Lorenz Assländer

A new blog, written together with @academic-integrity.bsky.social

Interesting paper, thread and discussion!

Germany has this DEAL consortium, which currently is focused on promoting Open Access. Would be cool to push this towards non-profit journals only.

deal-konsortium.de/en/

Newton's Laws of Graduation, Part 1

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New job vacancy!

Joint PhD: Prevent Falls with Augmented Reality (FallAR) at Maastricht & Hasselt Universities
vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...
with me, @melvynroerdink.bsky.social Pieter Meyns & @kennethmeijer.bsky.social

@ispgr.bsky.social @worldfallssociety.bsky.social

Looking for a PhD-student position? Eager to work with advanced rehabtech and scalable augmented-reality solutions for fall-risk assessment and treatment? Learn from a team of scientists, Strolll entrepreneurs & developers and clinicians? Love interacting with older adults in NL & BE? Please apply!

Which Kind of Science Reform What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

📢 New Publication 📢

Effort differentially shapes behavior before, during & after an action. w/ @bcheval.bsky.social, Silvio & Florent, we explore stage-specific effects of physical effort & how these dynamically modulate each other.

Now out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences 🤩🤩

Curious? ⬇️

I wrote an article earlier in the week arguing that we need to give junior researchers more independence earlier, and this should be our focus, not moonshot mega projects led by senior researchers.

I was surprised how much agreement I'm seeing.

So next question: how do we do this?

Is it me or the train moving? Humans resolve sensory conflicts with a nonlinear feedback mechanism in balance control Humans use multiple sensory systems to estimate body orientation in space. Sensory contributions change depending on context. A predominant concept for the underlying multisensory integration (MSI) is...

Self-promotion:
This is something we attempted for sensory integration in balance control. 1) quantitative model of how we think it works (based on previous work), 2) derived strong and unintuitive predictions, 3) conducted experiments to confirm.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does this count?

Jep, I fully agree. We did that in the last round and he/she was not happy.
Problem is: I see the confirmation of a true and strong a priori prediction as very good evidence and he/she wants us to exclude all alternative explanations, which is simply impossible. Pretty fundamental disagreement 🤷‍♂️

Is it me or the train moving? Humans resolve sensory conflicts with a nonlinear feedback mechanism in balance control Humans use multiple sensory systems to estimate body orientation in space. A predominant concept for the underlying multisensory integration (MSI) is the linear summation of weighted inputs from indiv...

Here is the preprint - will post more on it once its out.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you derive a non-intuitive prediction of a nonlinear distortion, test and confirm it, do you have to test for other potential explanations within this publication?

My point is: we can never fully exclude other potential explanations. A strong, testable prediction is the best we can do. No?

Science question: we believe we have identified a mechanism for sensory integration in balance. We predicted distortions, tested and confirmed them.

Reviewer: "..it is difficult to accept that these distortions provide additional support to the proposed model given there may be other sources." 🧪🧠📈

Spread the word and consider registering!

The app is easy to use, you can manipulate the visual sensory input and measure body sway.

Main feature: a full control systems analysis routine including experimental assessment and model-based interpretation to output sensory weights and other parameters

ISPGR World Congress program - ISPGR

Interested in sensory integration in human balance?

We present a virtual reality app to measure sensory integration and applications in a conference workshop @ispgr.bsky.social

ispgr.org/program/#wor...

Presenters: Bob Peterka, Laurie King, Chris Away, Saskia Neumann @dart-llui.bsky.social and me

1/5) 🫤 I'm 100% not with you on this.

Sorry, @ecologistgreen.bsky.social, but IMO this editorial is totally off the mark.

What does peer review accomplish? Does it make science more trustworthy and credible? Nope. Let's get real for a moment...

🧪

I believe in deleting all mails when returning from a vacation. Just add this as information to your auto-reply and kindly ask people to write again after your return date.
(I do quickly look through my mail before deleting though, but I only reply to the most important ones)

Interested in motor control or cerebellar function? We have two openings for graduate students for Fall 25. Join the sensorimotor superlab - our interdisciplinary research group Paul Gribble and Andrew Pruszynski. Application instructions at diedrichsenlab.org. Please repost 🙏

Approximately 1 in 7 Scientific Papers Are Fake

I don't think the article is as noteworthy as the extraordinary open peer review and editorial summaries - imagine it was all done this way

metaror.org/kotahi/artic...

When the internal review process is the most rigorous, you mostly get helpful reviewer comments - and sometimes this. Thank you reviewer #2 😎

😇 next coffee we talk about research.

Is it me or the train moving? Humans resolve sensory conflicts with a nonlinear feedback mechanism in balance control Humans use multiple sensory systems to estimate body orientation in space. A predominant concept for the underlying multisensory integration (MSI) is the linear summation of weighted inputs from indiv...

Not sure this is what you are looking for, but human balance is actually an excellent paradigm to study some of these things. Here is a current preprint where we propose a nonlinear dynamic mechanism explaining sensory integration during sensory conflicts.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What’s next? It seems to help this vertigo patient a lot. Can’t put n words how motivating this is for us! So let’s see what other patients say. And the big goal is yet to be tested: how useful is AVOC for fall prevention?

The result: 🤩🤩🤩🔥
It’s summed best by one situation in which the device accidentally froze (it’s still a prototype). Doing one turn caused him to stop immediately. However, he had been turning for minutes with AVOC on.
Overall, he was so happy that he kept on walking around and testing for 2.5h.

The test: we were nervous like hell, working on the idea since 4 years, but never had a good enough device to really test it with patients. So we asked the patient to wear it, walk around, turn, read text while walking, thus creating situations typically causing vertigo and sickness.

The patient: suffering from chronic vertigo since 3 years caused by vestibular nerve damage. Moving and turning is difficult and typically causes prolonged motion sickness. Focusing on vertical lines and fix points help in everyday life.

Technical state: in January we finally had the first fully functioning freely wearable standalone device. While still a bit of a helmet (a super cool helmet 😏), it is quite comfortable and working robustly in everyday conditions.

Our AVOC device - Augmented Visual Orientation Cues - superimpose a space stationary pattern over the peripheral field of view of a user. Such patterns are naturally integrated for visual self motion and balance. The idea is to augment the natural scene to improve orientation and balance.

Big day on our journey. Today we had the first vestibular patient testing our newest Augmented Reality AVOC device for Fall prevention. 🧵
#VRcademicSky #XR #balance #FallPrevention 🧠🧪