Benjamin Lowe
Cog neuro postdoc at Macquarie Uni, Sydney
Activist for a free Palestine 🇵🇸
- Reposted by Benjamin Lowe'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3
- He’s simply a grifter
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweInterpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweMost popular decision-making models assume that cognitive processes are static over time. In our new paper in Psych Review, we offer a simple extension to evidence accumulation models that lets researchers account for systematic changes in parameters across time 📈 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweOur publishing system does not prioritise or value the careful curation of research data to be FAIR nearly enough. I have been data editing for AP&P for a year now, and it is sad to see no reward for the clearly careful organisation of data and materials vs that which is thrown on OSF with no care!
- And it's out now in Cortex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Summary below 🧵
- 🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?
- Predictive coding theories assert that the brain uses prior knowledge when resolving percepts. Deviations between what is predicted and sensed generate surprise signals (so-called ‘prediction errors’), which calibrate the relevant erroneous predictions.
- But when does the visual system signal surprise? And do the dynamics of a surprise signal depend on which attributes (features) violate a prediction? This is important to think about, given the functionally segregated organisation of the visual system.
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View full threadAlso, I apologise for the poor figure quality in the HTML version of the article. Elsevier’s typesetting team made some nonsense changes that I did not consent to, which have somehow proved to be frustrating to fix on their end. The PDF version is fine though!
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweHigh-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference! 🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Summary 🧵 below 👇
- And it was an absolute treat to run! Thanks everyone who attended :) #ACNS2025
- Shout out to Australian researchers! 🇦🇺 (and folks in the southern hemisphere) 🌏 We're excited that our Ambassador Ben Lowe (@brainboyben.bsky.social) will be hosting a pre-conference workshop at #ACNS2025 (@acnsau.bsky.social) on getting started with PsychoPy! Sign up here👇 shorturl.at/gvnUU
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweTim 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
- Road trippin’ to ACNS 2025, Melbourne! @matthewod.bsky.social @tvcottier.bsky.social (Plus Ella and Seri) @acnsau.bsky.social
- Maybe a bit of a downer, but I think this conversation may be of interest to a bunch of people on here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbK...
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweGetting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweNew paper! After a distraction, rotating traveling waves steer brain processing back to where it should be. State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction direct.mit.edu/jocn/article... #neuroscience
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweA poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s behind a potential scientific brain drain.
- A wonderful paper!
- Super happy to share my very first first-author paper out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! We show content-specific predictions are represented in an alpha rhythm. It’s been a beautiful, inspiring, yet challenging journey. Huge thanks to everyone, especially @peterkok.bsky.social @jhaarsma.bsky.social
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweThe final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweFor all the knucklehead reviewers out there. Principles for proper peer review - Earl K. Miller jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8... #neuroscience
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweOne of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.
- I feel seen—and heard: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweJust published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible… www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/10
- Reposted by Benjamin Lowe1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.
- Looking forward to this!
- Shout out to Australian researchers! 🇦🇺 (and folks in the southern hemisphere) 🌏 We're excited that our Ambassador Ben Lowe (@brainboyben.bsky.social) will be hosting a pre-conference workshop at #ACNS2025 (@acnsau.bsky.social) on getting started with PsychoPy! Sign up here👇 shorturl.at/gvnUU
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweAcademic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
- Reposted by Benjamin Lowe5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...
- 🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days! doi.org/10.1101/2025... ☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level? ✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?
- FYI I've published similar results previously :) doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
- Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
I spoke yesterday with a lovely university student I know in Gaza who sent the message below. His instagram page shows his beautiful English and charisma, and the dire situation he is in: www.instagram.com/jehadkmiri/ Please consider donating to his family here: www.paypal.com/donate?hoste... - It’s frankly absurd that we’re at the point where this critique needed to be written
- Paper on the problems of using LLMs as replacements for human participants journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
- I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!
- 1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪
- The envelope has been pushed forward and now we can think about what these data mean within the broader literature. It’s exciting!
- IMO (now that this canned of worms has been opened), I think the field would really benefit from moving away from evoked responses and towards pre-stimulus and/or state-based activity characterising how predictions themselves are signalled (rather their errors!)
- I think a lot of people studying neural expectation have been skeptical of literal interpretations of PC for a while now. Again, this is not same as saying the brain doesn’t integrate prior knowledge with sensory input when resolving precepts. I’m excited to see where the field goes next :)
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweNew paper out in @plosbiology.org w/ Charlie, @phil-johnson.bsky.social, Ella, and Hinze 🎉 We track moving stimuli via EEG, find evidence that motion is extrapolated across distinct stages of processing + show how this effect may emerge from a simple synaptic learning rule! tinyurl.com/2szh6w5c
- Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweImmigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy
- Reposted by Benjamin LoweWe used a brain "pinging" again and found that distractor suppression is reactive rather than proactive, meaning attention is first drawn to the distractor before being suppressed.
- Climate science 👀
- 🚨 Neuromatch Academy Course Applications are OPEN for 2025!! 🚨 Get your application in early to be a student or teaching assistant for this year’s courses! Applications are due Sunday, March 23. Apply & learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/ #mlsky #compneurosky #ai #climatesolutions #ScienceEdu 🧪
