Nadine Dijkstra

It's all in the paper 😊

Interesting new preprint on the subjective experience of imagery. Does it even make sense to describe it as 'seeing', and what does a high vividness score indicate? Really great to see a push towards better characterisation of what people actually experience during imagery!

Awesome work by @jorge-morales.bsky.social and team, using LLMs to suggest that propositional reasoning might be enough to solve classic imagery tasks! ✨

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

Self-reports are better measurement instruments than implicit measures - Nature Reviews Psychology Implicit measures are widely used because they are assumed to be superior to self-reports. In this Perspective, Corneille and Gawronski challenge this view and argue that claims about disadvantages of...

Ahem. Mental imagery (& imagery-critical) researchers should read this:

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Hellohello #ICON2025! Please come and have a chat with me today at 10.45am about some content-specific alpha fluctuations! 🤓

Deadline Oct 15: Asst. prof. (tenure track), AI in Psych Science, @uoftpsychology.bsky.social jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Issues | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic Publishes papers on the development, organization, plasticity, and function of the cerebral cortex, including the hippocampus.

A birthday is a good time to reflect! To mark SPM @ 30, this month's issue of Cerebral Cortex features deeply insightful commentaries on neuroimaging analysis from Ed Bullmore, Peter Bandettini, Peter Fox, Pedro Valdes-Sosa, Klaas Enno Stephan, Viktor Jirsa, et al [1/2] academic.oup.com/cercor/issue

Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study This study aims to compare the neural representational geometry of visual perception and visual working memory using human fMRI. In our pilot experiment, observers viewed a face-scene blended image (s...

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

Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study

Tomoya Nakamura's first fMRI project

... in which we hereby release a preprint as a way of pre-registration

🧠📈

Individual differences in visual attention: A short, reliable, open-source, and multilingual test of multiple object tracking in PsychoPy - Behavior Research Methods Individual differences in attentional abilities provide an interesting approach in studying visual attention as well as the relation of attention to other psychometric measures. However, recent…

Spotlighting researchers sharing open-source paradigms in PsychoPy! ✨

This week:
Individual differences in visual attention: A short, reliable, open-source, multilingual test of multiple object tracking in PsychoPy

🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.3...

#OpenScience #PsychologyResearch #Research

Finally, on Friday at 10:45, we have Imagine Reality Lab affiliate @dotproduct.bsky.social presenting:

P6.36 | Pre-stimulus Shape Predictions Fluctuate At Alpha Rhythms And Bias Subsequent Perception.

Showing how content-specific pre-stimulus alpha-band oscillations influence perception.

On Wednesday at 10:45 @pazbartal.bsky.social will present:

P3.48 | The Influence Of Scene Context On Perceptual Reality Monitoring

Presenting preliminary results that suggest that imagery is more vivid and more likely to be confused for perception within congruent scene contexts.

Finally, on Friday at 10:45, we have Imagine Reality Lab affiliate @dotproduct.bsky.social presenting:

P6.36 | Pre-stimulus Shape Predictions Fluctuate At Alpha Rhythms And Bias Subsequent Perception.

Showing how content-specific pre-stimulus alpha-band oscillations influence perception.

On Wednesday at 16:30, I will be presenting at a symposium organised by @redmondoconnell.bsky.social SY24: Integrating Distinct Viewpoints On The Neural Origins Of Metacognition.

I will show a series of experiments on higher-order monitoring for distinguishing imagination and perception.

On Wednesday at 10:45 @pazbartal.bsky.social will present:

P3.48 | The Influence Of Scene Context On Perceptual Reality Monitoring

Presenting preliminary results that suggest that imagery is more vivid and more likely to be confused for perception within congruent scene contexts.

Looking forward to #ICON2025 next week! We will have several presentations on mental imagery, reality monitoring and expectations:

To kick us off, on Tuesday at 15:30, Martha Cottam will present:

P2.12 | Presence Expectations Modulate the Neural Signatures of Content Prediction Errors

Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors Nature Communications - Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors

Who doesn't like a good model of the brain? Yet, from simple regression to neural nets, some limitations keep popping up (e.g., overfitting) @mjwolff.bsky.social & I saw some cool but puzzling data, ran a quick analysis & found one such limitation: model mimicry. Now in #naturecommunications &🧵below

Thanks, Phil!!

Your Brain Has a Reality Check System—Here’s How It Works Seeing and imagining use similar brain machinery. New research reveals the brain circuit that identifies what is real, which may help scientists understand conditions such as schizophrenia

Fun write up of Imagination/perception work from @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social and others: www.scientificamerican.com/article/newf...
I was just live on Canadian Breakfast radio chatting about it. Bad pun, but this work really has captured the public imagination!

Traveling on from beautiful Switzerland to beautiful Edinburgh for #BACN25. Hope to see many of you tomorrow morning, for our symposium on neural re-use of resources for external & internal processing! With @rademaker.bsky.social @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social @larsmuckli.bsky.social & Ed Silson

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢

🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method.

Please RT

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Deadline for the 2 postdoc jobs with us at @ucl.ac.uk in one week, 17th Sep. On the roles of goals in organising social representations in prefrontal cortex (modelling, neuroimaging, transcranial ultrasound).

Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR) 🌱 Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR) 🌱 Reviewer Zero's Formative and Interactive Review (FAIR) draft feedback program is designed for early career researchers (ECRs) to receive feedback on a draf...

Are you an early career researcher (undergrad to postdoc) who could use advice about navigating peer review? Are you stuck on a manuscript submission or revision? Have general questions about peer review?

Schedule a 30-min chat with any member of @reviewerzero.bsky.social! We'd love to help 😊

Very much looking forward to #BACN25 in Edinburgh this week. We'll have five posters from the lab on the first day of conference, so come check them all out!

#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition

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

Sleuthing subjectivity: a review of covert measures of consciousness - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Consciousness may be inferred in others through observable behaviours such as facial expressions and vocalizations. However, such overt reporting has limitations, leading to research on physiological ...

Consciousness is private - our conscious experiences are inherently subjective. To infer someone else's consciousness, we typically rely on overt behaviors like language and body gestures. But sometimes these overt expressions are unreliable or absent altogether

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

The human brain mechanisms of afterimages: From networks to cortical layers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.30.673266v1

This is an amazing success story. We are happy to have published several papers there - it really has become the top neuroimaging journal within just two years. Kudos to all who had the courage to make it happen!

Hippocampal mismatch signals are based on episodic memories and not schematic knowledge | PNAS Prediction errors drive learning by signaling mismatches between expectations and reality, but the neural systems supporting these computations rem...

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory.

Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!