Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed.

In our new study, we investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed.

Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension.

These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children’s irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000926100543

#LanguageDevelopment #irony #EyeMovements #EyeTracking #WorkingMemory #empathy

Our paper, "Stimulus representations in visual cortex shaped by spatial attention and microsaccades" was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420704122

#Attention #VisualAttention #SpatialAttention #VisualCortex #Microsaccades #Saccades #EyeMovements #Representation #Dynamics #ActiveCognition #ActiveSensing #Decoding #V4cortex #ITcortex #Pulvinar #Neuroscience #PNAS

Lawful kinematics link eye movements to the limits of high-speed perception

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58659-9

#HackerNews #LawfulKinematics #EyeMovements #HighSpeedPerception #Neuroscience #Research #NatureArticle

2x PhD or PostDoc "EEG in Motion" @BenediktEhinger

University of Stuttgart

Emmy-Noether project "#EEG in motion"
Join us to understand the #brain with self-, object- and #eyemovements!
https://s-ccs.de/emmynoether

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=77965

#cognition #EEG #eye_...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=77965

2x PhD or PostDoc "EEG in Motion" @BenediktEhinger

University of Stuttgart

Emmy-Noether project "#EEG in motion"
Join us to understand the #brain with self-, object- and #eyemovements!
https://s-ccs.de/emmynoether

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=76397

#cognition #EEG #eye_...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=76397

2x PhD or PostDoc "EEG in Motion" @BenediktEhinger

University of Stuttgart

Emmy-Noether project "#EEG in motion"
Join us to understand the #brain with self-, object- and #eyemovements!
https://s-ccs.de/emmynoether

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=76243

#cognition #EEG #eye_...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/university-of-stuttgart-27778-2x-phd-or-postdoc-eeg-in-motion/?feed_id=76243

I was an invited speaker at the Neurips conference in New Orleans in Dec 2023 for the NeuroAI social.

I was more than surprised to be invited to what is now primarily an AI/ML conference (despite "Neural" being the first word, and the conference's origins in comp neuroscience). To say that the successful AI systems currently deployed and neuroscience/study of biological intelligence have diverged would be an understatement, it was a somewhat odd choice for the organizers to invite a neurophysiologist like me.

So, I took the invite as an opportunity to talk about attention in biological vision and how whatever they now call as attention in AI/ML/CNN/transformers
is almost orthogonal to what many others and I study within visual neuroscience or psychology or cognitive science.

While the talk was a partial critique of current AI models, it was more a call for them to take seriously the one instance of intelligence (i.e., the biological world) seriously and how it still has much to offer towards designing better AI systems.

If attention is not one of the cognitive ingredients that makes up the intelligence recipe towards autonomous systems, I don't know what is.

The talk slides can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/927f50bfvqpwtserizgl5/NeuroAI_Neurips_KS2023.pdf?rlkey=r3pgvsyoudwczapjijx80pj7l

#Neurips2023 #NeuroAI #Attention #Vision #BiologicalVision #ActiveVision #SpaceVariance #NonlinearCompression #EyeMovements #Neurodynamics #AutonomousSystems #AI #ML

Referenced link: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-tiny-eye-movements-degree-cognitive.html
Discuss on https://discu.eu/q/https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-tiny-eye-movements-degree-cognitive.html

Originally posted by Phys.org / @physorg_com: http://nitter.platypush.tech/medical_xpress/status/1642933246198689792#m

RT by @physorg_com: Tiny #eyemovements are under a surprising degree of cognitive control @WeillCornell @currentbiology https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982223003147 https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-tiny-eye-movements-degree-cognitive.html