Heleen Slagter

Smart isn't the same as aware. And your brain's software is also its hardware. Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be www.nature.com/articles/d41... #neuroscience

The more you automate, the less you see: Hidden pitfalls of autonomous AI scientists | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Alternatively, if the idea is not that biology enables specific functions, how are we supposed to detect consciousness using cogsci approaches? See here for a longer form of this argument: www.cell.com/trends-open/... Curious what you think :)

The Nature of Mind (NOM) research project is seeking a Study Coordinator! The NOM Study investigates advanced meditation, with a particular focus on recognition of the Nature of Mind as described in Tibetan contemplative traditions. See https://www.nomstudy.org/ for more info!

Thank you Jon Kabat-Zinn for this fantastic blurb!

Psych&CNS@NYU seeking t-track asst prof with outstanding record in human neurosci. Examples of areas (but not limited to): attention, perception, decision making, memory, executive function. Research incorporating neuroimaging (e.g. fMRI) preferred. Appl deadline Nov 15. apply.interfolio.com/195772

Do brain connections just carry information between regions, or do they transform it? Lab's latest is out in Nature Neuroscience, led by Lakshman Chakravarthula: "Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex" www.colelab.org/pubs/Chakrav... 1/n

Imagine two people standing in the same spot, looking at the same Goya. They inspect exactly the same parts of the painting, but in a different order. Later, they talk about what they saw. Ignoring all other differences: are the memories they formed identical?

Call for submissions: Special Issue in Cortex "Conscious awareness across the senses" co-edited by @renzolanfranco.bsky.social @arvidguterstam.bsky.social @leahbanellis.bsky.social @nfaivre.bsky.social & @canalesjohnson.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

𝗢𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 Excellent book on relational aspects of knowledge and world. Inspired by physics but providing a general process + relational + perspectival framework. Quite convergent with The Blind Spot by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson.

What can DNNs tell us about how the brain learns? Our new results show that predictive local learning better captures changes in brain representations during statistical learning than supervised or contrastive approaches. Excellent work by @denisekittelmann.bsky.social and @gutlin.bsky.social

When you focus on one item in working memory, beta rhythms may help “park” the other in a protected, set-aside state. Prioritization in Working Memory Reduces Interference via Beta Band-Linked Stimulus Transformations doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... #neuroscience

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

Reposting, in case you missed it! 8-) Reskeet appreciated!

🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...

🧵In April, I built an AI agent that could complete the Attention Network Task. The agent was task-specific and costly. I concluded that online behavioral experiments were safe from agentic infiltration. Six months later, my view has changed. Our new preprint explains why osf.io/preprints/ps...

How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)

🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...

Our Annual Review of Vision Science paper on "Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World" with @evadeligiannis.bsky.social is officially out and available through open access. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.

Important work showing just how easily AI agents can pass online behavioral experiments! Safeguards need to keep up if we want to continue online testing!👇

Here's today's column on the astonishing, ongoing mistreatment of people with #ME/CFS. Please spread it far and wide: the only thing which can break the media's wall of indifference is seeing an article about the issue go viral. Thank you. 1/2 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How can we test for consciousness in infants, non-human animals, and AI? I'm super happy that the recordings of our last workshop on exactly this question are now online! Speakers and links to talks below! 👇 #ConSci

we started out just wanting to point out that, despite its popularity, comparing hits vs misses in detection tasks is actually not a very good way to study subjective experience / consciousness. but we ended up expanding it to make it relevant for clinical stuff too led by @tomnakamura.bsky.social

1/ Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A long time in the making, but the full collection is *out now* in Behavioural and Brain Sciences I deeply thank all my many commentators for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic.I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽

Most cortical neurons exhibit mixed selectivity rather than specializing in a single function. Our limited ability to juggle tasks may therefore reflect interference among overlapping neural representations. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

A leaf blower: a Bayesian perspective doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.320655

I wrote down my thoughts about the last several weeks of AI hell. aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

Can AI Have Conscious Experiences? | Psychology Today www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/i-go...

Characteristically well-informed, and super interesting, by @philipcball.bsky.social The Einstein test: what happens when AI tries to rediscover relativity? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Sharing a big first: the first 1st-author paper from my first PhD student, Abi Wyllie. Definitely a first worth celebrating. So here's a summary, if you're interested in familiarity, memory, and attention. rdcu.be/2uSWUCg3PBia

In episode 951, I talk with Dr. Shaun Gallagher about his great book, The Self and its Disorders. #CognitiveScience #Philosophy youtu.be/Djlss-rWJEI

It's actually real! Lovely to see it in actual print, including @catalinayang.bsky.social's beautiful cover image. Check out the digital, fully open access, version here: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3.... #neuroskyence

Worth reading 👇 if only to appreciate that meditation may not be for everyone www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

📣 My lab at NYU currently has two open post-doc positions. We are interested in understanding perception, thinking, and hallucinations. We employ a range of cutting-edge techniques in human neuroscience (e.g., 7T fMRI, MEG, iEEG/DES) and computational approaches (e.g., DNN modeling).

Super excited to see our review out in TiCS! Here me & @cogsci.nl present the first comprehensive framework of the mechanisms driving relationships between spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior 👀🧠👩🏻‍💻 Spoiler: arousal is only one of at least four 😶‍🌫️ doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 Apply: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...

How can we design experiments that make computational models disagree? One section of our new @natrevneuro.nature.com Review with @kriegeskorte.bsky.social and @heikoschuett.bsky.social examines studies that used stimulus sets designed to elicit distinct predictions from competing models. 1/16

🙌🍾🎉 new paper w/ @svangaal.bsky.social, Z. van den Hurk @timostein.bsky.social & @fahrenfort.bsky.social where we attempted to replicate a classical unconscious priming study by Vorberg et al. (2003) using an improved single-subject Bayesian approach. 1/8

We keep asking LLMs whether they're conscious. I got more interested in WHO and WHEN taught them how to answer. I traced such self-report through 66 training checkpoints, 3 post-training stages, ~90k continuations. Paper: philarchive.org/archive/EKRWPT #philosophy #llm #ai #science #consci #cogsci

Thread. I have yet to see a proper explanation of how LLMs actually work that is targeted to an informed general audience. So here is an explainer that I put together along with Tim @countzerozzz (inspired by @CIFAR_News LMB discussions).

If you're interested in computational psychiatry (with a sprinkling of philosophy of science), then check out this new paper, led by Dr @bethfisher.bsky.social and with brilliant co-authors @noorsajid and Laura Convertino. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Heleen is a fantastic supervisor, so if you’re looking for a postdoc position this is the place to be!

When we shift covert attention from point A to point B; do we also attend everything in between, or does attention jump the gap? In a new preprint, our RIFT-EEG task suggests the latter (with S.V.d.Stigchel, @suryagayet.bsky.social, @schota.bsky.social, ...) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/3)

Our new paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com. Psychedelics don’t simply disorder the brain. We found hidden, context-sensitive organisation beneath the apparent chaos -- strongest in people reporting more positive, profound experiences and a reduced sense of separation from the world. 🧵👇

PhD position (4 years, paid) on an NWO-funded project on the Role of Foveal Processing in Spatial Attention at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, supervised by Dr. Mieke Donk (main PI) and me! For more information: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...