Matan Mazor
Interested in complex systems and in simple systems who believe they are complex systems. Leader of the Oxford Self-Modelling Group (Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford);
- Reposted by Matan MazorReward models (RMs) are supposed to represent human values. But RMs are NOT blank slates – they inherit measurable biases from their base models that stubbornly persist through preference training. #ICLR2026 🧵
- Reposted by Matan MazorThe race is on to re-home 120 ex-commercial laying hens in Didcot before February 8th. The British Hen Welfare Trust is appealing for would-be kind hearted chicken keepers to come forward by 4pm Friday and give the hens a chance at a free range retirement.
- Reposted by Matan MazorMy Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd
- Reposted by Matan Mazorbrass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis
- Reposted by Matan MazorAre you sure there’s no mosquito in the room? With @matanmazor.bsky.social, Chichi Dézier, @nfaivre.bsky.social & Louise Goupil, we study how we combine multiple sensory sources to be confident in presence and absence: While detection rely on one modality, confidence requires both channels to align!
- Audiovisual congruency drives confidence in presence and absence: osf.io/sqpmk
- Reposted by Matan MazorFascinating. Also....what if the tiny people are real and all around us and the mushrooms just let us see them.
- With most psychedelic drugs, you never know what you're going to get. But this mysterious mushroom from China - without fail - causes users to hallucinate tiny people: crawling up walls, popping out from under furniture and marching under doors. www.bbc.com/future/artic...
- Reposted by Matan Mazor
- Reposted by Matan MazorOur new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.
- Training people to activate a part of the brain linked to reward and positive expectations may be associated with an increase in the body’s immune response to a vaccine, according to a study in Nature Medicine. go.nature.com/4sQo3mK #medsky 🧪
- Reposted by Matan MazorOut now in @nconsc.bsky.social 🧠😶🌫️ academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
- 🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social! We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery. 📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Loulan (19 months old, shoulder height 29cm, 11.5kg) is now in a shelter in Romania, but will arrive in the UK by the end of the month, and is looking for a loving home. abldr.org.uk/applications...
- Reposted by Matan MazorWe have never needed this guy more
- Reposted by Matan MazorAfter 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
- Reposted by Matan Mazora project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?
- Reposted by Matan MazorAs the inner endless loop of "jingle bells" and "last Christmas" is gradually departing, 🚨 reminder about this funding opportunity for postdocs to transition to a PI role by Research Ireland👇
- Reposted by Matan Mazor
I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p... #cogsci #neuroskyence - Reposted by Matan MazorAnyone Else Here xkcd.com/3188/
- Reposted by Matan MazorThe attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.
- Reposted by Matan MazorI’m predicting that no amount of peer reviewed research will be sufficient to convince a lot of folks that they can’t reliably distinguish between AI and non-AI writing, no matter how well read they are.
- Reposted by Matan MazorHey, it's actually pronounced "jaslight" You've been saying it wrong this whole time.
- Reposted by Matan MazorCultivate insight, not just information.
- From Kinds of Minds (1996)
- Reposted by Matan Mazor[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Matan MazorGetting journal rejections like
- Reposted by Matan MazorAll eyes on UCL for its 200th birthday. Across 3 nights our Wilkins Building and main Quad will transform into an immersive sound and light experience as UCL illuminated takes us through the history of London’s oldest university. 11–13 Feb 2026 ucl.ac.uk/event-ticketing/app…
- Reposted by Matan MazorOfficially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
- This is truly amazing: some LLMs can detect when concepts are injected into their internal activations. transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introsp...
- Reposted by Matan MazorVery happy to see the UK government making a commitment to phasing out animal testing www.gov.uk/government/n...
- Reposted by Matan MazorBecause everything is shit, I give you ... Puggles. #Platypus #AustralianWildlife
- Reposted by Matan Mazor#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺 This Friday, November 7th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Simon Van Gaal giving a talk entitled "Linking global state fluctuations and recurrent processing to conscious perception in humans" In person or online. For more information: www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event
- Reposted by Matan MazorI built a DAG diagram with garden hoses for teaching. Pictured: a collider bias diagram, inspired by a blocked pipe situation I experienced (which I credit with giving me the intuition though it also ruined my belongings in the flooded cellar).
- Reposted by Matan MazorSuper happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social
- Reposted by Matan MazorWe're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/
- Reposted by Matan MazorWhenever you feel annoyed by someone on the internet, think instead of someone you appreciate and send them a note to tell them so.
- Reposted by Matan Mazor“There’s almost no limit to what you can get people to do if you let them think it is their idea” Jim Downey - former SNL writer
- Reposted by Matan Mazor🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.
- Reposted by Matan MazorThe Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford University is recruiting PhD students this cycle! We are a supportive team who happened to wear bluesky appropriate colors for the lab photo (this wasn't planned). 💙 Lab info: cicl.stanford.edu Application details: psychology.stanford.edu/admissions/p...
- Reposted by Matan MazorEverything you always wanted to know about intracranial correlates of #consciousness (but were afraid to ask): arxiv.org/abs/2510.08736 With @francoisstock.bsky.social, @liadmudrik.bsky.social, @meaperei.bsky.social and many great clinicians too busy for bsky! #iEEG
- Reposted by Matan MazorNew preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary
- All credit to @danwphilosophy.bsky.social
- Reposted by Matan MazorFascinating paper argues that (roughly) consciousness theories are untestable and unverifiable, and so instead they are selected to fit our moral preferences and preconceptions.
- Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Matan MazorVERY strong recommend in this very short piece! The final line is magnificent; so is @danwphilosophy.bsky.social’s theory on which the piece rests. Together, they exactly describe my naïve experience of wandering into #AIEthics over the decades. #consciousness
- Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Matan MazorWhat's a life well-lived? Researchers looked at 38 MILLION obituaries over 30 years to study virtue. Among the fascinating results, this one is chilling: After the pandemic, benevolence dropped in popularity and never recovered. In its place, tradition as a virtue experienced a popularity surge.🧪
- Reposted by Matan MazorFor years I got Gandhi (who is 156 today, the International Day of Non-Violence) backwards. I thought he developed nonviolent methods to end British rule, but this gets the ends and means the wrong way round. It's rather that he had to end British rule to make space for nonviolence. (1/8)
- Reposted by Matan MazorBreaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt
- Reposted by Matan MazorHad missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions. link.springer.com/article/10.3...
- Reposted by Matan MazorCan reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)
- Reposted by Matan Mazor"We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?" - Walter Ong recks idiomatic culture with facts and logic.
- Are there any reports of unilateral aphantasia? e.g. people who report being able to imagine things in the right hemifield, but not the left one?
- Reposted by Matan Mazor📢 NEW PREPRINT 📢 We show a metacognitive paradox (not blanket deficit!) in OCD: confidence is persistently lower, but fluctuations track evidence more tightly and are nearer Bayes-optimal. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7... 🧵👇
- Reposted by Matan Mazor🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation. We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...
- Reposted by Matan MazorInterested on working with me on consciousness?… this scholarship is an excellent opportunity to do so. Contact me and let’s think about exciting projects we can do together! Please share 🙏 azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...
- Reposted by Matan Mazor📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory? We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.
- Reposted by Matan MazorToday I had a curious encounter with my 4-yo son. He told me he discovered that his Batman action figure could switch the Batman logo to something else. He showed me, touched its arm, shook it and said: “there, it changed.” The thing is: the logo is fixed and cannot change. So what had happened?
- Reposted by Matan MazorNew preprint, osf.io/preprints/ps... a commentary to @anilseth.bsky.social's pice at www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧪
- I wish @joinprolific.bsky.social had some monitoring of promised versus paid bonuses. It is currently too easy to promise a bonus for the top-performing participants and not pay anyone. It shouldn't be too hard to have a mechanism that ensures that bonuses are paid as promised.
- (could be as simple as showing the offered bonus next to the offered base-payment in the study info screen, including the proportion of participants who are guaranteed to get it, e.g. "$2 + $1 bonus for one in every 3 participants")
- Reposted by Matan MazorA common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species go.nature.com/4mOb5T9
