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Christoph Strauch

@cstrauch.bsky.social
632 followers 545 following 179 posts

Assistant professor @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social studying spatial attention, eye-movements, pupillometry, and more. Co-PI @attentionlab.bsky.social

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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 21h
We don't know. Yes, such bots are likely economically feasible. But there may also be more profitable ways to commit fraud. From what I understand, Prolific, for instance, takes this serious and builds in safeguards. I would expect this to be a race; monitoring may keep use safe until a given point.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 22h
@talha-ozudogru.bsky.social what's your take on this?
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Ah! Not in the main paper, no. We just selected a bunch of tasks to not have to describe results for 33. In the supplement we have additional analyses and paradigms for simple search, singleton search, and Erikson flanker task (see Andrey's post above with the respective figure)
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eLife @elife.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Pupil size reveals the perceptual quality and effortless nature of synesthesia
buff.ly
Pupil size reveals the perceptual quality and effortless nature of synesthesia
Synesthetes' pupils reflect the brightness of colors that they only see internally, making their hidden perceptual experience objectively measurable.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Yes, we only tested browser based experiments here.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I find it hard to answer to be honest. Platforms may use additional safeguards @andrewgordon.bsky.social will have opinions on this, incentive structures could make it unattractive to fake participation (e.g., no compensation, no course credits).
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
What do you mean with perceptual tasks? Cueing/flanker tasks etc. were not off limits. We also had a Poggendorff task, visual search, etc.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I think that the investment needed (knowledge, time, money) will erode further, given the pace of the past 6-8 months or so. So when will undergraduate students be able to do the same in less time than regular participation costs to earn course credits? I would not bet on this not happening.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
With more powerful & recent (paid) models, @achetverikov.bsky.social built another agent that does well on a range of tasks we tested it on. Now Andrey is certainly an expert, but now time investment was below a day.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Certainly. @talha-ozudogru.bsky.social has knowledge about online experiments and bots in general, though also not about every single experiment we later applied the agent to. For him, this cost about 2 weeks of part time work, but he is a PhD candidate in Experimental Psych and not a lay person.
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Andrey Chetverikov @achetverikov.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Some months ago, I wrote a skeptical reply to a commentary on bots in online studies in PNAS, arguing that no evidence yet exists for such bots. Together with the authors of the original commentary, we now show that bots can pass (almost?) all online cognitive studies with human-like performance 1/n
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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
🧵In April, I built an AI agent that could complete the Attention Network Task. The agent was task-specific and costly. I concluded that online behavioral experiments were safe from agentic infiltration. Six months later, my view has changed. Our new preprint explains why osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
Generalizable experiment agents threaten online behavioral experiments
Online behavioral experiments rely on the assumption that participants are human. Advances in large language models (LLMs) challenge this assumption, but previous demonstrations have largely focused o...
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Heleen Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...
workingat.vu.nl
Vacancy — Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience
Join the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Perhaps of interest to you @micahgallen.com
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
We (spearheaded by the great @talha-ozudogru.bsky.social, @richardhuskey.bsky.social, @achetverikov.bsky.social, Leendert Van Maanen) conclude that the previous technical and economical barriers that made deployment of such fraudulent agents infeasible no longer exist.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The agent was built in August/September using a monthly subscription of around 17 euros/dollars. Time investment including testing on most of the tasks was about two weeks. By now, even less sophisticated prompting is sufficient to solve complex behavioral tasks in 1-2 attempts.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Hi Micah. Interesting stuff. We have tried a few other approaches recently, hope to have another preprint in 1-2 weeks
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
me when people talk about the crisis in academia
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Heida Maria Sigurdardottir @heidasigurdar.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Please talk to me or @arnig.bsky.social at #ecvp2026 if you know of an interested potential Ph.D. student -- or are that interested student ;) #ECVP #visionscience #neuroskyence #psychscisky #psychology #imagery #visualimagery #phd #cogsci
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Heleen Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
PhD position (4 years, paid) on an NWO-funded project on the Role of Foveal Processing in Spatial Attention at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, supervised by Dr. Mieke Donk (main PI) and me! For more information: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...
workingat.vu.nl
Vacancy — PhD position (4 years) on the Role of Foveal Processing in Spatial Attention
Are you interested in understanding how attention shapes what we see? Would you like to combine behavioural experiments, psychophysics, and eye tracking to uncover how the brain selects and prioritise...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
thanks! Glad that you like it. If you ever feel tempted to use some of it, experiments and analysis code is online :)
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
All this is fun for synesthesia research, but it also allows something quite decent in consciousness research: Objectively studying sensation that is generated internally alone. All scripts and stuff available online. Thanks to Casper Leenaars & Romke Rouw & the quite helpful reviewers & editor!
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Finally, brightness-effects were interacting with self-reported strength. Synesthetes claimed different levels of strength (e.g. the bright blue for a 5 being stronger than the dark orange for a 3). And indeed, for those stronger couples, brightness effects on the pupil were also bigger
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
This also showed in another pupillary response: effort-linked pupil dilation was a lot bigger in controls also having to report a color per number (although not seeing one) than in the synesthetes and another control group not having to report any color. Meaning: synesthetic experience is effortless
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
A control group that also had to report colors after seeing the same numbers showed no such effect. Interestingly, the synesthesia-evoked pupil response was relatively fast (slower than a regular light response of course!) suggesting that colors indeed emerge automatically.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Now final in @elife.bsky.social: #Synesthetes really do 'see' when reporting colors while reading (typeface gray) numbers: pupils change according to the perceived colors' brightness - if a synesthete sees a bright yellow, the pupils become smaller. elifesciences.org/articles/110...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
would this be fun? elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... will be out-out on August 4th in the final form (essentially as is + elife digest added). Tldr: there is objective evidence that synesthetes see what they claim seeing: their pupils respond to the brightness of synesthetically elicited colors.
elifesciences.org
Pupil size reveals the perceptual quality and effortless nature of synesthesia
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Listening to compressed music all the time while not noting that a huge part of the original recording was cut out from the data as it's imperceivable due to auditory masking (i.e. any mp3 like file is built on psychophysics).
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
So nice that you will join us over here! :)
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Surya Gayet @suryagayet.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Wooow! @danwang7.bsky.social just won the Early Career Excellence Award at the APCV/EPC 2026 meeting! As her supervisor in the past 3 yrs, I have seen so much professional & personal growth. It makes me incredibly proud that this was also seen by an independent jury on the other side of the planet.
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Brad Postle @bradpostle.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Postdoc position available at postlab.psych.wisc.edu. Pls send cv to postle@wisc.edu
postlab.psych.wisc.edu
PO-STL-AB
Our interests in human memory and cognition encompass the cognitive and neural basis of working memory, attention, control, and consciousness.News  Madison Symposium on Memory & Control. On 30 May 202...
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Damian Koevoet @dkoevoet.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
I became a dr. last week! Thanks to everyone who made it an amazing day - I had a blast.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
In practice, it should also work for fewer pictures/shorter data. You would just have to rely on response functions that are not fit to the individual. We find limited variability in the response functions though, so that effect should not be a severe issue.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Should work well with that workaround and you could still benefit from the gaze-contingent modeling this way. We haven't used it on pictures yet ourselves, but this is definitely something I'm quite interested in, so if you do it I would be most curious to read about your experience!
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Not directly, as we need to have a time course to model. But there is a relatively simple way to achieve that I think. Say you have pictures in a sequence that are presented for 10s each without interruption, you could make a "movie" that contains these pictures for the respective time.
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Jonas Obleser @jonasobleser.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
We have two job openings in my lab currently — for a postdoc (100% FTE some teaching four years) and a postdoc/phd student (75% FTE no teaching three years). Check them out at www.uni-luebeck.de/aktuelles/be...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
dl.acm.org
Convolution-Based Modeling of Pupil Dynamics: Integrating Luminance for Enhanced Arousal Prediction | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Pupil size is a key eye-based indicator of mental processing and internal states. Nonetheless, pupil size is also influenced by light, causing challenges for monitoring internal states with eye tracki...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Yeah, agreed. Step by step. For now, unrestrained head and gaze movements, unrestrained visual input work well. We'll work on the other factors (e.g. depth related responses) over the coming years
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Thanks! Something i wanted to do since the start of my phd too long ago, but never dared to. Great that @yuqingc.bsky.social could get this to work. There is another work, published just days ago that independently used our model to estimate arousal from travel videos, also with positive results
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Depending on the tracker, you also need to account for pupil foreshortening errors. But that doesn't mean it won't work, just something to keep in mind. Do you have some ground truth/other data to crossvalidate?
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Longer recordings should just work better for the model (easier to estimate the response function parameters). However, I'm not sure how well it will work with mobile eye tracking (we haven't tested something like that). So pupil near responses and auditory effects are something to reckon with
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Led by @yuqingc.bsky.social together with Marnix Naber and Stefan Van der Stigchel and myself @attentionlab.bsky.social If you want to use it and have questions, please reach out!
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
We find pretty good separation between load conditions using this approach - under dynamically changing video stimulation almost as good as with an entirely gray screen! All of this is entirely open and available with a neat toolbox on github: github.com/caiyuqing/Op...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
But the pupil of course provides a continuous measure! Convolving luminance events allows to remove them from the signal, leaving a signal that much better represents effort/arousal-induced changes
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Averaging pupil size over five minutes gives quite similar load distinction as NASA TLX or accuracy (±100 key presses per 5 mins). If one combines all three, one gets by far the best distinction
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
To evaluate our method, participants either looked at a gray screen with gaze fixed or at dynamic driving videos with lots of luminance changes (e.g., through mountain forests, over a pass to lake garda etc.). At the same time they did an auditory n-back Example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njdg...
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Have you thought of using unchained pupillometry to infer effort/arousal with _uncontrolled_ visual stimulation? Sounds crazy? @yuqingc.bsky.social shows that convolutional modeling of pupil responses with gaze-contingent luminance changes finally allows just that! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
we used tactors, they induce pupil dilation and can be integrated with precise timing, but our effects weren't massive (depending on stimulation strength and also sensitivity of the stimulated area). good luck! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Pupil dilation reveals the intensity of touch
Reader environment loaded
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Does movement count? Pressing a handle strongly etc? That's endogenously triggered then ofc.
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