William Ngiam | 严祥全

@williamngiam.github.io

Computational cognitive neuroscientist at Adelaide University | Perception, Attention, Learning and Memory Lab (https://palm-lab.github.io) | Open Practices Editor at Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics | ReproducibiliTea | http://williamngiam.github.io

(1/6) Do our visual neuroscience findings actually replicate? And do they generalize beyond the datasets they were found in? We've lauched re:vision, a community-driven initiative to answer these questions, and we are looking for scientistis to participate. re-vision-initiative.org

My preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social on inferring the representation underlying cognitive tasks has been updated: osf.io/preprints/ps.... It has a new title, upgrades of our previous models, additional analyses, and a stronger discussion that reflects our deeper and clearer thinking. /1

OSF

osf.io

William Ngiam | 严祥全@williamngiam.github.io · 9mo ago

What is the representation underlying cognition? Formal models rely on multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments to derive the representation. In this preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social, we take an alternative approach; we build Bayesian generative models for three cognitive tasks. /1

We're so very proud of this! Not much of the journal metrics per se (they don't always reflect well what they're supposed to measure...), but of the fact that we offer a reputable outlet for strong cognitive science outside of commercial logics. Send us your best papers, folks!

Gidon Frischkorn@gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is great to see! Also that @jcgntn.bsky.social has gained a good spot among these outlets. Obviously, I am not impartial (being AE at JoC), but it is great to see that non-profit journals that are backed by scientific societies & focused on serving the scientific community are faring well!

Happy to see our latest paper out. Led by Rachel Searston, we investigated whether participants could accurately verify identity from non-overlapping face fragments. Across 3 pre-registered experiments, we show above chance performance in our novel "spotlight" task. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Identity in the spotlight: Matching faces without overlapping features - Memory & Cognition

One-to-one face matching is widely used for identity verification yet becomes difficult with unfamiliar faces or when parts of the face are covered. We investigated whether observers could accurately ...

link.springer.com

1/9 📄 New in the Journal of Neuroscience: "Faster but less precise: expectation enhances response speed while reducing sensory fidelity" Does the brain prioritise the events it expects, or the ones that surprise it? We find it does both — at different stages. 🧵 doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Faster but less precise: expectation enhances response speed while reducing sensory fidelity

The brain’s remarkable ability to process continuous sensory inputs with adaptive efficiency – balancing flexibility while minimizing metabolic cost – is thought to rely on predictive mechanisms that ...

doi.org

We’re looking for an additional Associate Editor at AP&P, particularly in the field of auditory perception/attention. If you’re interested, please check out this flyer and please share this post so that this may find its way to others!

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Two vision scientists – holding adversarial positions on the theory – hide their secret romantic relationship from the field-at-large while delivering antagonistic conference talks. You won't believe what your eyes are seeing with each episode of ... "Heated Binocular Rivalry".

A thought that I have not yet seen to its end: quality of a research paper is more gainfully evaluated when substantial time has passed. That is, when subsequent research has tested or extended upon the ideas, leading to further progress and understanding. Seems daft to quantify that with metrics.

There's ongoing discourse about whether digital technology is impacting attention spans, but the empirical research does not seem to connect with what is felt by the general public. So, to better understand the perceptions, we examined what was being said on the issue in four relevant subreddits.

Collabra: Psychology@collabrapsychology.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New: A qualitative analysis of the perceived impact of digital technology on attention. From @williamngiam.github.io, Natasha van Antwerpen, @ellamoeck.bsky.social, and Carly Stagg doi.org/10.1525/coll...