iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Tom Wallis

House House @househouse.com · 15/10/2026

An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox. bigwalk.game/xbox

Regarding Xbox

In June 2026 we announced that the release of Big Walk would be limited to computers, Switch 2 and PS5. Since then, we have received many messages and comments, asking about a future Xbox release. We would like to address those questions here:

We have made the decision not to release Big Walk on Xbox, in accordance with the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement’s call to boycott Microsoft, and their designation of Microsoft Games (and Xbox) as a priority boycott target. If you need help understanding our motives, we would recommend reading about why Microsoft is a BDS priority target, the successes this kind of pressure has already had on Microsoft, and especially, watching this great introductory piece by People Make Games.

It has always been our intention for Big Walk to be played by groups of friends, and we know that keeping the game off Xbox runs counter to those intentions. This decision means that some people will miss out on playing Big Walk with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we’re causing. We are disappointed too.

We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets.

We’ve made this decision with the belief that meaningful change can be made in the world, that coordinated collective action can confront even the most powerful interests, and that one day, Palestine will be free.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
House House

(see bigwalk.game/xbox for links)

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Reposted by Tom Wallis

Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

What object or item is depicted in this image?

An ambiguous two-tone image made of regions of black and white patches.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

What object or item is depicted in this image?

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The original is part of the THINGS dataset; the Mooney was made by @lreining.bsky.social. Re-use for the Mooney is fine by us; the original you'd have to check with THINGS.

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Dr Nick @nmwilkinson.eurosky.social · 12/10/2026

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

a simplified facelike stimulus consisting of three blobs for eyes and mouth on a head-shaped background, and its non-facelike control stimulus with the blobs inverted upside down.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Thanks for your impressions! One aspect: do you now see illusory contours that were less apparent the first time? For example, I get a vague illusory contour over the top right of the ice cream scoop.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

PS: here's the template image for the Mooney image above. Did you get it? Now look at the first image again, and notice how your understanding of the scene has changed.

A photograph of an ice cream cone with two different flavours of ice cream (possibly vanilla and strawberry), slightly melting.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Techniques with lower initial recognizability are associated with higher post-template recognition. We also give practical guidelines for choosing a technique when building a stimulus set.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The package offers methods from image-statistical approaches to deep learning models that alter edge information to increase initial ambiguity. We validated and compared these techniques with human experiments, measuring recognizability of the Mooney images before and after they saw the templates.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

However, making these images by hand is slow and subjective. We built MooneyMaker, an open-source Python package to automate most of this process. doi.org/10.1167/jov....

doi.org

MooneyMaker: A Python package to create ambiguous two-tone images | JOV | ARVO Journals

Purchase this article with an account.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

These two-tone ("Mooney") images are useful tools for studying perceptual processes, because often the true perceptual organisation of the image is not perceived until you've seen the source image. This means you can study perceptual processing before and after disambiguation.

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Ole Jensen @olejensen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Exciting Associate Professor opportunity in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, with access to state-of-the-art neuroimaging and stimulation at OHBA/OxCIN: MEG, OPM, 3T/7T MRI, TUS, TMS & more. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSQ831/a...

jobs.ac.uk

Associate Professorship of Experimental Psychology at University of Oxford

Searching for an academic job? Explore this Associate Professorship of Experimental Psychology opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

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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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Andrey Chetverikov @achetverikov.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So where are we now? Bots pass most tasks, often in one shot, and are easy to develop. We don't know if they are present in the data. They don't have human performance, but behave human-like, making them hard to discard. So I believe that at least detection measures are needed. 9/n

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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

$Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.$

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2026

holy fucking shit - see Claude Code (Opus 5.5) rip through a survey eligility test I was really proud of... It requires tracing a route through designated points on a map with server-side Javascript applying eligibility criteria. (1.5 min video)

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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 23/09/2026

NYU Courant professor Tristan Buckmaster, of Navier-Stokes drama fame, gave a talk at the new NYU Mathematics in the Age of AI seminar series. It was... popular.

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Attention in Action Lab @attentioninaction.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The envy of every kindergarten: Our new #LEGO plate magazine in the lab! #VisualForaging #Attention #CFH_Research

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est. 1997 @molenaide.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

DO YOU REMEMBER

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 17/09/2026

So while you're thinking about a super human, super "intelligent" alien being killing you, here's what's really happening. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08...

abc.net.au

Doctor forced to apologise after AI makes 'scary' error about illegal drugs

Artificial Intelligence is listening to many people's medical appointments, but it is not always hearing things correctly.

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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

📣 Scholarship programme for applications by graduates in the Netherlands with a non-Western migration background and/or a recent asylum background. If interested to do PhD research in Computational Cognitive Science, feel free to reach out! Info about research lines in our lab in thread below. 🧵

nwo.nl

First round of Mosaic 3.0 now open for applications | NWO

The first round of the updated Mosaic 3.0 PhD scholarship programme is now open for applications. Mosaic encourages the recruitment of graduates from under-represented groups into Dutch academia by fu...

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Marlene Berke @marleneberke.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.

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Domi Smithson @domismithson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

LIVE from OpenFest 2026: Our brilliant keynote speaker @maddipow.bsky.social asks us to confront why feminist scholars still struggle to be heard. What does this mean for open research, how is this serving us but more importantly, how can WE do better? #openfest26 #openscience #genderequity

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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

What a photo. (Police officers arrest a protester during a 'No Kings' rally, 03/26 LA; Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images)

You see police officers arresting a woman dressed as Statue of Liberty

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I resigned from ExxonMobil today. I spent the last three years doing fossil fuel extraction research at both BP and ExxonMobil. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing to maximize extraction while the window to act closes, and gambling with our lives. More below.

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Arthur Prat @arthurpr4t.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...

arthurprat.com

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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Sixty years ago today, the starship Enterprise launched and with it, a vision of the future where humanity had moved beyond its divisions. I was there at the beginning, and I can tell you...

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Derek Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A recent paper argued that there is no visual binding problem. I disagree, and wrote a response... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Related demonstrations can be found here... staff.psy.uq.edu.au/~uqdarnol/JS...

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I made the final decision to change my main Perception course to a written exam instead of a lab report after reading a very well-written lab report about an in-class experiment that we didn't do.

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Sander van Bree @sandervanbree.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Excited to share our preprint! w/ @martinhebart.bsky.social To understand how primates visually process objects in the world, we rely on both research in human and macaque IT. But what representations of object space are actually shared between them? biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Quick thread 🧵

biorxiv.org

Shared and Distinct High-Dimensional Object Spaces in Human and Macaque Inferotemporal Cortex

Human and macaque studies of inferotemporal cortex (IT) have shaped our understanding of object vision, yet the extent of their representational alignment and the precise nature of this correspondence...

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 16/07/2025

chatgpt is much like an improv comedy group 1) you are the audience, giving it prompts 2) it produces things roughly shaped like your prompt 3) it is trained to respond with Yes, And 4) it has the factual accuracy of improv 5) it does not understand comedy

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Tal Golan @talgolanneuro.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

How can we design experiments that make computational models disagree? One section of our new @natrevneuro.nature.com Review with @kriegeskorte.bsky.social and @heikoschuett.bsky.social examines studies that used stimulus sets designed to elicit distinct predictions from competing models. 1/16

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

TU Darmstadt's Perception Lab is at #ECVP2026 in force. We hope you can make it to see our work! @engramm.ing @lreining.bsky.social @lschmittwilken.bsky.social

A graphic depicting the times that TU Darmstadt's Perception Lab members have posters at the European Conference on Visual Perception, 2026.

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Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

TU Darmstadt's Perception Lab is at #ECVP2026 in force. We hope you can make it to see our work! @engramm.ing @lreining.bsky.social @lschmittwilken.bsky.social

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Ben Beilharz @engramm.ing · 25/08/2026

Hey @ecvp.bsky.social we got twice the fun for you today (order of visit recommended): T5AM6 Swantje will talk about Dead Leaves stimuli with which you can model natural image statistics. T5AM1 @lreining.bsky.social will talk about how to segment these dead leaves, testing NNs for optimality.

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Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I ran a trainee-focused workshop today on "your online academic presence"—slides here in case they are useful for anyone else! jpeelle.github.io/online-acade...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 23/08/2026

if responding to racists with “fuck you, you should be excluded from polite society” means I do not support academic freedom then I guess I don’t support academic freedom

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GestaltReVision @gestaltrevision.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Busy first day for us at #ECVP! Today, @eleftheriapistolas.bsky.social will give a talk in the Multisensory and Haptic Perception Session and Doreen Hii, @elinevg.bsky.social and @lisa-kossmann.bsky.social will present posters in the afternoon session, on Aesthetics and Art. Come find us to chat!

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Laura Dugué @lauradugue.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Our lab’s presentations at #ECVP2026 @ecvp.bsky.social start today with the posters of @jayplease.bsky.social and @yuekong4real.bsky.social!

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Ben Beilharz @engramm.ing · 24/08/2026

goooooood mornin‘ @ecvp.bsky.social! If you are an early bird and you like to see something and talk about multi focal display, or just want to know how to easily implement your experiments on one, go ahead and pay Tarek a visit at M3AM1 :) #ecvp26

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Digital Brain @yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

These giant African rats sniff out tuberculosis in 3 seconds flat, work microscopes take a full day to do. APOPO's HeroRATs are already saving lives across Africa and Asia.

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Andrea Lathrop @cabernet.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Fiser J, Aslin RN, Lathrop A, Rothkopf C, Markant J. An infants' eye view of the world: Implications for learning in natural contexts. the International Conference on Infant Studies; Kyoto, Japan. June 19-23, 2006. was one of my favorites.

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Thérèse Collins @theresecollins.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Check out work from my lab #ECVP2026 @ecvp.bsky.social Motion direction representations and history effects in fixational eye movements Poster, Tuesday 3:30 With @canmertdoit.bsky.social Ambient and focal dichotomy in face perception Poster, Wednesday 3:30 With Dina Dagher & Karine Doré-Mazars

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ECVP 2026 @ecvp.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

🎉 TODAY’S THE DAY! 🎉 #ECVP2026 begins today in Bournemouth! 👁️🧠 We’re ready for a fantastic week of vision science, workshops, talks, symposia, posters and plenty of opportunities to connect with the ECVP community. Welcome to ECVP 2026 — let’s get started! 🚀 #VisionScience #Perception

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Ben Beilharz @engramm.ing · 03/08/2026

Happy to announce that MRD got accepted by the Journal of Vision (marks the first submission of my phd). Thanks to all editors and reviewers making the paper better over time. If you don't want to wait for the official JoV version, I updated the preprint & repo with the latest code and results.

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