herrick fung
@herrickfung.bsky.social
PhD student in Cognition & Brain Science @ Georgia Tech
Computation of Subjective Perception Lab w/ @dobyrahnev.bsky.social
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Subjective perception • Individual differences • Cognitive neuroscience • NeuroAI
Computation of Subjective Perception Lab w/ @dobyrahnev.bsky.social
――――――――――――――――――――――――
Subjective perception • Individual differences • Cognitive neuroscience • NeuroAI
Pinned
www.biorxiv.org
🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior.
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
Reposted by herrick fung
Turns out that individual differences in accuracy, confidence, and RT among ANNs that only differ in their random initialization mimic the individual differences in humans.
It may be time for NeuroAI to take individual differences even more seriously.
Check out Herrick's thread 👇
It may be time for NeuroAI to take individual differences even more seriously.
Check out Herrick's thread 👇
🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior.
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
www.biorxiv.org
February 12, 2026 at 2:20 PM
Turns out that individual differences in accuracy, confidence, and RT among ANNs that only differ in their random initialization mimic the individual differences in humans.
It may be time for NeuroAI to take individual differences even more seriously.
Check out Herrick's thread 👇
It may be time for NeuroAI to take individual differences even more seriously.
Check out Herrick's thread 👇
🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior.
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
www.biorxiv.org
February 12, 2026 at 2:00 PM
🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior.
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.
1/8
Reposted by herrick fung
How do people compute a sense of confidence? This question is usually addressed using very simple images because we don't know how complex stimuli are represented internally. In a new paper, we addressed this question using artificial neural networks (ANNs).
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Using artificial neural networks to reveal the human confidence computation
Author summary Human decisions are accompanied by a sense of confidence which reflects the decision accuracy. Conventionally, human confidence has been studied using two-choice tasks with simple stimu...
journals.plos.org
January 26, 2026 at 7:18 PM
How do people compute a sense of confidence? This question is usually addressed using very simple images because we don't know how complex stimuli are represented internally. In a new paper, we addressed this question using artificial neural networks (ANNs).
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Glad to have played a small part in this work led by Medha Shekhar, now out in PLOS Comp Bio. Using neural networks, we show that in multi-alternative perceptual task, humans compute confidence by the difference between the internal evidence of the top two choices.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Using artificial neural networks to reveal the human confidence computation
Author summary Human decisions are accompanied by a sense of confidence which reflects the decision accuracy. Conventionally, human confidence has been studied using two-choice tasks with simple stimu...
journals.plos.org
January 15, 2026 at 1:44 PM
Glad to have played a small part in this work led by Medha Shekhar, now out in PLOS Comp Bio. Using neural networks, we show that in multi-alternative perceptual task, humans compute confidence by the difference between the internal evidence of the top two choices.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Reposted by herrick fung
New preprint: Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making. A review I was supposed to write 3 years ago for my VSS Young Investigator Award. Better late than never 😅 I tried to organize the literature and explore the likely mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
January 13, 2026 at 6:13 PM
New preprint: Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making. A review I was supposed to write 3 years ago for my VSS Young Investigator Award. Better late than never 😅 I tried to organize the literature and explore the likely mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Reposted by herrick fung
Reposted by herrick fung
"How participants create illusory experiences to help experimenters." A new preprint of a multi-study manuscript w/
@zoltandienes.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social & Ryan Scott, extending previous work on demand characteristics & phenomenological control in psychological effects. osf.io/n2ukj
@zoltandienes.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social & Ryan Scott, extending previous work on demand characteristics & phenomenological control in psychological effects. osf.io/n2ukj
December 16, 2025 at 5:45 PM
"How participants create illusory experiences to help experimenters." A new preprint of a multi-study manuscript w/
@zoltandienes.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social & Ryan Scott, extending previous work on demand characteristics & phenomenological control in psychological effects. osf.io/n2ukj
@zoltandienes.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social & Ryan Scott, extending previous work on demand characteristics & phenomenological control in psychological effects. osf.io/n2ukj
Reposted by herrick fung
Excited to share my first paper: Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn’t the Right One (NeurIPS 2025). link below.
November 20, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Excited to share my first paper: Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn’t the Right One (NeurIPS 2025). link below.
Reposted by herrick fung
Need more fMRI data (beyond the amazing NSD)? Introducing MOSAIC! Incredible effort led expertly by Ben Lahner, with help from grad student Mayukh Deb. Work in collaboration with the amazing Aude Oliva! @neurosky.bsky.social. More below..
December 4, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Need more fMRI data (beyond the amazing NSD)? Introducing MOSAIC! Incredible effort led expertly by Ben Lahner, with help from grad student Mayukh Deb. Work in collaboration with the amazing Aude Oliva! @neurosky.bsky.social. More below..
Reposted by herrick fung
"ANN instances showed consistent variation in their alignment with specific human subjects." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This particular network is just like me fr!
Human-like individual differences emerge from random weight initializations in neural networks
Much of AI research targets the behavior of an average human, a focus that traces to Turing’s imitation game. Yet, no two human individuals behave exactly alike. In this study, we show that artificial...
www.biorxiv.org
October 29, 2025 at 6:30 PM
"ANN instances showed consistent variation in their alignment with specific human subjects." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This particular network is just like me fr!
Reposted by herrick fung
Clever behavioural experiment exposing how confidence is formed in visual perception
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41138620/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41138620/
Perceptual confidence has near perfect access to the existence of discrete representations, but only weak access to precision - PubMed
Perceptual confidence describes the degree to which we believe our internal perceptual representations reflect the external stimuli that caused them. How confidence is derived from internal representations is currently debated, but answering this question is made difficult because the nature of inte …
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
October 28, 2025 at 7:05 AM
Clever behavioural experiment exposing how confidence is formed in visual perception
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41138620/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41138620/
No two humans behave exactly alike. But what about neural networks? We found early evidence that human-like individual differences in behavior emerge from networks trained with different initializations. Here’s a peek at our results—to be presented at UniReps & DBM @NeurIPS. Full paper on the way!
Human-like individual differences emerge from random weight initializations in neural networks
Much of AI research targets the behavior of an average human, a focus that traces to Turing's imitation game. Yet, no two human individuals behave exactly alike. In this study, we show that artificial...
www.biorxiv.org
October 26, 2025 at 11:39 PM
No two humans behave exactly alike. But what about neural networks? We found early evidence that human-like individual differences in behavior emerge from networks trained with different initializations. Here’s a peek at our results—to be presented at UniReps & DBM @NeurIPS. Full paper on the way!
Reposted by herrick fung
It looks like stimulus manipulations can be divided into "task-defining" and "auxiliary". The manipulations from each group have very different effects on accuracy vs. confidence. And all auxiliary manipulations seem to work in basically the same way. Really cool stuff by @herrickfung.bsky.social.
Glad to see my first-year project is out!
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence
Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 13, 2025 at 12:09 PM
It looks like stimulus manipulations can be divided into "task-defining" and "auxiliary". The manipulations from each group have very different effects on accuracy vs. confidence. And all auxiliary manipulations seem to work in basically the same way. Really cool stuff by @herrickfung.bsky.social.
Glad to see my first-year project is out!
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence
Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 12, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Glad to see my first-year project is out!
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.
1/n
Reposted by herrick fung
🚨 Paper alert:
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop
LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models
📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop
LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models
📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io
September 29, 2025 at 2:28 PM
🚨 Paper alert:
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop
LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models
📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop
LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models
📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io
Reposted by herrick fung
At Neurips? You can now check out @herrickfung.bsky.social ‘s new work on modeling individual differences at two workshops! Much more to say on this awesome colab with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social very soon. 🙂
Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.
September 24, 2025 at 12:23 AM
At Neurips? You can now check out @herrickfung.bsky.social ‘s new work on modeling individual differences at two workshops! Much more to say on this awesome colab with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social very soon. 🙂
Reposted by herrick fung
Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.
September 23, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.
Reposted by herrick fung
New lab preprint led by Medha Shekhar in collaboration with @axc.bsky.social. We investigate what drives confidence in decisions of real-world complexity (perception and memory questions about short videos). It turns out confidence is influenced by so many factors!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
August 14, 2025 at 1:31 PM
New lab preprint led by Medha Shekhar in collaboration with @axc.bsky.social. We investigate what drives confidence in decisions of real-world complexity (perception and memory questions about short videos). It turns out confidence is influenced by so many factors!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...