I'll be presenting this work in poster form today 11am at @expsyanz.bsky.social. If you're interested in perceptual decisions, Bayesian inference or neural decoding come and have a chat!

Tim Gastrell@tgastrell.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🏰 New preprint! 🏰 (w/ the excellent @neuronomist.bsky.social & Prof. Jason Mattingley) For my PhD I've been using EEG, psychophysics and modelling to explore how the brain uses uncertainty to balance sensory information against expectations about what's out there. 🧵1/n

Feeling really proud of this one: a review of Bayesian efficient coding with Máté Lengyel and Paul Bays (@bayslab.org) is now available online in TICS! authors.elsevier.com/a/1nF3i4sIRv...

🏰 New preprint! 🏰 (w/ the excellent @neuronomist.bsky.social & Prof. Jason Mattingley) For my PhD I've been using EEG, psychophysics and modelling to explore how the brain uses uncertainty to balance sensory information against expectations about what's out there. 🧵1/n

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Late Integration of Prior Expectations During Precision Weighted Perceptual Decisions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.13.718329v1

Late Integration of Prior Expectations During Precision Weighted Perceptual Decisions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.13.718329v1

Fantastic presentation from @tvcottier.bsky.social kicking off our first meeting for 2026. His recent work suggests super-recognisers prioritise identity cues in faces over other dimensions, & that expressive cues interfere with them - suggesting these processes are not independent

Second up was @tgastrell.bsky.social whose research explored whether neural tuning depends on the precision of learned priors using a visual dot motion paradigm...

Excited to be sharing some recent work of mine with this fantastic group!

Brisbane Experimental Psychology Student Initiative (BEPSI)@brisepsi.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Our first meeting for 2026 is just 5 days away! To kick things off we have 2 awesome Tims presenting their research @tvcottier.bsky.social & @tgastrell.bsky.social You can join in-person or online via Zoom - register here to receive the link 👇 uniofqueensland.syd1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Introducing @brisepsi.bsky.social - we're an experimental psychology initiative run by grad students in Brisbane (Meanjin) across UQ & QUT 🧠 We host a monthly dose of freshly baked research (students, ECRs, & bigwigs) followed by social goodness. Help us grow with a follow! 🤗 #neuroskyence

Preventing data leakage in neural decoding - "for autocorrelated neural time series, standard k-fold cross-validation can dramatically overstate performance." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

And it's out now in Cortex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Summary below 🧵

The latency of a domain-general visual surprise signal is attribute dependent

Predictions concerning upcoming visual input play a key role in resolving percepts. Sometimes input is surprising, under which circumstances the brain…

sciencedirect.com

Benjamin Lowe@brainboyben.bsky.social · 12mo ago

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

Excited to be presenting new EEG results from my PhD at this years @acnsau.bsky.social annual meeting in Melbourne. If you're interested in how priors affect multivariate stimulus representations in the brain come through to the Sensation and Perception stream this afternoon! #ACNS2025

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Margaret Jane Moore, Amanda K. Robinson, and Jason B. Mattingley: Expectation dynamically modulates the representational time course of objects and locations doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11

Just published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible… www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/10

Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing

nature.com

🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?

The Latency of a Domain-General Visual Surprise Signal is Attribute Dependent

Predictions concerning upcoming visual input play a key role in resolving percepts. Sometimes input is surprising, under which circumstances the brain must calibrate erroneous predictions so that perc...

doi.org

My final Registered Report from my PhD is now out in Cortex! We investigated the role of dopamine & HD-tDCS in mind wandering & sustained attention. While stimulation had no effect, increasing dopamine reduced spontaneous thought and may protect against performance deficits. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

On the neural substrates of mind wandering and dynamic thought: A drug and brain stimulation study

The impact of mind wandering on our daily lives ranges from diminishing productivity, to facilitating creativity and problem solving. There is evidenc…

sciencedirect.com

I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!

Blake Richards@tyrellturing.bsky.social · last yr.

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... 🧠📈 🧪

Excited to be presenting behavioral and modeling work looking at perceptual decision making under uncertainty with recently learned priors at the EPC/APCV joint meeting today at UNSW, Sydney! Catch me at 2:45pm in Gallery 1! @expsyanz.bsky.social #epc2025

New paper @ JOV! With Matt Oxner, Frank Schumann and David Carmel. 🧠 Perception of ambiguous motion is shaped by recent visual experience - but does this differ across the visual field? Yes! Full open access paper here (Gastrell et al., 2025, Journal of Vision): 🔗 doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 🧵

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

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,

Out now in AP&P!

Joey Saito@jsaito25.bsky.social · last yr.

Effects of perceptual and decisional uncertainty on serial dependence in orientation perception link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Cognitive psych is often traced back to the 1950s. Psychology is often traced to Wundt's lab in 1879. Textbooks speak of "proto-psychologists" like Fechner & Helmholtz in the 1800s... Westerners all. Have you heard about Ibn al-Haytham, whose work predated them by 100s of years? 1/4

Excited to share my first paper: a novel visual illusion discovered by my co-authors Will Turner and Hinze Hogendoorn which we call the "Split-Stimulus Effect", in which a single flashed stimulus is perceived to be in two different locations simultaneously jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... [1/5]

New from my lab: "Priors for natural image statistics inform confidence in perceptual decisions" We used a natural image statistics approach to investigate the computations underlying perceptual confidence. 🧵 Article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“The PhD stipend is $33,511 … well below minimum wage of $47,627” “Universities can raise the stipend to a maximum of $52,352, but a ACGR survey found none have done so. The highest stipend is just over $40,000 … with the average at $34,244.” #RaiseTheStipend

PhD student Jesse Gardner-Russell earns $20 an hour. Experts say low pay is turning Australia’s best and brightest away

The University of Melbourne student whose work could contribute to curing blindness says ‘people are shocked to find out how unlivable it is’

theguardian.com

🖨️ Fresh off the press! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We have shown that the brain processes visual input differently as a function of display density, violating predictions of dominant cognitive control theories.

Prefrontal dimension change-related activation differs for visual search in sparse and dense displays

Changes of the target-defining feature dimension have previously been shown to elicit anterior prefrontal activation increases. In the majority of stu…

sciencedirect.com

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

Linking neural population formatting to function

Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

biorxiv.org

Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception: http://osf.io/e6tdy/