Furl Lab

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

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.

Schematic overview of the proposed sound reconstruction pipeline. Left: DNN feature extraction from sound. A deep neural network (DNN) extracts auditory features at multiple levels of complexity using a hierarchical framework. Right: Sound reconstruction. The reconstruction pipeline starts with decoding DNN features from fMRI responses using trained brain decoders. The audio generator then transforms these decoded features into the reconstructed sound.

Reconstructing sounds from #fMRI data is limited by its temporal resolution. @ykamit.bsky.social &co develop a DNN-based method that aids reconstruction of perceptually accurate sound from fMRI data, offering insights into internal #auditory representations @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4fhNw1Z

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

Navigating the value space during choice

Rhesus macaques represent choices as navigation trajectories in a value space using a grid-like code

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

At the crossroads of risk and certainty: an individual deliberates between a safe game of ₹100 versus a risky game of ₹1 to ₹1000. How does the brain process such reward expectations and drive this individual's attention and choice? The image shows cartoon with a confused person standing in front of two fruit machines, one labelled “Fixed, modest reward game” and one “Variable, extreme reward game.” Image credit: Ankita Sengupta.

Reward expectation modulates #attention & #DecisionMaking but are these mediated by common or distinct mechanisms? This study shows that spatial manipulation of #reward expectation modulates sensitivity, while choice-based manipulation affects decision making @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4eDPERq

Electrical stimulation of smiling muscles reduces visual processing load and enhances happiness perception in neutral faces - Communications Psychology Facial muscle activity can shape how we recognise emotions. Using electrical stimulation and EEG, the study found that activation of smiling muscles makes people more likely to see neutral faces as ha...

Facial muscle activity can shape how we recognize emotions. Using electrical stimulation and EEG, the study found that activation of smiling muscles makes people more likely to see neutral faces as happy.
@themisefth.bsky.social @sebkorb.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

LOL. I've definitely seen lots of (3)!

Subjects swap objects between non-adjacent ordinal positions. Left: Context 2 swapped the ordinal position of objects B and D. Right: Probability of choosing objects immediately after erroneously choosing object B in context 2: Three stars denote p < 0.001 difference (Welch’s t test with Bonferroni correction).

How smart are #NonHumanPrimates? This study shows that #macaques can learn to rearrange members of 5-object sequences to non-adjacent positions, suggesting that they form non-spatial cognitive maps of item relationships during learning, a hallmark of #intelligence @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40fZIKi

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

We’re not clear on what intelligence is, at all

How about using LLMs to check if referee reports raise legitimate concerns or are just gatekeeping? This I could get behind.

Paper finally published in JEP General!

Individual variability in mental imagery vividness does not predict perceptual interference with imagery: A replication study of Cui et al., 2007: osf.io/preprints/os...

A study cited over 500 times couldn't be replicated, even in extreme imagery... a 🧵

1/8

We could move in that direction, but the main obstacle is people are incentivised to pad CVs with lots of papers, bad & otherwise, and so prefer policies that make publishing easier and oppose ones that add more work to publish. Hence the self-serving support for removing peer review altogether.

The "only way" may be an rhetorical exaggeration but still ... That sounds awesome to me! The reviewer role absolutely ought to be less casual and dramatically expanded, at least in some ways.

Peer review is to science like democracy is to government: "the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

It's far from perfect and could potentially be improved. But that it does not do anything for science trustworthiness is an incredible exaggeration.

AI vision is insanely good nowadays—but is it really like human vision or something else entirely? In our new pre-print, we pinpoint a fundamental visual mechanism that's trivial for humans yet causes most models to fail spectacularly. Let's dive in👇🧠
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05253]

relationship between sensory evidence and confidence evidence

If you work with perceptual confidence judgments, you may be interested in our CNCB model of confidence ratings. Joint work with Vincent de Gardelle.

Uncorrected proofs here:
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

(🧵 1/4)

Dynamic categorization rules alter representations in human visual cortex - Nature Communications This study shows that neural representations of shape stimuli in human visual cortex are adaptively modulated when participants switch between different variants of a categorization task, becoming mor...

How do we flexibly categorize objects under changing task requirements? Our new paper in Nature Communications (@serences.bsky.social & @nuttidanuttida.bsky.social) examines this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

see 🧵👇

Perspective changes everything.
[Ars Mathermatica]

Delighted to share paper number three from Annika’s PhD: STAR Protocol to study how expectations guide predictive eye movements and information sampling in humans 👀
doi.org/10.1016/j.xp...
star-protocols.cell.com/protocols/4134

Nice tutorial on how to do signal detection analyses in R with the brms package
@matti.vuorre.com

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Scientists to study animal emotions at new research centre The world's first research centre for studying animals' feelings will open later this year in the UK

Exciting news! 🎉 A new LSE center led by @birchlse.bsky.social will explore the science of animal emotions.

"They will look at ways animals are treated by humans in areas like science, tech and farming, and explore ways to improve practices..."

www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/ar...

#sentience

Six-decade research bias towards fancy and familiar bird species | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Human implicit biases towards visually appealing and familiar stimuli are well documented and rooted in our brains’ reward systems. For example, humans are drawn to charismatic, familiar organisms, bu...

"from 1965 to 2020, nearly half the variation in publication trends among 293 North American male passerine & near-passerine birds was explained by 3 factors subject to human bias: aesthetic salience (visual appeal), range size (familiarity) & number of universities within ranges (accessibility)"

A dynamic spatiotemporal normalization model for continuous vision Perception and neural activity are profoundly shaped by the spatial and temporal context of sensory input, which has been modeled by divisive normalization over space or time. However, theoretical wor...

recently posted a new preprint (the first of my postdoc 🎉) where we implemented normalization across space *and* time, allowing us to capture several neural and behavioral findings! I'll be presenting this work at VSS in a couple of months too for those attending
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

@scaramozzino.bsky.social

Convergent vocal representations in parrot and human forebrain motor networks - Nature Using advanced brain-recording techniques, parrots were found to have a brain organization for vocal control similar to humans, making them an important model for studying speech and for developing po...

Convergent vocal representations in parrot and human forebrain motor networks (commonalities with
speech-related motor cortices in humans found in budgerigar, but not in zebra finch, a songbird
capable of more limited vocal learning) 🧪🧠🦜
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💡 When making choices—like picking a flat, a job, or a romantic partner—when should we stop looking and commit? Our new study from @rhulpsychology.bsky.social published in
Communications Psychology explores how biased expectations about future options shape our decisions. 🧵👇

I notice papers that test lots of measures, acting like they are interested in all of them and therefore they need no multiple comparison correction. Can one say a measure is a priori merely because the study included it in the first place? Should anything ever be corrected then?