Heleen Slagter

The inferred value of unchosen options spreads to related items in memory Counterfactual thinking — considering what could have come of choosing the other path — can facilitate inference. Previous studies have demonstrated t…

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!

Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?

In short, yes!

We showed this in 3 experiments with novel setup: participants performed an additional singleton task projected on a table top, while switching standing position. This way, we could manipulate whether a high probably distractor location was fixed in the world or with respect to their viewpoint.[3/5]

Active inference predicts that relative precision or uncertainty determines whether prediction errors drive movement (action) or belief updating (perception), leading to the predictions that sensory attenuation is necessary for movement initiation and that motor adaptation scales with uncertainty.

UZH: Postdoctoral Position Research at the Zurich Cognitive Psychology Unit focuses on capacity limits of cognition, in particular working memory, long-term memory, and attention, which we investigate with experimental, individ...

We're looking for a postdoc starting this summer to join our efforts in understanding the capacity limits of cognition: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

YouTube video by The Dissenter #882 Luiz Pessoa - The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together

In episode 882, I talk with Dr. Luiz Pessoa about his great book, The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. #Neuroscience #Science

youtu.be/gxdQXTAGlio

Objects warp space in our mind, and events warp time in our mind. @samiyousif.bsky.social and I teamed up to review the work in these two literatures and suggest that there may be deep connections across them (with analogous influences of objects on space and events on time).

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?

We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!

Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

An individual stands at a podium wearing academic robes, with a microphone in front. Several flags are displayed in the background.

Born #OnThisDay in 1935 was cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman FRS, who developed the feature integration theory of attention. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989. Read more about her life and work in Royal Society Publishing #BioMems. #WomenInSTEM https://bit.ly/48zDUe1

It is typically thought that distractor inhibition entails inhibiting the distractor location. Yet, here we show that distractor inhibition takes into account how one can suppress attentional sampling in space from their viewpoint to prevent distraction. It operates egocentrically. [2/5]

Very happy to share this new paper, published in @elife.bsky.social, the last one stemming from a PhD chapter 🥲. In it, @spk3lly.bsky.social and I show that an early V1 signal (the C1) can have direct influence on a perceptual decision.

Here's the link: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

🔑 Our key finding: TUS over the frontal eye fields (FEF) excited saccadic behavior, effectively biasing eye movements towards the contralateral side within a fraction of a second. 👀 This confirms that TUS can modulate behavioral in humans in real time.

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

Open access link: rdcu.be/e5skP

YouTube video by MIT Consciousness Club Marco Tamietto - Vision Without Awareness: from structures to networks

The recording of Marco Tamietto's talk "Vision Without Awareness: from structures to networks" at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGNy....

The Shape of Saccade-based Functional Visual Fields (FVFs): A cautionary note - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics A Functional Visual Field (FVF) describes an area around the current point of fixation within which some task is done. In visual search, three types of FVF are of interest. The Resolution FVF describe...

❗New paper published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics❗"The Shape of Saccade-based Functional Visual Fields (FVFs): A cautionary note" from Jeremy M. Wolfe, Chia-Chien Wu, and Cailey E. Tennyson

This is Cailey's first publication!
(PDF on lab website)

secure-web.cisco.com/1APAkwCmgQpj...

Come and join OPAM as an organizer for 2026/7!!🎉 We are still looking for two new early career researchers (phd/postdoc) to join the OPAM team to help run everyones favorite one day miniconference! Express your interest by this weekend!

Refining the Observed Mindfulness Measure to Create and Validate the Observed Mindful Behaviours Scale - Mindfulness Objectives To offer another lens to study how mindfulness influences behaviours and social relationships, this paper reports the creation of the Observed Mindful Behaviours (OMB) scale. The OMB respon...

Can you observe someone else's mindfulness in the way they act? We need proper tools to investigate this critical second-person perspective on mindfulness.

Masterfully led by Larissa Bartlett, this OA study validates the Observed Mindful Behaviours Scale.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Memorization vs. generalization in deep learning: implicit biases, benign overfitting, and more Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the memorization

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Across three experiments, we found that implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent when embedded in active behavior. That is, spatial inhibition cannot be abstracted from the agent moving through a 3D world and how they can suppress sampling the world from their perspective. [4/5]

What do neuroscientists mean by the term representation? A group of neuroscientists and philosophers discuss the use and misuse of the term “representation” across the cognitive sciences.

Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public).

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Experimental task. Trials began with variable fixation (500–1,000 ms) and placeholder (500–1,000 ms) intervals, followed by two spatial cues (100 ms) on opposite sides of the visual field to indicate the likely locations of both a subsequent near-threshold target and a salient distractor (100 ms). Cue validity was 70% for both cue types. Targets and distractors were presented after a variable delay (500–1,600 ms). Stimulus displays could include (i) both a target and a distractor, (ii) a target only, (iii) a distractor only, or (iv) neither a target nor a distractor. The number pad on a computer keyboard was used to indicate the presence of a target at the cued location, a target at a non-cued location, or no target.

Attentional resources vary rhythmically, but what about susceptibility to #distractors?@fiebelkornian.bsky.social &co show that theta & alpha phases modulate sensitivity & distractor impact, revealing rhythm-specific mechanisms shaping #attention & distractability @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4tU0vh4

What behavioral relevance is (not) We are thankful for the thoughtful commentaries of our colleagues. In our discussion article, we argued for a course correction to how the field approaches the organization of visual function in oc...

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology"

(quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

Closing soon: 40+ PhD positions in social science, humanities, cultural studies #SSH AND 20 postdoc positions in #STEEM. Deadline March 2nd, 2026.

careers.univie.ac.at/en/praedoc/p...

careers.univie.ac.at/en/postdoc/e...

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of deconstructive meditation under the predictive processi…

One of the coolest papers I’ve ever read

These findings show that statistical learning is sometimes grounded in the statistics of agent-environment interactions, not in the statistics of the world per se. They align with theories linking attention to action. Our study also highlights the importance of dynamic experimental setups. [5/5]

New Preprint alert ❗

Holistic and kinematics priors enable predictive neural representations during biological motion perception

With: @predictivebrain.bsky.social and
@moritzwurm.bsky.social

At: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Grounding distractor inhibition in action control: Implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent Spatial selective attention is typically thought to act as a sensory filter: prioritizing the processing of relevant information at a particular locat…

📢 New paper in Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with my co-authors: Freek van Ede @freekvanede.bsky.social, Chris Jungerius @cjungerius.bsky.social, and Heleen A. Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social. Grateful to have collaborated with you on this work: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... [1/5]

A World Appears by Michael Pollan review – a kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness The journalist and polymath probes the mysteries of the mind in this unsettling yet life-affirming investigation

"Pollan likens the study of consciousness to cosmology: just as we can only examine the universe from within it, there is no way for us to position ourselves outside our own consciousness."

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...