Matan Mazor

Cartoon image of me looking at a map, with a stadium behind me and a hotel and ferris wheel across the river in the background. I am thinking about going to the ferris wheel

My first PhD paper - with @lhuntneuro.bsky.social and @summerfieldlab.bsky.social - is now out in @plosbiology.org! We ask: how do humans (and deep neural networks) navigate flexibly even in unfamiliar environments, such as a new city? Link: plos.io/45uSwNm 🧵 (1/6)

CONGRATULATIONS EVAN!

I love this paper

קם פרויקט להעברת תרכובות הזנה לתינוקות (תמ״ל) בעזה, בהובלת ד״ר דייויד חסאן, והאיגוד האירופי לרפואת ילדים, שהצליח כבר להעביר אלפי בקבוקי פורמולה לעזה אחרי בירוקרטיה לא פשוטה, וגם בהובלת אנשי רפואה ישראלים.
להלן הלינק לתרומות:
www.thechildrensvillagegaza.org/eap
אשמח אם תשתפו הלאה.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

מביך בשביל האוניברסיטה. טוב לדעת שלפחות הרקטור, מונא מארון, תומכת במכתב (מתוך נאום שלה בטקס בוגרי תואר בחינוך)

"36 Questions That Lead To Love" was the most viewed article in NYT Modern Love.
Excited to share new results investigating these and other “deep questions” with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social @judithfan.bsky.social & @rdhawkins.bsky.social
Preprint: tinyurl.com/bdfx5smk
Code: tinyurl.com/3v6pws4s

🧠⚽ Spot the ball! New benchmark for visual scene understanding!
We ask: Can people and models locate a hidden ball in sports images using only visual context and reasoning?
🕹️ Try the task: v0-new-project-9b5vt6k9ugb.vercel.app
#CogSci2025

לראשונה, ארגוני זכויות אדם ישראליים קובעים כי ישראל מבצעת רצח עם בעזה בדו"חות נפרדים שפרסמו ארגון "בצלם" ועמותת רופאים לזכויות אדם, הם קוראים לקהילה הבינלאומית לפעול נגד ישראל כדי לעצור את רצח העם ברצועה. דו"ח "בצלם": התמותה הנרחבת ברצועה יצרה את "משבר היתומים הגדול בהי...

Two israeli NGO's conclude on the basis of evidence alone that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to genocide. the gravity of the situation of civilians in Gaza brings an unprecendented moment for Israel, its civil society, and its realtionship with the goverment. www.haaretz.co.il/news/politic...

I think the same is true for writing academic papers that develop an argument. It should not be a list. It should build an understanding of how the ideas are related.

The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #cogsci2025 💪

A ✨bittersweet✨ moment – after 5 years at UCL, my final first-author project with @smfleming.bsky.social is ready to read as a preprint! 🥲

Thrilled our work received a SIPS Commendation Prize 🥳

I'm not sure I can do more than one cube if the direction is random, and I'm also not sure how one could verify that people who claim to be able to really do.

Are the cubes perfect duplicates of each other? If yes, maybe this makes things easier!

If you trust their responses! :)

The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination - Nature Communications People can track a limited number of moving items in perception, but it is unknown if similar limits apply to the imagination. The authors show the mental simulation of moving objects is a serial process, which advances only one object at a time.

Interesting! The answer to that question may well be 1 for all subjects, as Balaban and @tomerullman.bsky.social show: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are hiring for several research positions for this grant, starting early next year. Please reach out if you're interested!
More details on the jobs here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Thanks Steve 😊

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...

Oh no the VVIQ doesn't have any reversed items 😱

(which, when thinking about it, might be a more general issue for studies looking at behavioural correlates of aphantasia? If inattentive participants are systematically under-represented in the aphantasia group?)

Yes! Also, we find with @noamsarna.bsky.social that inattentive participants (who tend to respond quickly) tend to rate their confidence as very high. I wonder if they also give high vividness ratings in imagery tasks.

Is vivid imagery reported faster than weak imagery?
YES. There is an inverse correlation between subjective vividness and RTs in imagery tasks (N=117).
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Thanks Doby, this means a lot coming from you!

It's cool and interesting that the same association between RT and vividness holds both between and within individuals!

The UK must immediately recognise Palestinian statehood.

There can be no two state solution if there is no viable state left to call Palestine.

(Maya and I will be at CCN so say hi if you're in Amsterdam! Or online at CogSci)

Finally, while Exp. 2 confirmed that confidence in absence is affected by stimulus size in a way that parallels the effect of size on prospective confidence, it also produced a series of disappointing null findings, with no significant effect of size on confidence in presence and no correlations between size effects on post-decisional confidence and on prospective confidence or perceptual sensitivity. Disappointed by these null findings, we reminded ourselves that Exp. 2 had a smaller sample size and only 8 trials per block (half the number of trials in Exp. 1). As such, we are not confident that these correlations are truly absent — we cannot be certain that we would have detected them if they were present.

See the full 6 pages for perceptual and meta-perceptual learning effects, prospective confidence, and one very honest closing paragraph:

Despite not being fitted to confidence ratings, model parameters correlated with confidence across subjects. Specifically, a "true visibility" parameter, derived from decisions and RTs, predicted confidence in presence, and a "believed visibility" parameter predicted confidence in absence.