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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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Reposted by Gal Chen
Communications Psychology @commspsychol.nature.com · 18/08/2026
A new research Article in the journal by Gal R. Chen and colleagues: www.nature.com/articles/s44... (in Press) @galchen.bsky.social @deouell.bsky.social
nature.com
High-level prediction of continuous speech during mind-wandering - Communications Psychology
This study examines how spontaneous drifts in listening relate to EEG responses to continuous speech, using encoding models of semantic and contextual representations. It finds that neural markers of ...
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
With Rachel Finkelshtein, Ariel Goldstein, @ran-hassin.bsky.social and @deouell.bsky.social.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
This means we still have a way to go in order to understand what is it exactly we gain when we shift fron mind wandering to conscious comprehension, and that the answer may not lie solely in the features DNNs represent. We also need to reconsider the view of mind wandering as complete disengagement.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
How come? We suggest that, in contrast to selective attention paradigms in which participants are required to supress or ignore unattended speech, here the sounds stay relevant even when one is engaged with their own thoughts, and so the system stands to gain from keeping track.
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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 · 18/08/2026
New study in @commspsychol.nature.com! Encoding models show neural activity can align with deep neural networks (DNNs) that represent and predict langauge. Is this brain-DNN alignment also reflective of subjective experience and comprehension of contents? www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
High-level prediction of continuous speech during mind-wandering - Communications Psychology
This study examines how spontaneous drifts in listening relate to EEG responses to continuous speech, using encoding models of semantic and contextual representations. It finds that neural markers of ...
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Reposted by Gal Chen
Association for Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Research conducted by @galchen.bsky.social and colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers insight into how the brain determines which information enters conscious awareness and which remains outside it.
psychologicalscience.org
Our Brains May Be Automatically Filtering Out Negative Words
A new study offers insight into how the brain determines which information enters conscious awareness and which remains outside it.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Very cool work!! Loved it.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
With @deouell.bsky.social and Ran Hassin. Read more in the open-access version of the paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
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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 found that, while low-level/phonetic features, and pronunciation intelligibility play a large role in determining awareness, word valence plays a role too - suggesting semantic information is prioritized before conscious awareness. And not in the direction you'd think!
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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 · 13/12/2025
An extraordinary experience!! Huge thanks to all mentors and organizers.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
First paper is now out in Cortex! We find behavioral and neural evidence for non-conscious speech processing, using a new dual-task paradigm that creates repetitive occurrences of in attentional deafness without masking or degrading stimuli. @deouell.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Neural markers of speech processing during inattentional deafness☆
Cognitive scientists have long debated the capabilities of non-conscious perception, defined as the level of processing of external stimuli that peopl…
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Sometimes when diving into a new topic, you don't even know the right keywords to look for. In that sense LLMs can be helpful right from the start, as long as you enter the papers yourself
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
If you mean logistic regression-like for proportion data then yeah beta. but note that for logistic 50 to 40 is not like 5 to 4, the latter is actually a smaller effect size in log odds ratio (making sense because the change from 95 to 96 is tiny).
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Reposted by Gal Chen
Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪
biorxiv.org
Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors
Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...
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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
The conclusions from 5 EEG and behavior studies draw a coherent picture: when speech is task-relevant and supraliminal, inattentional deafness might not be absolute: we can process speech contents non-consciously, and use their meaning to prioritize information for consciouness.
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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
These conditions, without masking, allowed repeated cases of inattentional deafness. We then asked (1) which words are detected more often (the answer will surprise you!) and (2) what happens in the brain when we miss a word, and is it goal-dependent?
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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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Gal Chen @galchen.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Opening a new window into auditory awareness with two new preprints! Conscious Detection of Spoken Words Depends on Their Valence osf.io/preprints/ps... Neural Markers of Speech Processing During Inattentional Deafness osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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