Nadine Dijkstra

Very proud to be part of this team! 🤓Our new preprint is out, where we examine how social basis functions develop during adolescence. 🥳🥳

I think the work by @meganakpeters.bsky.social on psychophysics for subjective experience is exactly what you are looking for, e.g. jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

Ooh, that looks very cool! I'd have to read your paper in more detail, but it reminds me of a recent idea that visual snow could be due to bad reality monitoring: noise in the visual system is incorrectly inferred to reflect reality. Perhaps in your case TMS did the same by adding signal... 🤔

Oooh! Is that work published? I'd also like to understand how it all relates each other :D

All code and data can be found on github.com/lunahuestegg....

a picture of a woman with the words my imagination has become on the bottom ALT: a picture of a woman with the words my imagination has become on the bottom

We hope that our findings will inspire future researchers to utilise non-invasive brain stimulation to push imagery over the reality threshold, thereby shedding light on the causal mechanisms that distinguish imagination from reality

The absence of an interaction between imagery and TMS could be due to a number of things: sensory strength might not play a causal role in reality judgments, the early visual cortex might not be the right locus of the sensory strength signal, or we did not have enough power

Our results were a mixed bag: we did find that both TMS to the early visual cortex (compared to vertex TMS) as well as imagining the stimulus increased reports of perceiving the stimulus when nothing was there, but there was no interaction between these two factors

Getting this set-up to work was HARD and I was really impressed by Luna and Cristina’s perseverance into getting this right. They spent days in the TMS lab troubleshooting and trying out different set-ups until we eventually had a protocol that we were happy with

a colorful brain on a black background with a galaxy in the middle ALT: a colorful brain on a black background with a galaxy in the middle

We applied sub-threshold TMS to the early visual cortex while participants were imagining. Previous research showed that this type of stimulation increases subthreshold sensory signals and thereby increases detection rates, so we reasoned that it might also increase sub-threshold imagery activity

In this paper, we aimed to test the causal role of sensory strength in distinguishing imagery and perception by using non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS) to increase sensory strength while participants were engaged in a simultaneous imagery and detection task

We recently proposed that the brain infers that visual experience reflects reality rather than imagination when sensory strength is high enough to cross a ‘reality threshold’ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)

Thanks, Megan!!!

😂🤩 Looking forward to it!!!

😂♥️

Thanks so much @thetransmitter.bsky.social for this Rising Stars of Neuroscience award! 🤩

And a big thank you to @smfleming.bsky.social for the nomination!!

More exciting psychophysics suggesting that imagery instantiates sensory representations through suppression, not activation: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-....

This paper demonstrated similar effects: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37782827/

Could this explain decreased activation and increased decoding?

Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...

New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social:

How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :)

#neuroskyence

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

Very proud to have launched our manifesto and report to make Dutch academia more sustainable - a moment to celebrate after two years of hard work with the Green Young Academy, DJA and many inspiring colleagues

dejongeakademie.nl/en/news/3148...

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Very proud of this great piece of multi-lab work by Kabir & Husta, et al.

Want to measure attention across the visual field (without interfering with ongoing perceptual/attentional processes)? Use RIFT!

Here we share our how-to-RIFT knowledge, including analysis code, quantitative comparisons, ..

This is such a fun idea! A cross-decoding perception-imagery challenge 🤩 Looking forward to seeing what comes out (and maybe having a sneaky go myself when I should be doing admin...)!

Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation Nature Communications - Eye movements during scene viewing are tied to grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex. Grid signals are specific to later remembered scenes, covary with activity in...

✨My first first-author paper is out✨
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation in @natcomms.nature.com ➡️ rdcu.be/eLRm2
Big thanks to everyone ‪@isabellacwagner.bsky.social‬, @tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social, @olejensen.bsky.social, @doellerlab.bsky.social, @clauslamm.bsky.social

Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations

my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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. 🧵