Matan Mazor

Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Am I making this up or was there a gif of Inside Out, zooming into Joy's (or Anger's?) head to reveal another control room, in an infinite regress?

New results from a study led by the brilliant @benjyb.bsky.social examining differences between numerical (e.g. zero) and perceptual absences using MEG - now revised in eLife elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

there's a U-shaped relationship between the rotational distance of a thing from a U and whether you call it a U-shaped relationship

Exciting Associate Professor opportunity in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, with access to state-of-the-art neuroimaging and stimulation at OHBA/OxCIN: MEG, OPM, 3T/7T MRI, TUS, TMS & more. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSQ831/a...

webrarian is a new R package. It turns a folder of R scripts and data into a static website where R runs in the visitor's browser, with no compute server and nothing to install. blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/introd... #rstats #webr #webassembly

🚀 PhD opportunity in the Vaghi Lab, starting 2027 @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social We are looking to support applicants interested in: 🔬 precision neuroimaging 🧠 compulsivity/OCD 💻 computational approaches Available via the ESRC UBEL DTP PhD or MSc + PhD routes 🔗 surl.li/qunzzt Please share! 📢

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

🩸🩸🩸TODAY WE SHARE TWO MAJOR DISCOVERIES🩸🩸🩸 1. We peered into genomes and brains of the rare mosquitoes that QUIT feeding on blood and found what biting is built from 2. Humans got rid of isoleucine in their blood, malaria suffers from it, and mosquito proteomes budget for it THREADS>

Yesterday's Print ➛ more ★ via

The difference between the performance of immigrants in England and Western Europe is staggering. (20 pts equals a year of learning.) I looked at this in detail in the post - it can't be explained away by language or relative advantage of different immigrant communities. There is a policy factor.

Our paper “Confidence is detection-like in high-dimensional spaces” is now published in Open Mind, led by @wiktoriakozyra.bsky.social and @kevingoneill.github.io direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

spawn-again.vercel.app

📣 New preprint 📣 An exciting collaboration with Lei Zhang's lab spearheaded by Aamir Sohail. We use game tasks and models typically used to estimate mentalization ability in humans, and we test them across a variety of commercially available LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2608.26291

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet an incredible group of people and build something new together. Today, our paper - "Science from the bottom up" - is officially out in TiCS. Free access link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1njPQ4sIRv... [pic: meal planning for the 2022 MESEC Workshop]

📣 Out now in Translational Psychiatry 📣 We show a metacognitive paradox in OCD: patients report persistently lower confidence than controls at comparable accuracy, yet their confidence is more sensitive to feedback and tracks a Bayesian observer more closely. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

The Stanford Psychology Department is having a search for a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Application deadline is 10/15. More infos here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

Nice to be profiled in this piece for @psychscience.bsky.social In which I talk a bit about our research so far, what can make our kind of career challenging - and why we should all strive to be 'fish scales' 🐟 www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

📣 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).

🔥🔥New paper alert! Super excited to share our paper, out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the wonderful Dr. Nofar Mizrachi! nature.com/articles/s41... To me, this finding fundamentally changes how we should think about the relationship between cognition and immune regulation:

📢 Our paper is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We know that symptoms of OCD fluctuate substantially. But what are the exact conditions that precede symptom escalations? We found evidence for metacognitive processes being a key antecedent. 1/

Hundreds of solar eclipse images projected onto my old Copper Beech. Noticed it by chance as I was trying to get my naff pinhole cardboard setup to work. Unexpected and magical 💚 🌱

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.

LLMs fail on letter-counting tasks

humans and LLMs as cognitive cousins open.spotify.com/episode/5e2w...

Special issue at Psych Science on psychology research using LLMs Theoretical & methodological work welcome. Read the full call for important info about what we’re looking for! Submission deadline: 15 March 2027 (15 October 2026 for Registered Reports) www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

[Comic ] From a couple of weeks back #comic #tech #sciencefiction #comedy #sketch

new preprint! in my final grad school project led by @kmiceli.bsky.social & @ninavanrooy.bsky.social w/@felipedebrigard.bsky.social, we challenge ~20yrs of causal cognition research by finding a context in which people's causal judgments are completely *unaffected* by norms! osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is amazing from a cognitive science perspective. The new intelligences are here.

An active inference account of sneezing directly into someone's face doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.146347

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.

How does the human brain extract abstract structure from experience? We show that sensory-independent relational representations emerge in mPFC over several days. Work with @mgarvert.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol...

📢 We’re hiring! We are looking for a postdoc for a funded inter-lab project on the computational mechanisms of creativity and humor, and their role in communication and neurodivergence. 🧠✨ Questions? DM me @amirtal.bsky.social or @yoedkenett.bsky.social Please RT to help us spread the word!

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3

Get submitting to OpenMind!! Not a bad deal :-)

A bee analogue of Kohler's insight learning experiments

A paper in Nature describes plague outbreaks dating back to around 5,500 years ago documented in hunter-gatherer communities from southeast Siberia. The findings, based on an analysis of ancient DNA, may be the oldest-known evidence of the plague and could shed light on its origins. 🧬🏺🧪

📢PhD job alert! A exciting PhD project that involves using MEG and biophysical modelling to try to predict effects of a glutamatergic treatment for psychosis... plus you can develop your own side project. Join our great team! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

If insects are sentient and sentience implies rights, what follows for food security and public health? I call this the "insect challenge" for animal ethics. The Journal of Practical Ethics has a new symposium on it, with an article by me and 3 replies: journals.publishing.umich.edu/jpe/news/ 1/5

The Kafka Diaries ➛ is.gd/thisisnt

They're made out of meat www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usX...