Psychophysics

…May 2027, covering visual perception, psychophysics and visual neuroscience. Abstracts are due 3 December 2026 (the organizer specifies midnight in the last time zone on Earth); symposium proposals are due 13 November. Presenters require VSS membership and meeting registration. This is an in-person meeting; exceptional remote presentations require a separate request and are limited. Other calendar milestones: banner call 20 August and deadline 17 September; membership and symposium submissions 19 October; T-shirt call 11 November; sponsor/e

Classical models of decision-making, including drift-diffusion and other accumulate-to-bound models, assume that the decision rule for committing to a decision based on accumulated evidence is determined prior to observing the evidence. These predefined rules are typically modeled as thresholds, or bounds, on the accumulated evidence (“decision variable”) that are either fixed [1-2] or collapsing over time [3], in both cases serving to balance decision speed (emphasized when bounds are low and reached quickly) and accuracy (emphasized when bounds are high and allow for more evidence to be accu

…Here, using psychophysics, computational modeling, functional neuroimaging, and analysis of recorded speech, we ask if humans can detect pitch motion using computations analogous to those used by the visual system. We adapted visual stimuli to create novel auditory correlated noise stimuli that elicit robust pitch motion percepts. Crucially, these stimuli are inharmonic and pos

Exploring the origins of animal and human behavior within cortical circuits remains a puzzle awaiting resolution. It is established that when animals and humans compare two stimuli (d1 and d2) separated by a delay interval (Fig. 1a), their perception is influenced by a perceptual bias, characterized by a contraction in the perception of the first stimulus towards its distribution’s mean (highlighted in red in Fig. 1a). To shed light on this effect, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) of spiking neurons were trained, and their behavior and firing activity were examined in comparison to those obser

…In a psychophysics and eye-tracking experiment, 63 participants reported filling-in while attending peripherally to a grey rectangle on a dynamic texture field. We varied the orientation of elements in the

An object’s colour, brightness and pattern are all influenced by its surroundings, and a number of visual phenomena and “illusions” have been discovered that highlight these often dramatic effects. Explanations for these phenomena range from low-level neural mechanisms to high-level processes that incorporate contextual information or prior knowledge. Importantly, few of these phenomena can currently be accounted for when measuring an object’s perceived colour. Here we ask to what extent colour appearance is predicted by a model based on the principle of coding efficiency. The model assumes th

…have been extensively studied in psychophysics and, more recently and to a lesser extent, with neural activity recordings. New computational techniques allow us to train spiking recurrent neural networks on the tasks used in the experiments. This provides us with another valuable tool with which to investigate the network mechanisms responsible for the biases and how behavior could be modeled. As

…In a series of online psychophysics experiments combined with computational modelling, we investigated to what extent imagination and perception are confused when the same content is simultaneously imagined and perceived. We found that simultaneous congr

…neural network (RNN) model and human psychophysics and electroencephalography (EEG), the present study investigates circuit mechanisms for processing probabilistic structures of sensory signals to guide behavior. We first constructe

…predictions, drawing on examples from psychophysics and virtual reality. Then, turning the lens inwards, we will see how the experience of being

…I will show how contemporary psychophysics can deliver extremely rich and highly constraining datasets that naturally interface with computational modelling. More specifically, I will demonstrate how psychophysics can be used to guide/constrain/refine computational models, and how models can be exploited to design/motivate/interpret psycho

Over the past decade, the domain of face identity processing has seen a surging interest in inter-individual differences, with a focus on individuals with superior skills, so-called Super-Recognizers (SRs; Ramon et al., 2019; Russell et al., 2009). Their study can provide valuable insights into brain-behavior relationships and advance our understanding of neural functioning. Despite a decade of research, and similarly to the field of developmental prosopagnosia, a consensus on diagnostic criteria for SR identification is lacking. Consequently, SRs are currently identified either inconsistently