PsychologyWordPress.com

Alex Holcombe's blog

open science, open access, meta-science, perception, neuroscience, ...
Home PageAtom FeedMastodon
language
Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

We invite applications for a research fellowship/postdoctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Alex Holcombe in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. The research area is visual psychophysics, and the project involves the perception and attentive tracking of moving objects. One line of experiments will investigate the limits on judging the spatial relationship of moving objects.

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

A new version of my 100-minute interactive neural network lesson is available. The lesson webpages guide university-level students through learning and directed play with a connectionist simulator. The outcome is that students gain a sense of how neuron-like processing units can mediate adaptive behavior and memory.

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

Most people are confused about temporal resolution. That includes my students. So I created this diagram to communicate the basic concept, with the example of human visual processing, using a water-works metaphor. Why water-works? I’m trying to explain an unfamiliar concept in terms that everyone can understand intuitively.

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

The BBC has produced a wonderful series called Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds. It’s visually stunning and it’ll wow you with a lot of cool science. The first episode is called Speed Limits. Because I study speed limits on perception, I was very excited.  To introduce the topic, Richard Hammond explains that vision is too slow to see many interesting things, things which can be revealed by high-speed imaging techniques.

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

Below is a draft of a chapter I’m writing for Subjective Time, an upcoming book from MIT Press edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd. In a bowling alley, a professional player launches his ball down the lane. As the ball rolls toward the pins, our visual experience of it is smooth and seamless. The ball shifts in position continuously, and this seems to be represented with high fidelity by our brain.

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

So I knew neuroscience has exploded over the last few decades, but I didn’t know its emergence as a more autonomous discipline is “the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past decade”. In the authors’ words that follow, they are referring to their figure showing neuroscience emerging as a new citation macro-cluster: “We also highlight the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past

Published
Author Alex O. Holcombe

We live in an era where students, shift workers, and scientists increasingly consume drugs that modify brain activity in order to enhance cognition. Ethicists are right to fret about this as the number of addictive substances with some ill effects proliferates (DeJong et al. 2008). People will use these things regardless whether or not some condemn the phenomenon, so it is important that information is out there about how best to use them.