Ivan Tomic

OpenWMData A collection of publicly available working memory datasets

If you are a visual #workingmemory researcher that has a dataset from a delayed recall task with continuous report (the ones using a circular response wheel) and want to share it, please drop a reply. Would love a link to both paper and dataset! See: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData

**Postdoc position in human category learning**

@thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social.

www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

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]

Working with Circular Data: A Tutorial for Cognitive and Behavioral Research: https://osf.io/5n64t

ESCoP-sponsored summer school: MESEC Spring Workshop 2026: Mental Imagery and the Causal Study of Consciousness

The upcoming Mediterranean Society for Consciousness Science Spring Workshop will take place from May 31rd to June 7th, 2026 in Ephesus, Turkey.

i honestly can't understand why any of you would spend mental energy on coming up with charitable excuses and defenses for why these names are in these files but sadly it is something so many people do in every individual sexual harassment case as well. so much cope, so much rationalization.

a husky puppy is laying on the floor with its tongue out and wearing a blue collar . ALT: a husky puppy is laying on the floor with its tongue out and wearing a blue collar .

Here’s a thought that might make you tilt your head in curiosity: With every movement of your eyes, head, or body, the visual input to your eyes shifts! Nevertheless, it doesn't feel like the world does suddenly tilts sideways whenever you tilt your head. How can this be? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵 1/n

We're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered.

For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...

Perhaps the question is not whether cows can use tools,
but why it took us so long to notice.

Maybe because we continue to underestimate the minds of the animals we eat.

Veronika is here to remind us of our biases

Oh, lots of us have had that moment - hopefully this will spare someone else 😁

I am happy to share that our preprint “𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮: 𝗔 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵” is now out.

Huge thanks to @bayslab.org, Julie de Falco, Zahara, @cjungerius.bsky.social, @ivntmc.bsky.social, Adam, and Xiaolu for the lovely collaboration.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🔔 APPLICATIONS OPENING SOON 🔔

✨ We are thrilled to announce the next MESEC workshop, centered on mental imagery ! ✨

May 30 - June 7
Ephesus Retreat, Turkey
850€ (bursaries available)
Applications open next Wednesday (14/01)
20 spots

🏆 Pre-apply to be informed by email !

mesec.co/event/worksh...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Research Specialist The Attention, Distractions, and Memory (ADAM) Lab at Rice University is recruiting a full-time Research Specialist (Research Specialist I). The ADAM Lab (PI: Kirsten Adam) conducts cognitive neurosci...

The ADAM lab is hiring a Research Specialist to join us! This role involves conducting human subjects research (EEG experiments on attention + working memory) and assisting with the execution and administration of ongoing projects.

Job posting: emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Incremental development and testing: Black cat adoptions Even when we know the final statistical model that we want to use for inference, we should not try to write it directly. It is better to develop simpler, incremental models and test each with synthetic data. This helps us to avoid the frustration of trying to debug a complex model. Large models can and usually do fail in multiple ways, due to a poison salad\subjindex{poison salad} of coding errors, misspecification, and estimation challenges. % Being smart means working smart. By starting with a simple, minimal model and adding one feature at a time, we have a better chance of knowing which portion of the model code is responsible for an error, misspecification, or poor convergence. This case study builds the target statistical model in several steps, while using synthetic data simulation to help construct and test each incremental model. This helps us construct the model, notice and evaluate alternative implementations, and better understand how the model performs. This case study also provides an example of survival analysis with censoring. This kind of problem is commonplace---there are observations that are only partially observed, and we need to use all the information, even if only partial. Bayesian implementation provides two different ways to implement censored observations, by using cumulative distributions corresponding to the ordinary data model or by treating each censored value as partially observed and imputing it using the data model. Neither approach is always superior, and each helps us understand the model better. We'll show you both. Another benefit of this kind of example is the generative model of the sample and the statistical model necessarily differ. We often say Bayesian models are generative, they can be used to simulate observations. And that's true. But it isn't always true of every aspect of the model. In the case of censored values, the censoring is part of the observation m…

Prior predictive distribution of waiting times for the first adoption model (without censoring). Each curve is a survival plot for an individual prior simulation. Black curves correspond to black cats. Orange curves correspond to all other cat colors.

Posterior predictive distributions of waiting times for the first adoption model (without censoring). Each curve is a survival plot for an individual posterior simulation. Black curves correspond to black cats. Orange curves correspond to all other cat colors.

Including the old black cat adoptions survival analysis example as a case study in the forthcoming Bayesian Workflow book. This is presented as a whole incremental workflow with simulation, validation, and model comparison. Just now went through code and extra-commented and cleaned. Getting close!

High impact, small size.

We welcome papers that address findings from a single set of experiments, or that are substantial enough to stand alone in 1,500 words or fewer.

Find out more: buff.ly/mVtikMw

Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forensic & Neurodevelopmental Sciences | King's College London

Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2)
www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...

I haven't looked into the details of the position, but I have to reshare it because Akureyri is an absolutely gorgeous town!

What is the representation underlying cognition? Formal models rely on multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments to derive the representation. In this preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social, we take an alternative approach; we build Bayesian generative models for three cognitive tasks. /1

Happy Fechner Day, to those who celebrate

Any early-career researchers in #workingmemory wanting to contribute to an #openscience initiative? I'm looking for help building up a data hub resource for the field. Volunteers can expect to devote a few hours, and might pick up insights into handling research data and how to use Github.

Join @matthiasmichel.bsky.social and me (over Zoom), won't you, for next speaker at the MIT Consciousness Club. Today at noon EDT
Rachel Denison (Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Boston University) - "Attentional Distortions of Subjective Perception"
sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!)

Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov....

1/11

ELLIS PhD Program: Call for Applications 2025 The ELLIS mission is to create a diverse European network that promotes research excellence and advances breakthroughs in AI, as well as a pan-European PhD program to educate the next generation of AI...

I'm looking for a doctoral student with Bayesian background to work on Bayesian workflow and cross-validation (see my publication list users.aalto.fi/~ave/publica... for my recent work) at Aalto University.

Apply through the ELLIS PhD program (dl October 31) ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...

What annotations / metadata do you wish was included with every #cogsci dataset (especially #workingmemory folks 👀)? My current list includes the experiment task, stimulus, level of data (trial-, subject-, or group-level), format, and whether analysis code is provided. Any more?

New preprint with Sebastian Schneegans and @bayslab.org
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Here, we ask whether the key limits of working memory - load and retention interval - are independent, or do they interact? Despite years of research, this question is still much debated.
#psychscisky #neuroskyence 1/6

@matthiasmichel.bsky.social and I are beavering away reading and responding to all the excellent commentaries on our BBS paper outlining an evolutionary account of visual consciousness.

In the meantime, if you missed our target article, it's available here:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Dynamics of variability and bias in working memory: https://osf.io/y2bjv

The manuscript also includes practical analytical tips for controlling swap errors, as well as a new non-parametric method for estimating biases.

Let us know what you think of this work! 6/6

We think these findings - on the interactive effect of load and retention on variability and the dissociation between variability and bias - have important implications for understanding working memory limits. 5/6