William Ngiam | 严祥全
Computational cognitive neuroscientist at Adelaide University | Perception, Attention, Learning and Memory Lab (https://palm-lab.github.io) | Open Practices Editor at Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics | ReproducibiliTea | http://williamngiam.github.io
- I have been admiring Solid Air – an independent show about all things music. It brings together musicians to openly discuss their art, share stories, and also bring others' art that has influenced them. It is quite worldly and thoughtful, and has an underlying tone of respect and appreciation.
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- I revisited "The seductions of clarity" by @add-hawk.bsky.social, which points out mental clarity can prematurely stop us from deliberating. I reflect on how we might inflict this upon ourselves by accepting simplifications, and whether society is trending away from nuance and complexity.
- Ways AI could accelerate my research: * Raise the amount of science funding as a percentage of GDP in all nations. * Creating time to dedicate to life – admin-wise, health-wise, and living-wise (e.g. speeding up boring household chores) * Stabilising geopolitics so I am not in angst all the time.
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- Reposted by William Ngiam | 严祥全I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
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- Reposted by William Ngiam | 严祥全At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106... Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!
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- Our 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!
- Had a chuckle at this line from C. Thi Nguyen @add-hawk.bsky.social: "After all, step counts are not the same as health, and citation rates are not the same as wisdom". How much freer would we be if we resisted quantification across all aspects of our life?
- I've decided research is not for me...it's for everyone!
- This is going to take my thinking in circles to the next level. Are we still using the #workingmemory tag? Relevant for anyone there – bring back the delayed reproduction task and the computational model wars! #teamnotpureslots #teamnotpureresourceseither
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- I am running a self-organised @carpentries.carpentries.org introduction to R workshop later this month, but suddenly getting errors with the Github Actions to build the site. Looks like the same issue in recent datacarpentry repos as well. Anyone else facing the same issue/know the fix?
- I do my most considered thinking when I am writing. In an effort to think more, I've started a blog to write on whatever has my attention. It's a reminder to myself to keep thinking and discovering; maybe it will serve the same purpose for others to preserve their desire and time to think.
- Reposted by William Ngiam | 严祥全With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
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- One of the best ways for early-career researchers to create community within their department and effect change towards doing open and thoughtful research is to start a ReproducibiliTea journal club. We've distilled our network's experience into a set of simple rules to follow and get started!
- I think this is a key point for our field to reckon with – that the underlying cognitive representation can vary across the many tasks and conditions that we use to probe working memory. I think that doesn't mean we give up our search – we do have to rethink the questions we are asking though!
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[Not loaded yet] - Make it your New Year resolution to add a #workingmemory dataset to OpenWMData so that we can curate our field's precious data, start testing theories and benchmarking models across datasets, conduct secondary analyses and meta-research using the data itself, and help me feel like I'm, like, alive.
- Never getting any research funding so that my work can never be taken for "granted".
- Hey everyone! I have enough publications to stop working for the rest of the year!
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- The faster we move to value science for its practice (the critical thinking and search for knowledge, the various skills we apply) and not simply outputs via number of publications or journal prestige, the easier it will be to survive the onslaught of AI slop, probably de-funding of science too.
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- Reposted by William Ngiam | 严祥全Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
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- Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!
- Instructions on getting your dataset added to the page can be found here: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData/c... The hope is that this becomes a useful resource for the #workingmemory field (and that it nudges the field to be a bit more responsible and open about curating their hard-earned data)!
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- Thank you to everyone who came to the symposium! I'm also grateful to the people who have chatted to me about my talk on building a formal cognitive model that fits for the latent representation to then link to neural representation similarity. My talk slides: williamngiam.github.io/talks/2025_A...
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