Heleen Slagter

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?

In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

New preprint 🚨

Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Excited to share that our MEG project is now out in Current Biology! We show how visual content codes relate to motor oscillations in telling time.

Huge thanks to Quirin Gehmacher, Peter Kok, Matt Davis and Clare Press (bsky links below).🧵

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

YouTube video by The Dissenter #455 Barbara Tversky - Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

In episode 455, I talk with Dr. Barbara Tversky about her great book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. #Psychology #Science

youtu.be/3tKcLo6zU2s

it's out!

@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language

Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

First preprint from the lab! Using intracellular recordings & analysis of 2-photon imaging data, we show that spiking & neuromodulatory input during experience drive a reorganization of visuomotor inputs in V1 layer 2/3 neurons, consistent with enhanced visuomotor cancellation - bioRxiv link below.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

🌍 More info on our website: sensorimotorai.github.io/debates/
💬 Join us on Slack: join.slack.com/t/sensorimot...

💡 The main motivation: recognizing how central "action" is in all things intelligence

Perception, cognition, and knowledge are fundamentally intertwined with "action"

🧵[2/5]

Karl Friston & Mark Solms: Is it Possible to Engineer Artificial Consciousness? Spotify video

Super interesting, thought-provoking conversation between Mark Solms and Karl Friston open.spotify.com/episode/151a...

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...