Furl Lab

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

Meme showing a worker labelled "academic staff" digging a hole in the ground while 10 others look labelled with management titles such as "Director of Human Resources" look on. The caption underneath reads "The only way we can cut costs is to reduce the number of academic staff..."

A meme for the modern university...

Our #sEEG study is now published in Nature Communications: rdcu.be/eIkoG! 🧠
Key finding: We discovered neural evidence accumulation for visual perception that's independent of report preparation—recorded from >3000 channels across 3 experiments!
#Neuroscience #Consciousness #OpenAccess

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

detection d' is generally overestimated, coz we tend to be too lazy to collect the necessary data in order to correct for the unequal variance between target present vs absent distributions. turns out we can do this for free - using reaction times data. so, let's do it~

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧠📈

Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o.

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

Representational magnitude as a geometric signature of image and word memorability What makes some stimuli more memorable than others? While memory varies across individuals, research shows that some items are intrinsically more memorable, a property quantifiable as “memorability”. ...

New preprint out together with @mheilbron.bsky.social

We find that a stimulus' representational magnitude—the L2 norm of its DNN representation—predicts intrinsic memorability not just for images, but for words too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Our new EEG + modeling work using the beads task is now preprinted osf.io/preprints/ps..., led by Christina Dimitriadou @rhulpsychology.bsky.social

Interested in #EEG #FPVS #FaceLearning?

*An Ecological and Objective Neural Marker of Implicit Learning of Unfamiliar Identities*

Preprint 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps...

@bfh-ch.bsky.social University of Malta @snsf.ch

Super-Recognizers, or Su-Perceivers? Insights from fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG - Brain Topography The term Super-Recognizer (SR), which describes individuals with supposedly superior facial recognition abilities, may be something of a misnomer. In the same way that blind individuals would not be c...

Hot off the press: 1st ever #FPVS #EEG investigation into #SuperRecognizers

Congrats to my amazing collaborators Jeff Nador, Kim Uittenhove & Dario Gordillo and thanks to all #police SRs & control participants!

@bfh-ch.bsky.social, EPFL, @snsf.ch, Polizei Berlin

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

statistician: But aren't you assuming normality?

A world without experts: alienation in academia Thoughts on the level of alienation in academic work, and how as much as we cannot exit the economy, we must recognise the inherent value of academia.

This is good on the extraordinary alienation that has now grown up in academia. The gap between the values of lecturers and the universities that employ them are now a huge unbridgeable chasm. One stands for education, the other institutional self-interest. blog.matthewbarnard.phd/a-world-with...

Windows Notepad, the native simple text editor, now has formatting options and a Copilot button.

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

It's a pity we have to write conclusions for papers and can't just fade them out, like musicians do.

Neural correlates reveal separate stages of spontaneous face perception - Communications Psychology Neural dynamics reveal separate stages of spontaneous face perception: EEG shows illusory faces in objects initially resemble real faces then shift to object-like representations, with task demands de...

EEG shows illusory faces in objects initially resemble real faces then shift to object-like representations, with task demands determining which identity guides behavior.
@amandakrobinson.bsky.social @jesstaubert.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

really fun to be reading critiques of "AI" from the 90s, 80s, 70s, and 60s that perfectly identify all the core questions the field still hasn't resolved and anticipate exactly where we're at now

In UK UG ed, students take exactly one subject chosen when 18 yo. One more reason that's not ideal. As a USA undergrad I had to evidence foreign language learning to get my psychology degree. I used my high school French classes but otherwise students in Illinois needed to take a foreign language.

Distracted Boyfriend meme: ME looking away from WRITING THE DISCUSSION SECTION to ogle MAKING NEW RESULTS FIGURES

I'm going to finish this manuscript by the end of the week, I told myself

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