Ben van Buren

The deadline for the Visual Science of Art Conference has been extended to Thursday: bsky.app/profile/bvb373…

I am seeking applicants for a fully-funded PhD student position in my lab. The student will join the Cognition track in the Psychology PhD program at UNH. Please spread the word if you know someone who might be interested. (RTs appreciated)

I am excited to announce that my latest project with @WilmaBainbridge is now out as a preprint! We were able to engineer the memorability of symbols by designing some to be highly memorable and others to be highly forgettable. Read it here: doi.org/10.31234/osf.i…

Congrats, Santiago!

I am looking forward to speaking at the University of Glasgow's 'Illusion of the Fortnight' talk series tomorrow! I'll present work from my lab on the perception of causality, as well as a new method for distinguishing 'illusions' from 'anti-illusions': nssrperception.com/docs/van%20Bur…

My final (& favorite!) 1st-author paper from my Psychology PhD came out the 1st week of my Philosophy PhD 🥹 @AlisonGopnik, @eunice_yiu_, & I show that 2- and 3-year-olds rapidly learn & apply abstract relations ('bigger', 'smaller') in a causal problem-solving task!

Come join us!!

Today's the day! The Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) 2024 commences today, held at the Old Aberdeen University Campus. It is a satellite conference to the European Conference on Visual Perception #ECVP2024 abdn.io/S3

Moths are attracted to lights because of the same mathematics that underlies twistor theory and compactification in theoretical physics: projective geometry. It all starts from a simple observation: translations are just rotations whose center is located "at infinity". (1/11)

This week's paper presents evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls. Using machine learning, the researchers showed that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call's acoustic structure, regardless of the similarity between the call and the receiver's own vocalizations. Additionally, elephants responded differently to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them compared to calls addressed to other individuals. They also suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants seem to not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another. Paper here: #email-newsletter" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">fermatslibrary.com/s/african-elep…

Now out in Open Mind! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…

Calling all early career cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists! OPAM's abstract submission form is NOW OPEN & can be found at opam.net! Submission window closes July 15th! Additional info can be found on our website Oh & Remember, OPAM is free to attend!

New paper with @sarah_hy_lee, @brynnesherman, and Anna Papafragou, in which we explore how people's mental timelines are shaped by event structure -- using popular TV shows to examine shared memories across months and even *years*! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Are you at #VSS2024? Stop by the Pavilion to check out my poster on our novel method to ensure accurate fixation in online fixation-dependent tasks!

Standing room only at #phiVis! So encouraging to see this much interest in the intersection between philosophy and vision science. #VSS2024 @VSSMtg

This morning - come check out Hong’s ‘attentional transplants’ project in the Banyan Breezeway! #vss2024

Freud sometimes gets credit for introducing the concept of unconscious mental processes into psychology, but why not Helmholtz? He got there first and arguably his conception stood the test of time better than Freud's did (though less flashy and less popular impact)

@VSSMtg @JiangxueN @Icarus_at_Night @HongBNguyen_ ...and on Tuesday morning, @HongBNguyen_ will present work in which she 'transplants' patterns of spatial attention from one observer to another, in order to cause the second observer to like the image similarly to the first.

@VSSMtg @JiangxueN On Sunday afternoon, Silas Choudhury (@Icarus_at_Night) will present work with @HongBNguyen_ demonstrating a new crossmodal interaction — listening to high-pitched tones makes objects look glossier!

The New School Perception Lab is happy to be at #VSS2024! Several lab members will be presenting — you can check out their abstracts here: docs.google.com/document/d/1ED… Looking forward to seeing everybody. @VSSMtg

BWLAB is at @VSSMtg with tons of interesting new science!