Will Harrison

The Rise of Eyes Began With Just One

Vision Science makes the front page of NYT!!
featuring work from @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social with comments from Berkeley's own @karthikshekhar.bsky.social
#visionscience

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/s...

The utterance of "A.I.'s inevitability" is one of the most stark pure performatives I've seen in my time working in higher ed. Every time it is uttered, it is clearly not reporting a fact about the world but instead actively trying to create the reality it narrates. We can and must refuse.

Anat is not only a brilliant scientist but also one of the nicest and coolest people I've ever met.

It's AI

lol

I feel like this should be out there but I’m drawing a blank… @rebeccakwest.bsky.social has a paper that models errors for separate judgments per trial, but not a typical dual task paradigm. I’m wondering if she may have any leads?

I tried to take a photo of a grasshopper on my windshield, but now it looks like a gigantic bug destroying the town.

Sounds super cool! I'm very interested in the fancy new tools, but I am still skeptical about how well they address many of the questions I personally am interested in. You may want to read more about me here: willjharrison.github.io#about

Thanks for nothing, bsky!

Anyone want to do a PhD with me at the Sunny Coast? I'm recruiting, and I wanna do some fun psychophysics (but the possibilities for the PhD are very broad). Domestic students only, sadly.

In case y'all happen to know someone:
@nataliepeluso.com
@reubenrideaux.bsky.social
@visnerd.bsky.social

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Our uni also has an elite athletics program with a few Olympians, but I hate that there is policy that grants them specific allowances for their study. Personally, I'd prefer it if ALL students could get accommodations for non-academic stuff, or none of them...

We are all biased estimators, and our estimates of how biased are also biased.

It's bias all the way down.

Great study and clear results. Did you do any exploratory analyses at the individual level to see if there are some individuals whose pupil correlates with vividness?

V1 receptive fields in 3 dimensions, x, y and t.

Matlab nerds, I need help with a coding task that has embarrassingly defeated me.

I want to turn a 3D array (kernel defined in 3 dimensions) into a cube visualisation... HALP

Imagery modulates the pupillary response, but this does not reliably index differences in imagery vividness. Most people report that they can imagine seeing things in their mind’s eye. But there are large individual differences. A small proportion of people r…

New Paper: Pupillary responses are not a reliable index of differences in imagery vividness.

Our search for more reliable metrics of imagery continues...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Really cool. I wonder if the spatial extent of the sweeps is related to the speed of movement?

Dates?

Three days left to submit symposium, workshop, and satellite ideas for EPC-APCV in Auckland in July.

Symposia will run alongside talk sessions during the conference, and workshops/satellites will run on the first day, before the welcome ceremony.

not necessarily- I think the issue was that I made these voluntary and lower priority (so the students can judge how the use their time without pressure from me). This year I will try a more forceful approach where I tell people a fortnightly meeting is expected and they should work around it.

At one point last year I had a group of 5 students, and we tried bi-weekly meetings. People's random schedules were such that we mostly cancelled the meetings because it would have just been me plus one or two others. We met ~3 times as a lab, which was wonderful, but not consistent enough.

I'm definitely a supporter of you and agree with your sentiment!

Idealistically, shouldn't the reward be re-use of the curated data (with or without attribution)?

A workflow diagram: Have great idea Finish project Start project Tell everyone The finish project is missed out.

Morning

The tech that enables Grok to make sexualised images against peoples' will is here to stay and we're just going to have to bring it into the classroom and ensure that all our students are genporn literate as they enter the marketplace.

A dynamic spatiotemporal normalization model captures perceptual and neural effects of spatial and temporal context The effects of spatial and temporal context on sensory systems have mostly been studied independently of each other. This study shows that the modulation of visual perception and neural activity by th...

Happy to share this new paper from the lab led by Angus Chapman, now out in PLoS Biology! It presents an integrated spatiotemporal normalization model for continuous vision. @afchapman.bsky.social

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Agreed. I let my students do it when the original paper is in a foreign language with no obvious translation, which is infrequent.

The idea to use a bot (probably) to write about the idea that we could be running out of new ideas is itself a new idea, thereby proving that we are not, in fact, running out of new ideas.

There is money just sitting on the table for a university brave enough to grab it.

OpenWMData A collection of publicly available working memory datasets

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!