William Ngiam | 严祥全

i have found my rightful place as the lil green pac-man ghost

Our review of Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception is out now in TICS – with @ivntmc.bsky.social and Máté Lengyel. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

👻"the moral panic used to justify preregistration to begin with is largely manufactured and not evidentiary"

Just published open access in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘥𝘴: “𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮: 𝗔 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵” 🔗 doi.org/10.1037/met0... 🙎 Co-authors: @bayslab.org, @ivntmc.bsky.social, @cjungerius.bsky.social, Xiaolu Wang, Julie de Falco, Zahara Gironés, Adam Triabhall

Join us for our annual open science speaker series at Flinders University. James Heathers will be talking about his new work conducting forensic metascience at a massive scale, taking observations about data accuracy and applying them across the entire body of published human science.

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

Extremely coarse learning objectives induce human-aligned representations in AI vision models www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1...

As part of data checks at AP&P, I have been asking authors to report their contributions using CRediT (credit.niso.org) and the easy-to-use tenzing (rollercoaster.shinyapps.io/tenzing/). I've wondered if this has nudged more collaboration (and perhaps PIs reflecting on their role in the work)...

Patterns of Alpha-band Power Reflect Prioritization of the Most Recently Encoded Location in a Working Memory Sequence

Long-term Memory Contributions to Working Memory: A Contralateral Delay Activity Study

New preprint! Are attentional lapses the result of disengagement or simply response failure? Using EEG, we tested how attention fluctuations impact visual representations in the brain. (1/5) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

☕️Shape the future of Open Research: Join the ReproducibiliTea Steering Committee for 2027! We are thrilled to announce that applications are officially open to join the ReproducibiliTea Steering Committee starting in early 2027.

Is there "a fundamental tension between the need for an open science culture and data sovereignty" in neuroscience? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42786235/ This is a very good question! And not just for neuroscience.

The @reproducibilitea.org conference is starting now!

🎉 ReproducibiliTea 2026 Conference | 25 September 2026 “A decade on & decades ahead” 🌟 Spotlight: Keynote Speakers & Closing Remarks We are thrilled to spotlight our opening and closing keynotes.

Recruiting a new PhD student to start Fall 2027. Research would focus on Visual Working Memory, possibly with a developmental approach (but not necessarily). Check out my lab website where the are links to the application and contact info if you have questions. rickermemorylab.com

Our department at UC San Diego is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor. Open area, research addressing foundational issues in cogsci using modern computational methods. I love my department, and you will too. Apply!! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04633 #cogscisci #cogsci #DevPsyc #PsychSciSky

I made an interactive demo with different visual illusions to replace the old videos we used before. Feel free to play with it here illusions.andreychetverikov.org and to use it yourself (the code is on my Github; if I missed to include somebody in the credits - please let me know).

Check out the reusability checker ShinyApp! It's very useful for making sure your data repositories are in good condition before the upcoming read-only freeze of OSF repositories.

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

📅 Make sure that you have the ReproducibiliTea conference marked in your calendars on Friday! I will be chairing the first session where we look at some of the issues around computational reproducibility including statistical interpretation, sleuthing and review, and dissemination. Link below👇

If psychological judgments of similarity are non-metric (Tversky, 1977), and we are evaluating similarity of neural representations by using metric spaces (like Procrustes distance), then how does that mismatch get resolved for neural representations of similarity?

Can we put OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. through any Institutional Review Board / Research Ethics Committee? It would be so fun to watch them implode from all the administrative barriers and minutiae they have to get through to do their "research" (let alone address all the actual ethical issues).

Is your lab doing research in developmental cognitive psychology? Are you looking for (online) speakers for your lab meetings? Then perhaps reach out to Jenny.

📢 Open for feedback: Draft ARC FAIR Data Policy Have your say on a draft FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) Data Policy for future NCGP schemes to support more consistent management, description and sharing of ARC-funded research data. More: www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub...

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

More like Dan "uh-really?" amirite

Which causes more distress: the cold pressor test or getting a manuscript rejected after the second round of reviews?

Make a band bigger Two Door Cinema Spade

With the upcoming changes to OSF, DataPipe (pipe.jspsych.org) is migrating to a multi-backend model. We're currently developing support for Zenodo, Dataverse, and Google Drive. If there are other providers that you'd like to see as options please get in touch.

New Blog post: Which Data Repository Should you Use? In light of OSF closing down, I compare Zenodo, Dataverse, ResearchBox, PsychArchive, and local repositories on six important dimensions. If you want to know which to pick: It depends! daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/08/whic...

I've been data editing for Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics for a year and a bit now; I feel slightly vindicated for nagging people about READMEs in their repositories and to organise their files. Note that you won't be able to make edits to existing repos from mid-February onwards!

On a quick skim, the core function that OSF will fulfil is registration of studies (plus protocols and analysis plans) and hosting preprints. This means we will need to find data repositories for new projects following mid-November; perhaps Github, Zenodo, or university-operated commons.

Yikes “Starting November 16, 2026, no new projects or child components of existing projects can be created on OSF. After February 19, 2027, all public and private OSF projects will become read-only.” www.cos.io/osf-changes

New preprint! Have you ever wanted to measure psychometric functions in high-dimensional stimulus spaces, but realised that this is infeasible? We present and validate a technique to adaptively estimate psychometric functions for stimulus spaces up to 50 dimensions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ever thought meta-research and Open Science needed a virtual conference that all could attend? @reproducibilitea.org is putting one together in September, with the program shaping up to be insightful and impactful. Please reach out if you would like to help! reproducibilitea.org/conference2026

Interested in doing a postdoc with me in Auckland, New Zealand? 🇳🇿 See info below on a competitive award opportunity, and please spread the word!