AttentionLab Utrecht University

Want to keep track of AttentionLab's members? We have our own starter pack! Follow all or make a selection, up to you! Will update this list whenever more lab members join Bluesky 🙂 go.bsky.app/4yHiToK

It's already cool that we can use neural responses to *invisible* flickers of different frequencies to track covert attention (with RIFT), but in a new preprint we show you can even track attention between tags at the same frequency (using phase): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/4)

Now final in @elife.bsky.social: #Synesthetes really do 'see' when reporting colors while reading (typeface gray) numbers: pupils change according to the perceived colors' brightness - if a synesthete sees a bright yellow, the pupils become smaller. elifesciences.org/articles/110...

I am very happy to announce that I have been awarded the NWO VENI grant to carry out research on the interaction between working memory and imagination. I look forward to starting this project in 2027, together with Stefan van der Stigchel at Utrecht University.

Wooow! @danwang7.bsky.social just won the Early Career Excellence Award at the APCV/EPC 2026 meeting! As her supervisor in the past 3 yrs, I have seen so much professional & personal growth. It makes me incredibly proud that this was also seen by an independent jury on the other side of the planet.

Have you thought of using unchained pupillometry to infer effort/arousal with _uncontrolled_ visual stimulation? Sounds crazy? @yuqingc.bsky.social shows that convolutional modeling of pupil responses with gaze-contingent luminance changes finally allows just that! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint (doi.org/10.64898/202...) shows that where you look next is an economic decision. Saccades trade off effort-costs (measured via pupil) against monetary rewards. 1) By default, participants have strong saccade direction preferences (e.g., cardinal over diagonal, up over down) (1/4)

Last piece of @ajhoogerbrugge.bsky.social PhD is finally out in @psychscience.bsky.social. Alex work very nicely shows that concurrent search is possible (people just prefer sequential search usually). What's more, people flexibly pick from these strategies

New paper alert: very proud to share our review published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, spearheaded by @maellelerebourg.bsky.social, and together with @peelen.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social, about goal-directed search in real-world environments. See below for a thread/tldr!

Past experiences shape current selection. But when and how strong are past and present targets represented in the brain? In our newest paper, we show that past and present search targets are concurrently represented in the brain. Out now in @plosbiology.org doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience

We had an exciting Seminar chat today from Stefan van der Stigchel, head of @attentionlab.bsky.social, titled "When participants aren’t human: Rethinking online behavioral research" Thank you to those who attended and to Stefan for the great talk and discussion on AI/bots in research!

For those interested in (re)analyzing (video-based) pupil data and looking into a solution for the foreshortening error (resulting from changes in the angle between camera and eye), check our open access Behavior Research Methods paper! rdcu.be/faNse link.springer.com/article/10.3...

We recently warned of bots in online behavioral research. @achetverikov.bsky.social showed there is no evidence for that in our @joinprolific.bsky.social data - but that doesn't mean we're safe. Agentic AI can do behavioral tasks through prompting alone. Reply & videos: osf.io/3cztr/overview

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

@attentionlab.bsky.social identified (what look like) #AI bots in an online response-time task (Posner cuing). Give-aways are normally distributed RTs and lack of serial-dependence effects. Pretty troublng. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted. see our comment: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

Our commentary @stigchel.bsky.social on Ruth Rosenholtz' Visual Attention in Crisis paper is now available: doi.org/10.1017/S014... We argue that effort must be considered when aiming to quantify capacity limits or a task's complexity.

Numerosity adaptation suppresses monotonic neural responses to numerosity displays in the early visual cortex, with more suppression for higher numerosity adaptors. Therefore, numerosity adaptation effects begin in early sensory stages of processing. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Planning on running a RIFT study? In a new manuscript, we put together the RIFT know-how accumulated over the years by multiple labs (@lindadrijvers.bsky.social, @schota.bsky.social, @eelkespaak.bsky.social, with Cecília Hustá and others). Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Filled with a bunch of extra analyses, this is now accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience @sfn.org! You can have a sneak peak here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Spatial attention and working memory are popularly thought to be tightly coupled. Yet, distinct neural activity tracks attentional breadth and WM load. In a new paper @jocn.bsky.social, we show that pupil size independently tracks breadth and load. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

Very happy to see this preprint out! The amazing @danwang7.bsky.social was on fire sharing this work at #ECVP2025, gathering loads of attention, and here you can find the whole thing! Using RIFT we reveal how the competition between top-down goals and bottom-up saliency unfolds within visual cortex.

I'll show some (I think) cool stuff about how we can measure the phenomenology of synesthesia in a physiological way at #ECVP - Color II, atrium maximum, 9:15, Thursday. say hi and show your colleagues that you're one of the dedicated ones by getting up early on the last day!

And now without bluesky making the background black...

#ECVP2025 starts with a fully packed room! I'll show data, demonstrating that synesthetic perception is perceptual, automatic, and effortless. Join my talk (Thursday, early morning.., Color II) to learn how the qualia of synesthesia can be inferred from pupil size. Join and (or) say hi!

Excited to give a talk at #ECVP2025 (Tuesday morning, Attention II) on how spatially biased attention during VWM does not boost excitability the same way it does when attending the external world, using Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT). @attentionlab.bsky.social @ecvp.bsky.social

Excited to share that I’ll be presenting my poster at #ECVP2025 on August 26th (afternoon session)! 🧠✨ Our work focused on dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in early visual cortex by using Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging @attentionlab.bsky.social @ecvp.bsky.social

Excited to present at #ECVP2025 - Monday afternoon, Learning & Memory - about how anticipating relevant visual events prepares visual processing for efficient memory-guided visual selection! 🧠🥳 @attentionlab.bsky.social @ecvp.bsky.social Preprint for more details: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Gaze heatmaps (are popular especially for eye-tracking beginners and in many applied domains. How many participants should be tested? Depends of course, but our guidelines help navigating this in an informed way. Out now in BRM (free) doi.org/10.3758/s134... @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

Thrilled to share that I successfully defended my PhD dissertation on Monday June 16th! The dissertation is available here: doi.org/10.33540/2960

Now published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social Open Access link: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

We previously showed that affordable eye movements are preferred over costly ones. What happens when salience comes into play? In our new paper, we show that even when salience attracts gaze, costs remain a driver of saccade selection. OA paper here: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Preparing overt eye movements and directing covert attention are neurally coupled. Yet, this coupling breaks down at the single-cell level. What about populations of neurons? We show: EEG decoding dissociates preparatory overt from covert attention at the population level: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

In our latest paper @elife.bsky.social we show that we choose to move our eyes based on effort minimization. Put simply, we prefer affordable over more costly eye movements. eLife's digest: elifesciences.org/digests/9776... The paper: elifesciences.org/articles/97760 #VisionScience

New preprint! We present two very large eye tracking datasets of museum visitors (4-81 y.o.!) who freeviewed (n=1248) or searched for a +/x (n=2827) in a single feature-rich image. We invite you to (re)use the dataset and provide suggestions for future versions 📋 osf.io/preprints/os...

Out in Psychophysiology (OA): Typically, pupillometry struggles with complex stimuli. We introduced a method to study covert attention allocation in complex video stimuli - effects of top-down attention, bottom-up attention, and pseudoneglect could all be recovered. doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70036

Congrats to Luzi @luzixu.bsky.social! We're very proud of you! 🎊

Presaccadic attention facilitates visual continuity across eye movements. However, recent work may suggest that presaccadic attention doesn't shift upward. What's going on? Our paper shows that presaccadic attention moves up- and downward using the pupil light response. doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70047

New popscience piece on why pupil size changes are so cool. psyche.co/ideas/the-pu... Included: an assignment that lets you measure pupil size. In my classes, this replicates Hess & Polt's 1964 effort finding without an eyetracker. Feel free to use it! #VisionScience #neuroscience #psychology 🧪

In conclusion, observers can flexibly de-prioritize and re-prioritize VWM contents based on current task demands, allowing observers to exert control over the extent to which VWM contents influence concurrent visual processing.

🚨My first paper with Samson Chota, Luzi Xu , Stefan Van der Stigchel and @suryagayet.bsky.social accepted in Consciousness and Cognition(www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) We asked whether the impact of VWM content on early visual processing depends on the priority state of the memory items.

As always, excellent work by Damian et al.!

Happy to have published my first paper during my PhD🥳 Huge thanks to @cstrauch.bsky.social, Leendert Van Maanen, Stefan Van der Stigchel!

New paper accepted in JEP-General (preprint: osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/uvzdh) with @suryagayet.bsky.social & Nathan van der Stoep. We show that observers use both hearing & vision for localizing static objects, but rely on a single modality to report & predict the location of moving objects. 1/9

This Friday (29-11) the Helmholtz Institute are hosting another public lecture. All are welcome to attend! The lecture starts at 16.00 in Ruppert Paars, with drinks afterwards. Abigail Marsh: "Altruism, care, and the extended self" helmholtzschool.nl/2024/07/09/h...