Periodic reminder that what really identifies a Bayesian is their fondness for integrating out uncertainty, i.e. marginalization, not wedging things into Bayes theorem. Even Fisher did that from time to time.

brasidas@brasidas.bsky.social · last wk.

Folks, you have to observe B for this to work!

#eNeuro | How Gaze Direction and Dynamics Affect Visual Resolution https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0176-26.2026

How Gaze Direction and Dynamics Affect Visual Resolution

Humans exhibit machine-like eye movements (consistent and repeatable) in space and time while performing demanding acuity tasks. To investigate these, we used an adaptive optics imaging and display system in 6 human subjects (4 females, 2 males) to present ultra-sharp Vernier acuity stimuli briefly every 2 s while simultaneously measuring eye movements, including precisely where on the retina each stimulus fell. We found that drifts and microsaccades combined to confine the landing location of the anticipated stimulus to a tiny retinal region centered on the preferred retinal locus (PRL). The variance of landing location was smallest at the time of stimulus presentation and a few hundred milliseconds after. We correlated where the stimulus fell in space and time with correct or incorrect responses. The PRL and a small area around it, including the anatomical fovea, conferred the best acuity. Acuity declined consistently in the rare events in which the stimulus fell more than 5 minarc from the PRL. We also found that acuity was best when the last microsaccade occurred sufficiently prior to stimulus presentation. Our findings reveal a highly evolved oculomotor system where gaze direction during fixation is rarely far enough from the PRL to compromise visual resolution when a person makes natural fixational eye movements.

doi.org

Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

Our paper Retinal curl as a functional signal for heading estimation beyond the focus of expansion doi.org/10.7554/eLif... now is published in its final version of record. @elife.bsky.social

👁️ Can your eyes respond to an illusion as if it were real? Researchers found that pupil size and eye movements changed on if people saw a hole or a bump. The eyes responded to the perceived 3D shape — even though the stimulus was completely flat. 🌀 Read more: doi.org/10.1177/0301...

Happy to share our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... First time torsional eye movements are measured in natural walking conditions showing how they help structure retinal flow

Torsion in motion: the visual system as a three-axis gimbal

Rigorously tracking eye and head behavior in space is key to building realistic models of the stimulus that reaches our retina. The motion structure of this stimulus or retinal flow - the substrate fo...

biorxiv.org

A recent paper argued that there is no visual binding problem. I disagree, and wrote a response... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Related demonstrations can be found here... staff.psy.uq.edu.au/~uqdarnol/JS...

New preprint: A systematic review and meta-analysis of motion sensitivity in schizophrenia. González-Del Pozo, de la Malla, Linares We found a robust deficit, but few studies assess lapses. More studies need catch trials to isolate perceptual deficits from inattention. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A VR street-crossing task revealed that increasing task-irrelevant scene variability reduced crossing attempts & confidence in crossing successfully, delayed crossing initiation, which was countered by moving faster. www.nature.com/articles/s44... @aguilarlleyda.bsky.social @jlmoliner.bsky.social

New preprint! 🎉 How can we measure how the nervous system knows, moment to moment, where the body is as it moves? We introduce a continuous tracking paradigm to measure the hidden dynamics of proprioception—revealing it is faster and more precise than vision during movement. tinyurl.com/yf297k53

Tracking the hidden dynamics of proprioception

Every movement unfolds with a simple question: Where is my body? The nervous system answers through proprioception - the sense of limb position (static position sense) and movement (dynamic propriocep...

tinyurl.com

Happy to share our new paper in eLife @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif... with my PhD student Kontessa Zorpala. We demonstrate that the rotational component of retinal flow—traditionally viewed as a nuisance—plays a functional role in heading estimation.

Happy to share my first PhD preprint! We show that magnitude estimation measures the perceptual noise distribution (it's Poisson-like!), resolving the sources of Weber's law & the pedestal effect. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thanks to @linaresdani.bsky.social @jlmoliner.bsky.social !

Scientific funding is a net negative: "European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

nature.com

The role of science for democratic societies has never been more important. Register for our upcoming scientific meeting on 16-17 March 2026 and explore the theoretical and practical consequences of treating science as a global public good: https://bit.ly/3Y42i4F

Forget random-dot motion and drifting gratings, embrace "Motion Clouds", the motion stimulus of the 21st century! by: Andrew Meso Jonathan Vacher, @jon-v.bsky.social Nikos Gekas Pascal Mamassian, @mamassian.bsky.social Laurent Perrinet, @laurentperrinet.bsky.social Guillaume Masson

Laurent Perrinet@laurentperrinet.bsky.social · last yr.

🚀 Excited to share our new paper: > "DynTex: A real-time generative model of dynamic naturalistic luminance textures" ...now published in Journal of Vision! Read it here: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... #DynamicTextures #ComputationalNeuroscience #ComputerVision #OpenScience

Congratulations, very impressive collaborative work! The published results are already interesting, but the open-source data will undoubtedly be very useful in the future.

Matteo Carandini@carandinilab.net · last yr.

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Everything you always wanted to know about color, but were afraid to ask. A superb, highly didactic video, now in English!

ScienceClic@scienceclic.bsky.social · last yr.

New video in English! 🎉 What are colours? Do they form a particular geometry? Can we build this geometry from our perceptions? 🖌️🎨 All the answers in 20 minutes! youtu.be/7KYwi2F5Ce4

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

A nice short article of Pascal Mamassian @mamassian.bsky.social on using AI for reviewing papers that referees should be aware of: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Very pleased to announce the next talk in the Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making: "Eye Movements As Sequential Decision-making Under Uncertainty" by @c-rothkopf.bsky.social. DM to join us online! #DecisionMaking #EyeMovements #TheEyesHaveIt www.psychologie.uni-bonn.de/de/institut/...

Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry

psychologie.uni-bonn.de

A beautiful reflection on the role of informal spaces—like the coffee room—in scientific progress by Frans Verstraten. Especially resonant for those of us in perceptual science. A reminder that interaction fuels insight. It is open doi.org/10.1177/0301...

Very nice model! However, most psychophysicists would be reluctant to run a detection task using a single interval, precisely to avoid individual differences on the criterion between present and absent percepts. Can this model be extended to the 2-interval detection paradigm?

Matan Mazor@matanmazor.bsky.social · 2y ago

Our "I would have seen it if it were there" paper — a collaboration with @ranimo.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social — is now out in Psych. Review. There’s a lot in this paper, but here are what I see as the 3 main takeaways: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

The dynamic version is even more disturbing...

Gavin Buckingham @drgbuckingham.bsky.social · 2y ago

Simple and beautiful impossible image, by Niko22966

This is the part of the book where William James famously wrote “you can’t bore a German”! Well, maybe, but some people mistakenly extrapolated “psychophysics is boring”. That ain’t true!

Jorge Morales@jorgemorales.me · 2y ago

William James's take on psychophysics is *incredible*. Worth reading the whole quote. #psychSciSky #philsky #VisionScience "But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods,

Happy to share our paper @royalsociety open science. The first model for a predictive outfielder: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The predictive outfielder: a critical test across gravities | Royal Society Open Science

Intercepting moving targets is a widespread challenge across many species. In humans, heuristics that use optic variables have excelled in guiding interception, relying on a closed-loop system to couple optic variables directly with direction of ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

We just updated the preprint of our amortized Bayesian decision-making paper (accepted at @iclr-conf.bsky.social #ICLR2025) What's new: - disentangling the effect of priors and costs - model comparison between different cost functions on three sensorimotor tasks

Constantin Rothkopf@c-rothkopf.bsky.social · 2y ago

Curious to learn more? Check out our full paper to see how neural networks can transform Bayesian inference in complex decision-making models arxiv.org/abs/2409.03710

My great collaborators and I published a project on rapid eye and hand responses in an interception task. jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... I like to summarize my papers in Dr. Seuss style 🟩🥚🥚🍔

Our meta-analysis (Cristina de la Malla & Aster Joostens) on the contrast sensitivity deficit in schizophrenia is out. After extending our initial search, we now include a total sample of 46 studies, showing a clearer relationship between the deficit and medication academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

‘Systematic reviews’ that aim to extract broad conclusions from many studies are in peril www.science.org/content/arti...

‘Systematic reviews’ that aim to extract broad conclusions from many studies are in peril

Fake papers are “poisoning the well” for these gold-standard syntheses, researchers say

science.org