We also explored the reported strategies for dealing with the perceived impacts of digital technology on attention (and their resulting benefits). We catalogued them on a continuum from moderation to elimination – from curating content to using "dumbphones" and having devices only for a single use.

Cognitive scientists mostly have specific and nuanced lenses on attention. In contrast, our analysis identified a wide range of perceived impacts, both individually and socially – such as "brain rot", wasting time, mindless consumption of digital media, and a disconnection from the "meatspace".

In its fourth year, the pre-data poster session has helped researchers get their ideas out there, receive feedback at a point in the project when it can be actually actioned, and to meet other interested researchers in the same area. It is a low-key way for junior scientists to get involved in VSS!

Okay, this is probably the best I will do. A bit of inspiration for some fun citizen science / psychophysics! What's My JND? 0.00080 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

How dare you besmirch psychophysics? What's My JND? 0.0017 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

Years of piloting my own visual psychophysics studies trained me for this moment. Any vision scientists out there that can do better than me? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

The data from the task is compelling because there is no "correct" answer; it's a free choice! Super-recognisers are grouping faces based on identity rather than valence or gaze angle. This ends up interfering their expression-matching in an independent face task (they are worse when faces mismatch)

Tim Cottier @tvcottier.bsky.social introduces a novel face triad task to explore whether super-recognisers decipher the identity, valence or gaze of faces. When asked which face is distinct out of the three, super-recognisers preference identity information more than controls! #ASPP2025

Wawu means spirit - the life force connecting people, Country and story; it conveys that knowledge and care are intertwined, and that knowledge is relationship and responsibility.

The second keynote for the conference is Cammi Murrup-Stewart on "Connection as Knowledge: Decolonising Mind through Wawu". A good reminder on our responsibility as knowledge leaders is sure to come.

After seeing @micahgoldwater.bsky.social speak on memes as forms of argument-making, I've decided to livetweet what I can of the Australasian Society of Philosophy and Psychology conference #ASPP2025. Conservatives can see the effectiveness of liberal memes, whereas the reverse is not observed.

For the Feyerabend anarchists:

me: finding a recent and relevant Chaz phil vis paper that I had missed through zohran-posting

As per Schurgin et al. (2020), we find that the cognitive representation underlying all tasks do not match the physical stimulus space. But we also find that the representation is different for similarity comparison and both reproduction tasks; similarity is not the basis for working memory. /7

We conducted a follow-up experiment comparing static discs to moving discs; we wanted to make sure the canonical CDA set-size effect replicated in our paradigm where we cued targets first. And it does when the discs are static, and we also replicated the lack of color load effect for moving discs!

A surprisingly similar result! While the CDA amplitude was slightly elevated overall, there was no clear effect of working memory load. That is, the CDA appeared to be largely driven by the attentional tracking load – one or two discs.

Our result? When subjects were only required to complete the MOT task (and could ignore the colors), the CDA was as expected. We observed a sustained difference in the CDA amplitude when tracking one disc compared to tracking two discs. But what about tracking and remembering?

We combined MOT with the whole-report WM task – subjects had to track one or two moving discs, while also remembering the colors of those discs. There were either one or two colors per target discs, so either two or four colors to remember in total. We had subjects do MOT-only as well to compare.

I had a fantastic experience presenting at Raising the Bar last night! It was nerve-wracking to speak about research with no slides, but it meant I really connected with the audience on the current discourse around the perceived impact of digital technology on attention spans and brain function.

Does tracking and remembering the colour of multiple moving objects share a common mechanism? How might the encoded information be represented in the mind and brain? See my talk tomorrow morning to hear about a couple of EEG studies looking at this (see task below)! @expsyanz.bsky.social #EPC2025

In the first iteration of the session, @styrkowiec.bsky.social and I shared the very beginnings of an experiment idea testing how information would be organised in working memory when stimuli were moving and changing at the same time. We got a useful signal – that others were interested in the idea!

I created this reading list on theory in psychology a while back, so it probably needs an update! Would love any recommendations for papers to include – maybe I can turn this into a syllabus of sorts. PDF of this reading list here: williamngiam.github.io/reading_list...

Embarrassing as a vision scientist to upload a SVG of the logo, for it to come out blurry. Hopefully this one is a bit nicer to look at

For the #visionscience folks, the pre-data poster session is back at VSS for its third year. It only makes sense to get feedback at the conference at a point in time where you can actually action it! I think it is a great opportunity for ECRs to be involved in VSS as well!

I feel like this will give ECRs (both postdoctoral researchers and early-career faculty) a great deal of insecurity, bouncing around from academic job to research job and back again, from project to project. Would like to see more explanation of how the following is achieved:

I don't think this is "radical" or is in opposition with institutional structures. Reform won't come in one fell swoop – I hope that with enough individual and local community action, there will be a strong resonance that tumbles existing structures or forces them to evolve to remain standing.

A new update to quokka – my open-source, in-browser, free-to-use qualitative coding ShinyApp! In the new 'sorting' tab, users who have finished analysing can organise their codes into themes (or subthemes or categories based on the approach) with a simple drag-and-drop interface. #CAQDAS

Actually Google, I did not mean that.

Everything is spot on, even down to the quotes. And if anyone wants to know how I think (some of the) Open Science principles can transform psychological science for the better, I will happily talk for hours on end. Check out my Veggie ID! You can create yours at sophie006liu.github.io/vegetal/