community! 😀

🚨PhD position alert!🚨
Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions
vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...
Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

Characterising the neural time-courses of food attribute representations Dietary decisions involve the consideration of multiple, often conflicting, food attributes that precede the computation of an overall value for a food. The differences in the speed at which attribute...

New preprint from the lab!

We used EEG⚡🧠 to map how 12 different food attributes are represented in the brain. 🍎🥦🥪🍙🍮

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

Led by Violet Chae in collaboration with @tgro.bsky.social

Interested in pupillometry, eye movements, visual attention, visual working memory, or related topics? Apply with our group in in beautiful, livable, and friendly Groningen! Reach out to @elkanakyurek.bsky.social, @van-rijn.org, @olaf.dimigen.de, @miles2708.bsky.social or myself to explore options!

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Check out this preprint led by @sabomelinda.bsky.social
which presents the outcomes of her @marcsinstitute.bsky.social visiting scholarship!

We analysed EEG data from 500+ participants to investigate how the brain processes cognitive conflict. #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🚨PhD opportunity Fall/Winter
2025🚨
Join me in Geneva Switzerland #unige to learn more about colour perception. Using neuroimaging & computational modelling, you'll be working with an international & interdisciplinary team to understand how we transform light into a colourful world!🧠👁️🌈 #neurojobs

👀 🚨 New scholarship available! We're hiring a PhD student to work on the neural basis of face perception, part of a collaboration between @marcsinstitute.bsky.social and #UNSW. DMs open if you want more info 🧠 #neurojobs

I’m still recruiting for this position — please get in touch if you’re interested in working together!

#PhD #Scholarship Opportunity: Unlocking Person Identity Codes in the Human Brain 🧠 | Explore the extraordinary abilities of Super-Recognisers & contribute to the advancement of person identification technologies worldwide. #Neuroscience | Applications close 31 Jan 2025. | tinyurl.com/45c4m3kk

#MRITogether 'Transferable open MRI skills: from academia to industry' will be on in 30 minutes! You can still register for that!

Congrats @aramirezharo3.bsky.social ! Fantastic first conference talk 🎉 at @acnsau.bsky.social

Are you an Australian cognitive neuroscientist 🧠 affiliated with the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society?

This Starter Pack is a fast way to connect with your ACNS colleagues - reply here to be added! And don't forget to follow @acnsau.bsky.social Only 5 more sleeps! 🤩 #ACNS2024

Newly funded ARC Discovery Project will unlock the secrets of how children learn and provide parents & educators with insights to support #childdevelopment.

Looking forward to transforming #education in Australia, one discovery at a time!

@drquekles.bsky.social

I just looked at a highly circulated starter pack for top science and science communicators and there are 58 men, 27 women, the rest orgs based in the US, and 95% white. Maybe, just maybe, do a bit of curation and check your biases and show some care with what you put out into the wild.

Very excited to kick this project off in 2025! If you like brains, face perception, neural decoding, EEG, or some combination of the above then we want to hear from you 🧠👀📈

🚨Join us! We're hiring a 3yr Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience with @drquekles.bsky.social
@manuelvarlet.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social & David White
to investigate decoding in super-recognisers. Applications close 14 Jan #postdoc #cogneuro #ACNS2024
tinyurl.com/SuperRecogni...

Open mind is 💎?

Diamond open access (free to read AND to publish in) experimental psychology-adjacent journals we have accredited at freejournals.org.
Do you know of others? Lemme know; could suggest they check they meet our standards at freejournals.org, and join our community. #openaccess #scientificPublishing

Pre-conference run and swim 😎☀️🌊 #acns2024 @acnsau.bsky.social

Excited to share our recent work investigating the temporal dynamics of object space! It’s been wonderful working with @tgro.bsky.social and @drquekles.bsky.social at @marcsinstitute.bsky.social on this fun project😊

Visit us in Sydney next year!

Applications for 2025 MARCS visiting scholar scheme are now open! PhD Candidates & ECR welcome to apply to come and visit for 1-3 months to Sydney. Feel free to contact me (email or DM) if interested!

tinyurl.com/3ztnrufd

Applications close January 20, 2025.

8/ This supports a **multidimensional approach** to object space, showing that dimensions interact dynamically, depending on the visual context.
It also highlights the need for considering **temporal dynamics** to study neural processing.

Read the full preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2024...

7/ Why does this matter?
Previous studies often overlooked **time** as a critical factor. We show that *aspect ratio* and *category* are distinct dimensions that **co-occur dynamically**—a key step in resolving an active debate in the field.

6/ These results highlight two fundamental insights:
1 **Flexibility**: Object space adapts to the info available to the visual system.
2 **Temporal dynamics**: Object processing dimensions evolve rapidly over time.

5/ **Key finding #2:**
In silhouette stimuli, removing internal details flipped the result!
🔄 *Aspect ratio* became the primary dimension, stable over time, and better explained neural data during & after stimulus presentation.

4/ **Key finding #1:**
In intact stimuli, *aspect ratio* was encoded EARLY and TRANSIENTLY, while *category* and *animacy* dominated LATER and STRONGLY.
*Category* also better explained the brain's representational structure than aspect ratio.

3/ To tackle this, we presented participants with two types of object stimuli:
🔹 *Intact stimuli*: detailed objects
🔹 *Silhouette stimuli*: internal details masked
We tracked the brain's response using whole-head EEG. 🎥🧠

2/ Visual object space is rich and dynamic. Past studies have debated whether **aspect ratio** or **category** dominates object processing. Is one driving the other? Or do they coexist as distinct dimensions? 🤔