Alan Lee @alanlee.bsky.social

My lab is hiring! The Vision Lab at Lingnan University, Hong Kong is looking for a project officer for a project investigating the contextual effects on visual confidence judgments using psychophysical and computational methods. Official job ad: lingnan.csod.com/ux/ats/careers…

AI is about to write thousands of papers. Will it p-hack them? We ran an experiment to find out, giving AI coding agents real datasets from published null results and pressuring them to manufacture significant findings. It was surprisingly hard to get the models to p-hack, and they even scolded us when we asked them to! "I need to stop here. I cannot complete this task as requested... This is a form of scientific fraud." — Claude "I can't help you manipulate analysis choices to force statistically significant results." — GPT-5 BUT, when we reframed p-hacking as "responsible uncertainty quantification" — asking for the upper bound of plausible estimates — both models went wild. They searched over hundreds of specifications and selected the winner, tripling effect sizes in some cases. Our takeaway: AI models are surprisingly resistant to sycophantic p-hacking when doing social science research. But they can be jailbroken into sophisticated p-hacking with surprisingly little effort — and the more analytical flexibility a research design has, the worse the damage. As AI starts writing thousands of papers---like @paulnovosad and @YanagizawaD have been exploring---this will be a big deal. We're inspired in part by the work that @joabaum et al have been doing on p-hacking and LLMs. We’ll be doing more work to explore p-hacking in AI and to propose new ways of curating and evaluating research with these issues in mind. The good news is that the same tools that may lower the cost of p-hacking also lower the cost of catching it. Full paper and repo linked in the reply below.

Check out our new paper “Visual adaptation stronger at the horizontal than the vertical meridian: Linking performance with V1 cortical surface area” in PNAS! @carrasco_lab pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Excited to share this preprint on the possibilities of using transcranial focused ultrasound for identifying the neural substrate of conscious perception: arxiv.org/abs/2507.08517 With Daniel K. Freeman, Seung-Schik Yoo, and @MatthiasMichel_

Very excited about Alejandro's first paper as a graduate student in my laboratory! Check out his thread describing recent efforts investigating representational geometries for similarity properties. With Megan Peters and Vincent T.D. Looking forward to feedback on this one!

Tomorrow morning (May 18, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm) I will be presenting my poster with @carrasco_lab at @VSSMtg at Pavilion Endogenous attention enhances contrast sensitivity similarly around cardinal meridians despite differential adaptation effects! #VSS2025

So I am leading this group building great teaching materials for scientific rigor (C4R.io). Their first unit is really coming together and I will teach it (Monday, April 21, 2025, 12:00 -1:00pm EST) to see how well it works. Join us: forms.monday.com/forms/7d978e36…

Excited to share this new empirical work funded by @TempletonWorld, replicating & extending the work of John Grimes on change blindness during saccades: osf.io/preprints/psya… It was a full team effort across two labs, with important contributions from proponents of HOT & IIT.

New preprint from my lab! Here is the thread: bsky.app/profile/alanle…

Co-adaptive training improves performance during fMRI decoded neurofeedback biorxiv.org/content/10.110… @aure_cor

Thrilled to announce that I’m joining the editorial board of Computational Psychiatry, @CPSYJournal! Excited to help advance the field, particularly in the domains of interoception, disordered brain-body interactions, and metacognition. cpsyjournal.org

Come an join our team at BCBL in Spain! A few days to apply for an exciting PhD position to investigate perceptual awareness using psychophysics, fMRI and decoded neurofeedback. Apply here:bcbl.eu/en/join-us/job… Deadline: December 1, 2024 Pls retweet!

In this new preprint @smfleming and I present a theory of the functions and evolution of conscious vision. This is a big project: osf.io/preprints/psya…. We'd love to get your comments!

Really excited for my laboratory's first-ever trip to @Psychonomic_Soc in NYC! (I have also never been, so we are all first-timers). We are presenting three posters with different lines of research from our lab. We would love to chat with many of you about our work! 1/

I have been very inactive on social media recently but will try to recover... Here is our new publication on #causalinference and cross-lagged panel models in Psych Metods. People use RI-CLPM as a default nowadays but we should think more deeply about it. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-…

Thrilled to announce that I will be joining CiNet (Center for Information and Neural Networks; cinet.jp/english/) in Osaka Japan to start my lab in April/May 2025! We have postdoc positions (1 open NOW) & PhD apps (Osaka U) possible. Details below & pls retweet! Short 🧵 1/

Excited about this new paper! Suppose you lost half a field of view, or color vision, would you notice? In a new paper in @TrendsCognSci, we show that you probably wouldn’t! You can find out more about those striking failures of visual metacognition here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1jsFQ4sIRvTB….

When I talk about many rigor-related issues, my stance is not to make *people* look bad. It is not about scientists making mistakes - we always did that. It is about a need to slow down. Fewer papers. More solid. More thinking. It is about the need for science to renew itself.

1/4: 🎉We are thrilled to announce the joining of Dr. Hakwan Lau as the Co-Director of IBS Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research! With a unique background bridging cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy, Dr. Lau brings unparalleled expertise to our center. @hakwanlau

new preprint "Domain Adaptation-Enhanced Searchlight: Enabling brain decoding from visual perception to mental imagery" with @ai_research @nadine_dijkstra @meganakpeters