Investigating the impact of fondant on lab meetings...

Are representations in visual cortex organised according to stimulus features or affordances? Here, Shruti Japee and I measured responses to highly variable facial expressions in 🐵 The upshot: exact visual features were not as important as we thought! doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a…

First experiment from my PhD! Dynamic faces are great, but videos are a nightmare for experimental control, so many of us use dynamic morphs of photos. Except we showed that if you can’t use videos with natural face motion, you might be better off using static faces 😬

Sustained looking at faces at 5 months of age is associated with socio-communicative skills in the second year of life #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1111/infa.1…

Does #facepareidolia reflect a failed prediction on the part of a detection mechanism? In a new Scientific Reports paper, Blake Saurels and 🧠@nataliepeluso.bsky.soci report a bias towards #facepareidolia in the periphery - a result consistent with the detection hypothesis. rdcu.be/dGtfR

How many research papers have content that is fascinating to both researchers and toddlers? Some of the stimuli in this face pareidolia study are top-tier 😀 A great eye-tracking study from Jessica Taubert and colleagues, using the TRACKPixx3 and VIEWPixx!

👏 A huge congratulations to #UQ Psychology PhD candidate, 🧠@nataliepeluso.bsky.soci, who was awarded the Best Platform Presentation prize at the #AS4SAN. Her talk was entitled 'Visual saliency and task relevance modulate oculomotor behaviour towards naturalistic faces'. #Neuroscience

This is a fun collab with Ottmar Lipp where we looked at socio-emotional biases in the perception of #facepareidolia The upshot is that we categorise happy illusory expressions faster when the illusory face is perceived as feminine. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-…

BIG congratulations to recent graduates, Eleanor Moses and Linda! Its been such a privilege to have you working in the The BrisBrain Lab during your pre-doctoral studies and we are collectively so proud of everything you have accomplished.

I am very pleased to announce that @lina_teichmann is visiting UQPsych this week and will be presenting her latest scientific discoveries in a special talk tomorrow at 10AM. Please join us!

Every year the UQ school of psychology challenges students (and staff) to transform their lecture material and research topics into art. Today, we showcased nearly 50 entries at the Psychology As Art Exhibition. UQPsych Congratulations to all the winners!

New review in J Neuro on the neural encoding of bodies for social perception. jneurosci.org/content/44/40/…

🎉 Huge congratulations to Zihe Wei on winning a People’s Choice Award at HDR Day @UQpsych! 🏆 Her presentation on the neural coding of faces for social perception captivated the audience and highlighted the exciting research she's been doing! Well done, Zihe! 🌟 #HDRDay

New research by Eleanor Moses et al. isolates the nasal hemiretina via a monocular viewing paradigm to probe the subcortical pathway's visual sensitivity. A nuanced look at how our brain detects fear! 🧠👀@UQpsych royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

Are we sensitive to pain-related facial expressions? Chris Buckland is interested in what genuine pain looks like and whether its recognition elicits approach or avoidance behaviors from observers. His first paper looks at injury-related expressions: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Here, Kenji W Koyano et al. show that 🐒 neurons in certain face patches barely react to pareidolia (illusory faces in objects). doi.org/10.1016/j.pneu… To those who have argued that the brain "obviously" processes stimuli that look like faces as faces—it's not that simple.