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Will Harrison

@willjharrison.bsky.social
955 followers 412 following 834 posts

Vision scientists and horror film enthusiast. I can’t read or send DMs because Australia banned social media accounts for people under 16…. You do the maths. I also lecture at the University of the Sunshine Coast when I'm not at the beach.

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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 6h
I suspect this is what the companies were doing back in the 2010s, but the training datasets weren't sufficient to produce the appearance of "expertise" in all domains.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 6h
I can't see those results reported though? Am I missing something?
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
AI companies are waging and winning a war to absolve themselves of liability for their shitty products. The real danger has always been how AI tools will help Bad Humans do Bad Things, and that's exactly what is happening when an AI agent goes "rogue".
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
bro wants you to calmly chew your asparagus so strangers can tell you why you shouldn't exist He often gives seemingly good advice, but this is dog shit privilege.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is critical and missed by many researchers. We don't necessarily understand something just because a DNN or LMM can reproduce him-like responses; that just means that the responses can be learned from a dataset/architecture. A psychologist/neuroscientist's target is the mind, not the model.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Can you comment on the team's knowledge contribution to agent development? It's easy to calculate direct costs, like subscription fees and time spent playing with a model, but do you also need to factor in your team's expertise?
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Can you share more information about the "new" untrained tasks you tried out? (I've been arguing with my uni that online testing is not good enough quality for my research, so this is also a really critical study for uni policy)
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is really fascinating and potentially troubling. I'm curious if you tried any perceptual tasks? From reading the preprint and your thread, some important details are unclear about what information was available to the boys. I'm not skeptical of any of your claims in general. 1/n
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Completely agree.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
This looks like a positive change, but the devil will be in the details: how many “highly competitive” allocations can be made, and what is the expected number of funded grants based on review vs lottery?
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sensible change IMO
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Reposted by Will Harrison
Bruce Wilson @brucewilson.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
1,200 reported incidents of sexual assault, dating & domestic violence, and stalking lead to 7 expulsions or dismissals. Cornell has positioned itself as higher ed's industry leader in teaching rape culture to America's future male economic elites. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
usatoday.com
Cornell rarely expels students in sex assault cases | Exclusive
A third of undergraduate women say they've been sexually assaulted. But on average, Cornell reported expelling just one attacker per year.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I'm avoiding it and actively encouraging my friends and family to leave.
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Reposted by Will Harrison
Alex Holcombe @alexh.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
With the recent mainstreaming of AI concerns, I'm very disappointed that we haven't heard more about supporting proof of personhood tools and techniques, which some have worked on for more than a decade.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We just decided to trial Discord in our lab too
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Reposted by Will Harrison
J. Brendan Ritchie @jbrendanritchie.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
If only there was a thing govs could do to make companies align with human values. Some kind of system of legally binding constraints for certain industries. Shame nothing like that has ever existed ever.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
isnt the joke on us, the people who use these tools for IRB-approved studies?
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We let AI companies soak up all the IP in the world but dammit if we let them take our maths. If this is the straw that achieves change then so be it.
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Reposted by Will Harrison
Icelandic Vision Lab @icevislab.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
VIVAS correlates only moderately with the VVIQ, well below the ceiling set by their respective reliabilities, and shows striking individual-level dissociations: some individuals scoring in the bottom 10% on one measure fall in the top quartile on the other. 7/9
Cross-tabulation by percentiles: we split both VVIQ and VIVAS into five percentile bands based on each score’s position within the sample: 0-10%, 10-25%, 25-75% (middle half; IQR: interquartile range), 75-90%, and 90-100%; equal scores stay in the same band (ties kept together).
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Why won't anyone think of where the codes are
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I don't think I know what the binding problem is anymore. As an aside, I'd like to know if demo #1 still works when peripheral stimuli are scaled for cortical magnification. I suspect the conflicting motion signals are being pooled in larger RFs, and just adding noise.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Great letter and good on you for bothering to write, send and share.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Before everyone was talking about prediction errors, surprise was investigated in the context of attentional control settings, e.g. link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com
Oculomotor Capture by New and Unannounced Color Singletons during Visual Search - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
The surprise capture hypothesis states that a stimulus will capture attention to the extent that it is preattentively available and deviates from task-expectancies. Interestingly, it has been noted by...
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
When I hear an AI model solved an old maths problem, I ask myself: 1) How many human mathematicians were involved? 2) How much money and freedom were the mathematicians paid to solve the problem? My null hypothesis is that the multi-billion dollar models are not the critical ingredient.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I'm rarely this excited for a new movie.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
We should all be ashamed.
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Reposted by Will Harrison
Eric Schares @eschares.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm
Line chart showing 5 biggest publishers from 2019-2025
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Yeh but the water temp is still only 20° and I'm such a baby I need it to be 22 before I go in 😭
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
This reads a bit like, "Now that we've built such huge complex models that aren't really interpretable, we need to start using the tools of science to understand them."
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
We really breezed right through winter this year didn't we. So uncomfortably warm for this time of year already.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Thanks for sharing - what a cool graphic. As someone who straddles behavioural psych and cog neuro/computer vision, I think the fracturing in neural methods will be lesser that traditional psych because of the better development and sharing of analytical toolboxes in neuro-areas.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
@neuronomist.bsky.social will probably know more about this, or maybe can suggest some papers?
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Sure, but your question involves attentional sets, which I think are more contextual than trial by trial. An observer doesn't know from one trial to the next what the orientations will be or the best saccade vector. They DO still know the relevance of colour, which is a more reliable cue.
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Reposted by Will Harrison
Igor Utochkin @utochkin.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Our new preprint w/ @edvogel.bsky.social presents a neural marker of a competition/interaction taking place in working memory between memory and current goals. We label it r-CDA Check out preprint for details about r-CDA and other interesting neural dynamics osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
My immediate thought is that orientation/shape is distorted across eye movements, but colours aren't. It's hard to tune to "horizontal" while making horizontal eye movements, because everything turns horizontal during the saccade, and static horizontal features get masked.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Good and useful summary, thanks. I skimmed through the more critical replies and thought they make assumptions about your motivation in preparing this, which I found confusing.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
It’s so gross and blatant IMO.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Would I have the power to stop the year-to-year arbitrary formatting changes for grant apps? #hahahgivememoremoney
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Skeptical of some /AI/ math proofs banging around public sphere. How do we know what's in the training data? How much was the human doing? But honestly I don't care enough to debate.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
By finding the local peaks and troughs of the filtered noise, it's easy to add specular highlights to give the appearance of gloss.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Sometimes I just want to try to code pretty shit low pass filter 3D noise (creates the undulation) -> project noise onto a colour wheel (with some other bells and whistles)
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
It’s very difficult to assess what tools help learning, versus appear to help learning.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Hey Blake do you do much undergrad teaching? My feeling is my first year students would need 2 semesters of dedicated study before understanding your point.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
great to see some places still have a backbone
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I also left around the same time. We had something special on Twitter, pre-Musk, but now I reckon there's no excuse for publicly funded scientists to tweet or even peruse twitter.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Just putting this idea out there: if a theory of cog neuro requires screening out left handed people from experiments, maybe the theory isn't really a theory, yet. (And cool work from this team!)
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Put this on your journal club roster 🪶🙋😂
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
An adaptive algorithms that lets you shape your stimulus in any of 50 dimensions according to an observer's response.... and it works almost in realtime so you can use it in experiments on the fly.
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Will Harrison @willjharrison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Huge if true!
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