Samuel Recht @SamuelRecht@qoto.org

"new specialization, perhaps emergent, within pFC and perhaps other brain areas. Interactions between brain areas are of critical importance no doubt and should be studied, but they do not supplant modularity. To give net- works (and sensorimotor loops) exaggerated creative powers will not advance understanding." All quotes from a review of @PessoaBrain 's new book Entangled Brain. @cognition https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01932

For this year's gingerbread I made... Curiosity!

#space #gingerbread #nasa #mars #curiosity #baking #astronomy

Popper on 'best theories'. As opposed to what people often think, Popper is clear theories often have 'ad hoc' assumptions introduced to 'fix' a theory when original predictions do not pan out. He just prefers ad hoc assumptions to be testable and as few as possible. If your preregistered analysis seems like a bad idea afterwards, you can ad hoc your analysis. It is better if you don't have to, and you should not do it to escape falsification. But it can be fine (and future tests will tell us).

Internal attention is the only retroactive mechanism for controlling precision in working memory
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-022-02628-7

#neuroscience

Intolerance of uncertainty 😱

🚨📰 Very excited to have been a part of the editorial team of the special issue on 'Neural and physiological markers of intolerance of uncertainty'.

📕 Summarizing editorial paper: https://psyarxiv.com/kpbn2/

📗📙 📘Individual submissions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-psychophysiology/special-issue/10GFVWL4QMD

How do we balance paying attention to the external world around us vs. our internal thoughts and memories?

The hippocampus shows differential coupling with the cholinergic basal forebrain and the dorsal attention network for externally cued vs. memory-guided attention.

So proud of grad student Craig Poskanzer for leading this project!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.20.521285v1

Further developments on the blog.
I’ve added links to lecture by Florian Naudet on zombie trials, and blog by Peter Wilmshurst.
Please also see comments, including important point by someone who works as research integrity officer and notes pressures they are under.
http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2022/12/when-there-are-no-consequences-for.html
The bread is rising, folks.

We can introspect on the quality of our own mental states. But can we introspect on how well we introspect?

Really enjoyed this paper from @SamuelRecht, @BalsdonTarryn & co describing an elegant new way to measure how much we know about how much we know.

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2022/1/niac014/6761526

A general audience summary of our recent article in the Neuroscience oc Consciousness with Samuel Recht, Ljubica Jovanovic, and Pascal Mamassian:
Can you know that you know what you know? https://link.medium.com/IMEKuvacQub

A toot-summary of our recent article!

We often use our confidence to gauge the reliability of our perception.

But what about the confidence... in our confidence?
Sometimes, we can be certain we are uncertain.

With Samuel Recht, Ljubica Jovanovic, and Pascal Mamassian, we had fun testing the limits of meta-metacognition in a classic visual task.

We found surprising accuracy of confidence up to the fourth order (confidence in confidence in confidence, or meta-meta-meta-cognition).

Reminder: the Department of Cognitive Studies at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris is inviting applications for a *fully-funded* extended 3-year Masters program in Cognitive Science, which offers interdisciplinary training in Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Social Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Modeling and Cognitive engineering (https://cognition.ens.fr/en).
Deadline for applications: December 7

More information on the website: https://cognition.ens.fr/en/teaching/international-selection-655

@cognition #ENS @linguistics @psycholinguistics

Using standard linear regression or anova to analyse ordinal data can be misleading, and yet it is a widespread practice in psychology @cogsci @cognition. This post 👇 provide an detailed overview of papers on this issue and of the reasons why this practice is really not defensible from a statistical standpoint

https://discourse.datamethods.org/t/preprint-analysis-of-likert-type-data-using-metric-methods/5536

Salience memories formed by value, novelty and aversiveness jointly shape object responses in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33514-3

#neuroscience