Not to self-promote but my lab has been developing a very basic tool to track mouse movements in surveys. Our paper is under review, but I’d be happy to share the tool with you (or anyone else who is interested)

I really appreciate all the discussion and helpful feedback. As many are suggesting adversarial prompt injection its worth noting that there is already empirical research on this which suggest it is only partially effective and highly model dependent.

Micah G. Allen@micahgallen.com · 2d ago

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Yes, being very specific helped. More specifically, the message explains the risk to science, the fact that this violates prolific rules, and that it constitutes payment fraud. At least, Anthropic’s models (Opus and Fable) were sufficiently aligned to refuse to perform the task.

My postdoc work at @uclacollege.bsky.social in the #CorreaLab is now published at @pnas.org! 🙌 Our broad question was - do estrogens act on the brain to coordinate thermoregulatory adaptations during pregnancy? 1/8

Recently ran a prolific study asking ppts to describe images in <20 words. With 50 captions per person, we were able to pass each participant’s full text into Pangram. It detected 2 out of 200 with high confidence as fully AI, and about 6/7 others as borderline AI/human. FWIW :)

Been raising that alarm internally at Sinai and Yale, but if our field wants to continue to rely on virtual data collection then we need to develop better bot detection tools. Glad to be collaborating with @kiante.bsky.social on these efforts. His work at UCLA is leading the way survey-shield.com

Micah G. Allen@micahgallen.com · 2d ago

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Unfortunately, better for the agents... but collectively, by having a good sense of the ever-evolving current state, members of the community have been building safeguards that track these devolpments.

I think that may become the cost of doing business when conducting online behavioral research. We need to keep doing our due diligence and keeping up with what works. People gaming the system is not new. Just more accessible.

Yes, but I think process tracing is the right approach. We have been recommending that people consider webcam eye tracking: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Unfortunately, LLM agents can already pass these checks. Video instructions can be decoded just as easily as text. You can try it yourself by asking one to identify objects in a youtube video

Highly recommend checking out some of @kiante.bsky.social recent work. He's developing some great tools for bot detection, including survey-shield.com and kiante-fernandez.github.io/webgazer-qua...

We have been documenting agents' capabilities to take on these sorts of tasks across a wide range of cognitive paradigms. The current state is even better than some of these initial benchmarks suggest as well (under review at NeurIPS this year). cog-arena.vercel.app

Storing all four active fermentation vessels in my bedroom means it sounds (and sometimes smells) like I’m living inside a very active small intestine. 🫠

some good news... in this one example, mouse behavior is a dead giveaway of agentic browser usage. No idea if a simple instruction (make sure to use the mouse in a human way) could bypass it. But in this case, the mouse literally teleports around the screen.

Micah G. Allen@micahgallen.com · 2d ago

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Here is what Sol said when I asked it how it did this 🧵

Micah G. Allen@micahgallen.com · 2d ago

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Preprint of collaboration with @lauradata.bsky.social. We found that infraslow slow sighing at a frequency recently linked to glymphatic clearance (0.02-0.03 Hz) produced significantly higher CSF-BOLD coupling than other breathing regimes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Effects of different slow paced breathing regimes on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) oscillations

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) transport is crucial for clearing waste from the brain and is largely driven by blood vessel oscillatory dynamics. During non-REM sleep, large oscillations occur in the infra...

biorxiv.org

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Brilliat new paper : The brain is two separate organs that develop in parallel One organ is for controlling breathing, temperature, heart function, and the other organ is for thinking. They form separately and then join together during development 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain - Nature Neuroscience

This study shows that the brain arises from two distinct progenitors: one forms the forebrain and midbrain, whereas the other generates the hindbrain. These insights enable the generation of human hin...

nature.com

🔥 Exposure to basic emotion labels primes people to respond with fewer unique labels when viewing faces. Here, a new study extends this to labelling face pareidolia in aging. TL:DR basic emotion labels need disentangling from task constraints www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Emotion labelling varies with lexical complexity more than age in face pareidolia images

Forced choice paradigms constrain the emotion labels available to participants, limiting the range of lexical responses elicited by emotional stimuli. To characterise emotion labelling when this co...

tandfonline.com

Consciousness is not just how much emergent brain activity you have, it's how it's organized Emergent multiscale organisation of neural dynamics fragments in anaesthesia doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... #neuroscience

Emergent multiscale organisation of neural dynamics fragments in anaesthesia

Abstract. Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales: from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical indepe...

doi.org

🤰 Pregnancy cravings traced in mice Pregnant mice crave food much as pregnant women report. Louisiana State University researchers traced it to serotonin brain cells that fire less during pregnancy. doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02445-3 #Neuroscience #Pregnancy 🧪

Serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe control food-craving-like behavior during pregnancy in mice - Nature Neuroscience

Zhao, Feng, Dong and colleagues found that pregnant mice crave highly palatable foods due to SK3-mediated inhibition of 5-HT neurons in DRN. Reactivating serotonergic DRN→VTA projections reduced these...

doi.org

Excited to share a new discovery from @stanfordpntlab.bsky.social about the effects of neurostimulation on brain activity. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... With our colleagues at the University of Iowa, we explored how intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) changes neural excitability. A 🧵

iTBS induces a suppression-rebound pattern in human cortical excitability

Intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) is a widely used form of brain stimulation, developed on the premise that it promotes long-term potentiation (LTP) and neural excitation. However, this is n...

medrxiv.org

I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵

#Medsky🧪 #Neurosky #publichealth In a 2025 @sciimmunology.bsky.social Review, The study discussed how interactions between the nervous and immune systems could impact neurological disorders and allergy-related behaviors like food avoidance. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today in Nature @nature.com, we report a new approach to studying human brain development and modeling disease in vivo. Open article link below 👇

1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.

📖 New review out today in @natrevneuro.nature.com: Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition 🧠🧪 Full-text link to the paper is here: rdcu.be/9YK3mF7dYhFa

Excited to share our recent publication in @natcomms.nature.com We started by trying to make people stop associating the money rewards they obtain with irrelevant features of their behavior. In the first experiment, we used clear instructions framed as a story, and it didn't help...

How do you model what your heartbeat feels like? Our new Bayesian toolbox makes models of cardiac and respiratory interoception easier to use and interpret, with familiar R formulas and worked tutorials. New publication 🧪: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of interoceptive psychophysics - Behavior Research Methods

Interoception, the capacity to sense, perceive, and metacognitively appraise viscerosensory and homeostatic signals, is a growing focus in psychology and psychiatry. Adaptive psychophysical tasks now ...

link.springer.com

new paper out, led by @jobeneuro.bsky.social , exploring 5HT dynamics in cingulate and central amygdala, and how a history of alcohol consumption changes them! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Selective dysregulation of serotonin dynamics in the anterior cingulate cortex and central amygdala following binge alcohol consumption - Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology - Selective dysregulation of serotonin dynamics in the anterior cingulate cortex and central amygdala following binge alcohol consumption

nature.com