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Gal Chen

@galchen.bsky.social
169 followers 709 following 22 posts

PhD student at Hebrew University. Consciousness & attention, speech perception, M/EEG, stats & data enthusiast. Unsure at which order.

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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Our encoding models and extensive control analyses painted a different picture: the responses that track contextual features (LLM embeddings), surprisal (LLM-based probability), and context-independent semantic features (word2vec) are highly robust during mind-wandering.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Indeed, the average response evoked by word onset showed a robust decline during the early period - as a "decoupling" account will suggest. Does it mean the brain completely shuts off higher levels of external processing?
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
We recorded EEG while participants listened to over two hours of audiobooks and reported being "on-task" or "mind-wandering" during random thought probes. If some metric of processing reflects the active comprehension of speech, we expect it to show strong decline before mind wandering reports.
Task design. See figure 1 in the published paper
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Negative words are detected *less* often when you focus on another task, regardless of task difficulty, the specific word set, or potentially confounding features. The decision of the system to disengage from a primary (visual, in our case) task might not conform to our conscious intuition.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
We designed a dual task in which dozens of spoken words evade consciousness, but without degrading the words - if you knew they were coming, you would've heard them. Which features mitigate this "inattentional deafness" that is so familiar in daily lives?
Paradigm description (see ms fig 1)
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
New in Psychological Science! We've been studying visual non-conscious prioritization processes for decades, but not a lot is known about non-conscious speech processing. Does it conform to the same principles, despite the very different way it functions? #consciousness #psychscisky #PsychSky
Results of exp 2 (lower awareness rate for negative words)
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
When we listen to speech, we do it while constantly predicting upcoming contents. Is this prediction associated with the subjective experience of engaged, conscious listening? What happens when we fail to listen? Come take a look at my poster (P116) tomorrow at @assc28.bsky.social 16:30
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
We are often too busy to listen to things we need to notice. How can we study the very frequent case of "hearing without listening" without maybe-too-aggressive masking? We developed a new dual task that requires noticing unexpected spoken words during visual task performance.
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