Derek Arnold

Happy to see @genetang.bsky.social's review article on Charles Bonnet Syndrom now available as early-online in Brain! #VisionScience #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky doi.org/10.1093/brai...

🚨Paper alert🚨 Here we try to tackle the tricky problem of measuring the inherently private experiences of visual imagery. Now out and open access in Cortex: doi.org/10.1016/j.co... @heidasigurdar.bsky.social @arnig.bsky.social #imagery #visualimagery #visionscience #psychology #cogsci #aphantasia

A recent paper argued that there is no visual binding problem. I disagree, and wrote a response... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Related demonstrations can be found here... staff.psy.uq.edu.au/~uqdarnol/JS...

Join us on 1 July, 12:00–3:15 PM, for the Synaesthesia Science & Community Forum. Explore the latest research in consciousness, sensory neuroscience, auditory cognition, and phenomenology through talks and discussion. See here for more details: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

I adapted a scheduler app that was shared at VSS for this conference: apcvepc2026.netlify.app. Hope others find it useful in organising their time. (And thank you to Miyoung Kwon who created the app originally).

Cardiac vagal reactivity predicts visual imagery vividness. This challenges traditional efferent accounts in which autonomic activation is merely a byproduct of imagery; rather, autonomic afferent input shapes visual imagery itself www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Final days for Early Bird registration! Register now and take advantage of discounted pricing.

All speakers should have received information about the session & timings of their presentations at #epc-apcv-2026 by now! A preliminary (searchable) schedule is available on the website: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026 Remember to register by the end of 15 May for early-bird rates!

Researching visual imagery? Consider submitting to this new cross-journal special issue on visual imagery at Nature Communications, Communications Psychology, and Scientific Reports! We welcome a broad range of topics and methods - more info below 👇 www.nature.com/collections/...

I’m doing this again next week. Pint of Science pintofscience.com.au/event/mind-t...

We're hiring! Looking for a postdoc to work at UNSW Sydney, studying impacts of reward and information on attention, using eye-tracking, EEG, and modelling - with Kelly Garner, Daniel Pearson and me. Application link below, please spread the word! external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/53...

We have over 100 abstracts submitted already and are expecting a big spike in these last couple of weeks! EPC/APCV are very rarely in NZ (last was 15yrs ago). If you're kiwi, this is a great opportunity for a nearby international conference. If you're not, this is your chance to see beautiful NZ :)

Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron! Here is a download link (free for 50 days): authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH... Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social 🧵

Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos... I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...

🔊 New preprint 🧠 for the first time we show congenital #aphantasia has physical brain anatomy alterations. Surprisingly, they have structurally intact #visual pathways. Structural alterations instead found in the fronto-temporal and cingulate systems. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani, Anina N. Rich, and Alexandra Woolgar: Spatiotemporal characterisation of information coding in the multiple demand network doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Meet our second keynote speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Prof. Elaine Reese from the University of Otago will deliver a keynote lecture titled "Memory Development: From Basic Science to Applied Approaches."

Our paper on double decisions in working memory tasks is now published in Computational Brain and Behaviour! When you give people a second chance, it reveals a lot about the contents of their memory. Led by @paulmgarrett.bsky.social @psychunimelb.bsky.social rdcu.be/e8SLX

Congratulations to Ian Thornton and colleagues who published their Mainz-Linez illusion in i-Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social): the red dots appears to wave left and right when one looks at one of the black dots, but they actually move straight journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Next up: Keynote Speaker Announcements. Introducing the first speaker for APCV & EPC 2026! Prof. Hakwan Lau will present a keynote lecture titled "Prefrontal Mechanisms for Perception."

⚡SYMPOSIA SPOTLIGHT #2 More symposia highlights from our upcoming conference!

Please repost! I have a wonderful colleague seeking a postdoc with expertise in *Bayesian Network Analysis* Position for 1 year in Liverpool, starting as early as next month (April)! Informal EOIs to Angelika Stefan: astefan1.github.io

#Aphantasia and visual working memory: No direct evidence of impaired visual working memory in aphantasics, either in behavioral performance or the accuracy of a multivoxel pattern classifier www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

⚡SYMPOSIA SPOTLIGHT #1 We are super excited to announce a series of symposia taking place throughout our conference. Here is a preview of some featured sessions and speakers. Of course, there is more to come. Stay tuned!

**Postdoc position in human category learning** @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social. www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

Everyone: Binocular rivalry describes an alternation between exclusive percepts from each eye. Me + Prof Bex: Which perceptual categories do observers experience during multistable perception? url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Melinda Sabo, Tijl Grootswagers, et al: Multiple partially overlapping neural modules orchestrate conflict processing doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307

Coming to APCV & EPC from outside of Auckland, New Zealand? Here is some more information about Student Travel Awards. More available on our website: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

Anyone want to do a PhD with me at the Sunny Coast? I'm recruiting, and I wanna do some fun psychophysics (but the possibilities for the PhD are very broad). Domestic students only, sadly. In case y'all happen to know someone: @nataliepeluso.com @reubenrideaux.bsky.social @visnerd.bsky.social

Our latest paper, “Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests”, is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Non-paywalled version: arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786 Tweet thread below from first author @genetang.bsky.social...

New Preprint: People in general have idiosyncratic imagined experiences characterised by salience differences. Some have more salient imagined sensations of smell than of imagery, while most have the opposite - and these differences shape people's daily lives. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper with Tom Whitford, using EEG to investigate inner speech in people with auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. academic.oup.com/schizophreni...