Cody Cushing

When reading a line like "the glow of the flame briefly illuminated his face", most readers tend to build an image in their mind. 🧠
People with aphantasia, however, report that they do not. We wanted to know: Does this change how they physically read stories? (1/5)

are better-performing face recognition models more human-like? turns out: NO

in terms of how we see/treat different faces as similar/different to each other, there seems to be tradeoff: better models are LESS human-like

so they already work in some 'alien' ways...

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Numerosity adaptation suppresses early visual responses - Communications Biology Numerosity adaptation suppresses monotonic neural responses to numerosity displays in the early visual cortex, with more suppression for higher numerosity adaptors. Therefore, numerosity adaptation ef...

Numerosity adaptation suppresses monotonic neural responses to numerosity displays in the early visual cortex, with more suppression for higher numerosity adaptors. Therefore, numerosity adaptation effects begin in early sensory stages of processing.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need …

Happy to be on this new paper: "Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems" - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... The paper expands on some of the methodological points made in the Butlin et al. 2023 report on AI Consciousness.

Continuous Flash Suppression responses in mouse visual cortex: stimulus laterality and anesthesia effects We investigated whether binocularly conflicting stimuli adapted from primate binocular rivalry studies could induce binocular response suppression in mouse visual cortex. We presented binocularly conf...

More evidence of continuous flash suppression / binocular rivalry under anesthesia (in mice): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here rdcu.be/es8A1 we respond to the recent (unfair) editorial in Nature about recent criticisms of IIT theory of consciousness. We keep fighting for transparent and serious science. @hakwan.bsky.social @felipedebrigard.bsky.social @deanbuono.bsky.social

The brilliant @rastokke.bsky.social showing how shoddy evidence can spread like wildfire and how this has serious consequences #rEDTO25

Is vision modular or not?
The debate continues.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

How can we resolve ambiguous visual input? To answer this question, Mooney images meets THINGS and large scale behavior! Amazing effort by an amazing crew in Granada, and happy to play a small part in it!

different coloured mice on a white background

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel.
buff.ly/ypISrtx

who says that science doesn't generate profit?

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

new preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

aphantasics reported to feel less 'absorbed' as they read stories, but they dwelled just as much on words that typically evoke imagery. so perhaps they just didn't realize they have (non-conscious) imagery too

Ali Moharramipour's 1st paper as senior author

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check out our METACOGNITIVE SCIENCE MEETING!! in collaboration with @cogcompneuro.bsky.social !! come one come all to Amsterdam in August!

Home This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. About this meeting The Metacognitive Science Meeting grew out of an ...

We are extremely excited to announce the 4th edition of the Metacognitive Science Meeting (formerly known as the Perceptual Metacognition Satellite) - to be held on August 11th 2025, right before @cogcompneuro.bsky.social in Amsterdam!

For info and how to submit: sites.google.com/view/metacog...

"that would be asking for a right to wrong, rather than a right to be wrong". well said

i used to have blog on consciousness. i just uploaded my final post there, in which i responded to Alex Gomez-Marin & Anil Seth's recent commentary on the scientific status of IIT.

inconsciousnesswetrust.blogspot.com/2025/03/fina...

so long, folks.

the world is going nuts. pls take care.

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Remember the controversy about IIT last year - I have great sympathy to the critical side? Well if you want to think a bit about what pseudosciences are and whether we can distinguish science and paeudoscience here is a new short book ffeee download. t.co/6YvZ1kwLti

Also there's an irony here given all the complaints about posting a preprint last time that this debuts behind a paywall. Anyone in need of a pdf please reach out

Why Tononi’s Defense of IIT Fails to Convince Me I am one of the co-signers of the letter labeling IIT as “pseudoscience” for numerous reasons. These include a definition of…

Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...

Now longer and in nature neuroscience. Why I (and 60+ of my closest friends) think IIT is pseudoscience. Has no empirical evidence. Has no hope of future empirical evidence. Open and closed case in my view.

Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network Analog machine learning computations are performed passively by propagating light and sound waves through programmed materials.

Analog computing with waves. It's a thing. It's powerful and way more energy efficient than digital computing. The brain doesn’t just discard those useful waves.
Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
#neuroscience

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu).

Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993).

Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025.

Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

Hypotheses No Longer Cut It For decades, hypothesis-driven research has been the cornerstone of inquiry — from health and neuroscience to political science, economics…

Why hypothesis testing is not the way forward to understand brains: medium.com/@kording/hyp...

Psilocybin alters visual contextual computations Psilocybin alters perception and brain dynamics. Contextual computations are ubiquitous in the brain. Here, we investigate the effects of psilocybin using psychophysics, ultra-high field functional MR...

Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, alters perception and induces hallucinations. In this preprint, we show through visual illusions, fMRI and modeling that psilocybin affects contextual computations, a potentially general mechanism of psychedelics.

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

Very happy to see it

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!