Cognitive Neuroscience postdoc @ucddublin, previously
@UCL_ICN. Interested in the science & philosophy of decision making, voluntary action and consciousness.
... and this is for people who *did* have advanced skills to begin with.
It is important for students to realise you should demand an education that teaches *you* how to learn, understand and do things, rather than cheating you out of this opportunity
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
What a surprise …..
“Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.”
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
✅Funded PhD studentship in computational modelling of supra-modal evidence accumulation/decision-making!
⏰ Closing date: 1st July 2026!
➡️ More information: shorturl.at/FsTQ0@redmondoconnell.bsky.social@seanfw.bsky.social@maynoothuniversity.ie@tcdpsychology.bsky.social
No reviewer should have to waste any time trying to make sense of something that was not actually *thought* by someone else. LLMs produce stuff that *looks* sensible, but is an empty shell.
“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.”
irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...
Poorly-phrased thoughts and also mistaken ones can drive science forward. When reading those, a reviewer can ask: "what do you *mean*?" and a discussion can ensue. But a reviewer cannot ask for the meaning or assess the value of an LLM-generated shell of a sentence, because it contains none.
A reviewer's job is to engage with all the complex nuances of actual thoughts, which convey *someone else's* interpretation of the world. Human effort should only be spent understanding human work. Else we will soon be asked to accept that AI-based tools "evaluate" our work - as if they could.
Strong agree - doing things faster is not doing them better. Especially if you're not doing them at all. I too refuse to join that ship and agree we should fight to change flawed incentive systems rather than cave to them by slowly surrendering our ability to think for ourselves.
Pressure to use genAI for #ECR is quite high, I feel it weekly... ethical, ecological, economical, privacy- and cognitive-related worries keeps me from joining that ship.
I need more time to research not something that creates the illusion of reasoning, if that costs grants or positions, let it be.
"If everyone thinks technological trends are inescapable, they probably will become so. That is why those serious about the human prospect should reject the rhetoric of fatalism and demand something more substantial."
Pressure to use genAI for #ECR is quite high, I feel it weekly... ethical, ecological, economical, privacy- and cognitive-related worries keeps me from joining that ship.
I need more time to research not something that creates the illusion of reasoning, if that costs grants or positions, let it be.
Very happy to share this new paper, published in @elife.bsky.social, the last one stemming from a PhD chapter 🥲. In it, @spk3lly.bsky.social and I show that an early V1 signal (the C1) can have direct influence on a perceptual decision.
Here's the link: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Check out our new paper which isolates a human brain signal that specifically tracks the growing urgency to commit to a choice pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41611534/. This one was a long time coming! Sterling work from @harveymccone.bsky.social and a bunch of past lab members!
Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not.
The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...
#hiring
Come work with us to better understand the neuronal mechanism underlying perceptual consciousness!
18 months postdoctoral position at INSERM in Grenoble, France.
⌛Application deadline 10 March 2026.
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/408445
Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻
Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems.
See below for + details and retweet 🙏
New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)
Our #sEEG study is now published in Nature Communications: rdcu.be/eIkoG! 🧠
Key finding: We discovered neural evidence accumulation for visual perception that's independent of report preparation—recorded from >3000 channels across 3 experiments!
#Neuroscience#Consciousness#OpenAccess
Our new sEEG study is out on BioRxiv: tinyurl.com/4afh3b9n! Using 3 face detection experiments and recording from >3000 channels, we found a neural code that reflected evidence accumulation for conscious perception and perceptual confidence! 👇
These results align with recent work in an expanded judgement task under volatility, where the CPP following individual tokens shows transient evoked activities that scale with context-optimal belief updates:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Overall, our results highlight how prominent neural decision signals may take different shapes in different contexts, and how probing them using tasks that depart from conventional ones can provide important insights into their functional roles. Thanks for reading this far!
Our participants sometimes terminated decisions early, tending to use the second pulse less than the first one, and CPP amplitudes following each pulse reflected this differential weight on choice (i.e. small CPP, small weight on choice), also capturing condition-specific differences in the effect.
A simple bounded accumulation model could capture the key behavioural patterns in our data, and model-based simulations were able to reproduce the condition-specific profiles of the neural data (CPP & MBL) following each pulse 👇
We show that when noisy evidence for a single decision comes in temporally separate pulses, the centroparietal positivity (CPP) tracks multiple rounds of evidence accumulation, falling back down to baseline during the intervals in between pulses when no relevant info is presented.
This transient pattern of activity stands in contrast to motor beta lateralisation (MBL), which keeps track of the total sum of accumulated evidence throughout the intervals between pulses and until response.
Excited to be in Porto for #ICON2025! I will be at poster session 2 tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon (P2.20) talking about evidence accumulation and choice-encoding centroparietal signals in the human EEG. Come say hi!
📢Fully Funded PhD position in Barcelona!
I'm excited to announce that I’m opening a PhD position at @idibaps.bsky.social, Barcelona!
We'll investigate the role of bodily signals in autobiographical memory, using virtual reality, EEG and TMS, in healthy volunteers and patient populations.
Excellent piece.
We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it.
"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in @Nature.com:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +
New paper from the lab indicates some surprising differences in visual cortical contributions to two popular VEP types.
In it, Kieran uses some of his brilliant tricks from last year's paper:
Delighted to share this paper, now published in @arvoinfo.bsky.social. With @spk3lly.bsky.social and Anna Geuzebroek we explored differences in visual cortical responses for pattern pulses and pattern reversals. Here's the link:
jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...
Check out our new multisensory decision study!
We tackle a decades-old Q: does faster detection of bimodal targets come from a race or co-activation between modalities? And also a vital, orthogonal Q: is it one decision process or two?
A1: co-activation
A2: two!
Read here: rdcu.be/eASYd
In this article, Egan et al. examine multisensory evidence accumulation and show that evidence in two modalities sub-additively co-activate a single, thresholded motor process.
CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS
How the CCN Community Can Contribute
#CCN2025 on Wednesday 13th (10am 🇪🇺)
Livestream link below
➡️ Exploring the possibility of Computational Consciousness Science
➡️ Discussing three Templeton World Charity Foundation Adversarial Collaborations
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Redmond G. O’Connell, Simon P. Kelly, et al:
Regressing away common neural choice signals does not make them artifacts: Comment on Frömer et al. 2024
doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
The way that the CPP behaves in this task seems very different from its well-established characteristics in static contexts with continuous evidence (e.g. classic random dot motion tasks), where it reflects the absolute cumulative sum of evidence.
We believe our results hint at a flexible neural architecture that can adapt to different decision contexts, and highlight how the CPP may play a key intermediary role in adaptive evidence accumulation. Stay tuned for upcoming related work, and thanks for reading!
We found that motor beta lateralisation kept track of an evolving decision variable (DV) in a sustained manner over trial time, consistent with previous MEG work:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Further, we found that the centroparietal positivity (CPP) tracks effective evidence (i.e. it reflects how much a DV changes following a token, rather than just stimulus information), but it does not keep a sustained representation of the DV.
We used an expanded judgement task where participants watched a slow sequence of discrete tokens (400 ms per token, up to 10 tokens) which favoured one of two possible choices. The task was volatile, which means that the choice supported by the tokens may change within a trial.
Because the normative solution to this task does not prescribe perfect accumulation, we could dissociate objective evidence presented on the screen from effective evidence (i.e. the belief updates that each token triggered), and map these quantities onto neural signals.
In life, 3 things are certain: death, taxes, and decision-making variability🧠. Our review tinyurl.com/4dcwafc4 explores how computational models 💻 explain variability, their limits, and recent advances. A thread🧵👇
@redmondoconnell.bsky.social@neuromurphy.bsky.social Mark Bellgrove (not on Bluesky)
1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!