Please come to see our lab presentations at #ICON2025, by the brilliant Kirsten Rittershofer and Quirin Gehmacher. Sorry I can't be there myself, it looks a brilliant meeting 🎉

Looking forward to #CCN2025! Please come to say hello and check out our lab's presentations 👇

@compcogneuro.bsky.social

Sampling rhythms reflect statistical learning of temporal properties of inputs, governed by both externally- and intrinsically-determined sensory dynamics. We process the sensory world according to the probability with which a weighted combination of sources predicts information at that time. [5/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

Importantly sensory rhythms in our environment will usually not coincide specifically with the rate of any fixed rhythm. We must therefore crucially now ask how we optimally combine these rhythmic sources to determine perceptual and motor processing. To this end we propose a new account. [4/6]

In contrast, accounts predominating in audition propose neural rhythms that are flexible and couple to those of the input. We contend that these different accounts grew from contrasting paradigms in which the visual world is more easily, yet artificially, stabilised in lab settings. [3/6]

Some accounts of oscillatory processing, predominating in vision, propose perception is supported by fixed neural rhythms that do not reflect rhythmic structure of the input. They instead reflect motor (e.g. saccadic) and neural architectural constraints (e.g. receptive field interactions) [2/6]

Please welcome @jessyeclarke.bsky.social to Bluesky! Jessye is a new ERC-funded PhD student in our team, based previously at Cambridge and LMU Munich. Follow Jessye to find out about the fascinating interactions between learning, awareness & perception

Find out more: www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/action-...

Quirin Gehmacher (also Juliane Schubert, Nathan Weisz, Maria Chait and others, Fri 2-3:45 pm) considers how gaze tracks envelope and acoustic onsets of attended speech [8/9]

Aaron Kaltenmaier (also @jhaarsma.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social , @peterkok.bsky.social, Fri 2-3:45 pm) asks how expectations about stimulus presence and content differently affect perceptual inference [7/9]

Matan Mazor (@matanmazor.bsky.social; Fri 2-3:45 pm) considers the role of counterfactual visibility in perceptual decisions, examining whether we accumulate evidence for absence or represent the counterfactual to decide that something isn't there [6/9]

Matan Mazor & Nick Simpson (@matanmazor.bsky.social, also E Ward, K Rittershofer; Thur 3-5 pm) consider perceptual repulsion from lifelong gravitational priors, whether recently learnt expectations bias motion perception similarly, & adaptation vs prediction mechanisms [5/9]

Emma Ward (Thurs 3-5 pm) asks about the impact of high surprise on perception both of the surprising event itself and other concurrent events, examining how we might direct resources when environmental statistics suddenly depart from learnt environmental regularities [4/9]

Kirsten Rittershofer (also @peterkok.bsky.social ; Thurs 3-5 pm) will ask, with EEG, how shapes of varying conditional probabilities (4-72%) are decoded across time, to test our account (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... of how predictions influence perceptual processing [3/9]

Thrilled to announce that I - and the lab - will shortly be joining UCL Experimental Psychology (we remain also part of the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL). It's been an exciting 12.5 yrs at Birkbeck and I'm looking forward to the next era!

Pleased to announce three new lab members. Quirin Gehmacher and Aaron Kaltenmaier join for 3 yrs to examine the role of learning in oscillations supporting perception. Cristiano Costa to study emotion-based prediction. Welcome!
psyc.bbk.ac.uk/actionlab/pe...
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/team/action-...