JohnMark Taylor

🧵Excited to announce— "Reimagining the binding problem(s) for the 21st century": A VSS Symposium St. Pete Beach @vssmtg.bsky.social May 15th, 10:30am Presenters: Peter Tse, JohnMark Taylor, Seda Karakose-Akbiyik, Ana Chica, Anne Sereno, & Jake Quilty-Dunn visionsciences.org/symposia/?sy...

4 Aug

Excited to be working as an @AnthropicAI Safety Fellow in the Bay Area from August-November, focusing on mechanistic interpretability. Drop me a line if you want to meet up or talk shop!

JohnMark Taylor reposted

Eivinas Butkus

@eivinas.bsky.social

21 July

Do world models emerge in neural networks trained for prediction? Generative Adversarial Collaboration (GAC) at #CCN2026

11 May

Does anyone have a favorite platform for live Q&A during a talk session? Ideally would have: 1. Unlimited participants 2. Easy export, e.g. to a txt file 3. Easy sorting based on popularity or recency

My favorite vision science success story: based on her theory Anne Treisman boldly posited a weird new kind of conscious experience, where we see features (e.g., colors & shapes) combined the wrong way. Then she just went and created this experience in people's brains. 1/

Anyways, you can try it and introspect for yourself. Let's give our field some credit (no physics envy required): a theory made bold and counterintuitive predictions that were subsequently borne out. And Treisman did it with nothing but old-timey tech and brilliant thinking. 7/7

(Postscript: as much as we've learned with our multimillion dollar MRI scanners, how much more is there to learn about the brain from doing just the right simple experiment? Food for thought.)

At least for me, seeing the illusory conjunctions required a weird half-focused headspace—if I'm paying attention *too* closely to the letters I don't see them (exactly as her theory predicts!), but once I start zoning out they start popping up. 5/

psycnet.apa.orgAPA PsycNet

Later work has questioned the existence of illusory conjunctions, suggesting they may be artifacts and not genuine percepts. This raises an interesting philosophical puzzle: if people confidently report seeing them, why doesn't that settle the issue? 6/ psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-...

Finally, check your answers against the correct answer shown a few seconds later. Some trials, you may find that you saw "illusory conjunctions" that weren't there—for example, a green "N" and pink "T" when in fact a pink "N" and green "T" were present. 3/

If you're like the original participants, you might even see the numbers as colored sometimes (they're black every trial—promise). 4/

youtube.comIllusory Conjunctions DemonstrationYouTube video by JohnMark Taylor

Out of curiosity I recreated her original experiment. Here it is (full-screen helps): each trial you'll briefly see a row of three colored letters, surrounded by two numbers. Try to report the numbers, then as many colors and letters as you can. 2/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3pr...

JohnMark Taylor reposted

Seda Karakose-Akbiyik

@sedaakbiyik.bsky.social

30 Apr

If there’s a concept in cognitive science everyone knows, it’s the binding problem. But being well known doesn’t mean there’s agreement on what it is, or that it’s been solved. Excited to be co-organizing a symposium at @vssmtg.bsky.social reimagining it for the 21st-century. Come join us!

JohnMark Taylor@johnmarktaylor.bsky.social

docs.google.comBinding Problem Hot Takes

We'd love to involve the broader VSS community in this event, starting now. We genuinely want to know where you stand on this topic, so please feel free to give us your open-ended hot takes here (the spiciest takes may be featured in the intro): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

We'd like to thank our wonderful panelists for their help in planning this event across the last few years, some of whom are traveling a long way to join us, and to the @vssmtg.bsky.social staff for all their logistical support. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

If you're like us you might've wondered at some point: whatever happened with the binding problem? Is it alive and kicking, solved, ill-posed? We're delighted to have the chance to hash this out from all interdisciplinary angles (behavior, neuro, AI) at this year's VSS.

We think this is a perfect time to take stock on this topic—recent findings across diverse subfields invite us to reexamine nearly every facet of the "textbook" binding problem, and the DNN revolution has given us new tools and "model organisms" for exploring it afresh.

18 Apr 2025

now on Twitter an AI dog automatically pops up and spouts regime propaganda slop at you when you express heretical opinions

JohnMark Taylor reposted

Barack Obama

@barackobama.bsky.social

15 Apr 2025

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

nature.comTen principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience - Communications PsychologyProgramming is essential for modern research in neuroscience and psychology, but it can quickly become a source of frustration and error. This Primer introduces ten practical principles guiding resear...

15 Apr 2025

Excellent primer. Can be hard to pack in software engineering training amidst everything else in grad school but a little bit goes a long way

Martin Hebart@martinhebart.bsky.social

Proud to announce our primer on "Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience" www.nature.com/articles/s44... This primer is for beginners to get started, advanced programmers to improve, and PIs. #psychology #psychsci #cogsci #neuroskyence

27 Mar 2025

gotta believe the top salsa dancers would score through the roof on spatial intelligence / shape rotation tests

biorxiv.orgWhen do measured representational distances reflect the neural representational geometry?The representational geometry of a brain region can be characterized by the distances among neural activity patterns for a set of experimental conditions. Researchers routinely estimate representation...

5 Jan 2025

Recording modalities like fMRI aggregate the responses of many thousands of neurons, but how does this affect representational geometry? Meticulous essential breakdown from @veronicabossio.bsky.social biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...