iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

🎉🎓 Big congrats to @josefinehebisch.bsky.social who successfully defended her thesis "Through the Eye of the Beholder: Pupil-Linked Arousal in Memory Formation and Decision-Making" last week and earned her PhD "summa cum laude"! So proud of your accomplishments!

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

However, white noise sounds generally do not seem to be a suitable tool for reliably evoking phasic arousal in a way that could fully mimic effects of intrinsic, task-evoked arousal. 10/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

We conclude that the timing-specific positive effect of sounds on image recall needs further replication but may reflect increased processing due to attention allocation (speculative mediation through effects of arousal on synaptic plasticity). 9/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Additionally, sounds played during the recognition task had no effect on recognition decision behavior. 8/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Task-irrelevant sounds played after the auditory presentation of words in the encoding had a detrimental influence on word recall on the next day. Other sound onset times produced no effects on recall. Recognition performance was generally unaffected by the sounds during encoding. 7/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Sounds played during the presentation of images had a positive influence on image recall immediately after encoding. This positive effect could only be observed for images as this onset timing was not applied in the words task due to the auditory nature of word stimuli. 6/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Task-irrelevant white noise sounds applied at different onset times (before, during or after stimulus presentation) in the encoding and the recognition task produced reliable pupil dilations. However, their influence on behavior was much more inconsistent. 5/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

We replicated earlier correlational relationships. Higher task-evoked pupil-linked arousal during encoding of words predicted better recall one day later. Pupil responses during recognition decisions correlated with the old/new bias for both recognition decisions about words and images. 4/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

We here compared the intrinsic, task-evoked pupil-linked arousal to the effects of task-irrelevant sounds on pupil-linked arousal in a long-term memory experiment. 3/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Not all memories are remembered with equal ease. Arousal has been proposed to be a factor in memorability. Transient activations of the central arousal systems of the brainstem are reflected in pupil dilations 👀 2/10

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

📜 New paper out showing that “Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation” led by @josefinehebisch.bsky.social and Pakita Van Puyenbroeck with Lars Schwabe, @degeelab.bsky.social & Tobias H. Donner doi.org/10.1038/s415...

doi.org

Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation

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Reposted by Donner Lab

Kara McGaughey @kara-mcgaughey.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

New paper from my PhD out in @elife.bsky.social! 🎉 We asked: when the state of the world is changing, how does the brain adjust how much incoming evidence is accumulated? Turns out there isn't one answer—there are (at least) two. 🧵

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Reposted by Donner Lab

Mengting Fang @mtfang.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

🎯New preprint! The resource-rational dynamics of evidence accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Evidence accumulation isn’t stationary. It is dynamically controlled to trade off information gain against cognitive effort. With Jiang Mao, Tobias Donner @donnerlab.bsky.social, Alan Stocker

biorxiv.org

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

✨ This provides key new experimental constraints for mechanistic models of decision and confidence formation. Our results open a new window on the distributed neural dynamics underlying important subjective states such as confidence.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

✨ In sum, for the first time, we simultaneously track competing neural decision variables in the frontal cortex and show that both of them predict decision confidence.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

It fits the behavioral data better than a range of alternatives, and reproduces a number of behavioral and neural signatures, including the concurrently measured dynamics of the encoding of contrast samples in visual cortex.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Our model combines sensory adaptation, leaky accumulation with feed-forward inhibition, and an asymmetric readout of the DVs in confidence formation.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

These observations, combined with several others, constrained a dynamical model of decision and confidence formation. The model identified the intrinsic correlation between the DVs as a signature of inhibition between the sensory-motor pathways supporting the two choices.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

We next used single-trial regression to predict confidence from the winning and losing DVs, controlling for evidence strength. Both DVs made a significant, unique contribution to confidence. However, in contrast to standard models, the magnitude of the winning DV was stronger.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Despite the independent inputs, we found intrinsic negative correlations between the two DVs within trials, a signature of inhibition between the sensory-motor pathways supporting the two alternative choices. The strength of this correlation on each trial predicted confidence.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Our task removed that correlation at the level of the input. It required participants to track and compare the mean contrast of two sequences of grating contrasts. Critically, the contrasts of the two sequences fluctuated independently within each trial.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

n typical tasks used to study evidence accumulation for decisions, evidence supporting one choice is, by construction, evidence against the alternative. The inputs to the two DVs are anti-correlated, which complicates the identification of competitive dynamics within the brain.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

We tracked the competition between neural decision variables (DVs) in the human frontal cortex, combining a novel task with atlas-based multivariate decoding of source-level MEG data to track two neural DVs for alternative choices in left and right premotor/motor cortex (PMd/M1).

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

While the choice is only dictated by the winning neural population, theoretical considerations indicate that also (or only) the losing population should shape the internal sense of confidence associated with the decision.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

⚖️ It has long been held that decisions result from a competition between neural populations encoding different choices. Yet, several technical challenges have so far precluded the direct observation of this so-called neural race🏃

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Our model combines sensory adaptation, leaky accumulation with feed-forward inhibition, and an asymmetric readout of the DVs in confidence formation.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

In typical tasks used to study evidence accumulation for decisions, evidence supporting one choice is, by construction, evidence against the alternative. The inputs to the two DVs are anti-correlated, which complicates the identification of competitive dynamics within the brain.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

✨ In sum, for the first time, we simultaneously track competing neural decision variables in the frontal cortex and show that both of them predict decision confidence.

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Donner Lab @donnerlab.bsky.social · 03/11/2025