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Saurabh
@saurabhr.bsky.social
60 followers 240 following 12 posts
Ph.D. in Psychology | Currently on Job Market | Pursuing Consciousness, Reality Monitoring, World Models, Imagination with my life force. saurabhr.github.io
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
World models are a highly speculative topic in AI as well as in cognitive science. I’m excited to share my manuscript on investigating internal world models using imagination networks in humans and LLMs! 🧵1/n

arxiv.org/abs/2510.04391
Internal World Models as Imagination Networks in Cognitive Agents
What is the computational objective of imagination? While classical interpretations suggest imagination is useful for maximizing rewards, recent findings challenge this view. In this study, we propose...
arxiv.org
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Reposted by Saurabh
handle.invalid
Imaging Neuroscience @handle.invalid · 2d
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Viviana Greco, Penelope A. Lewis, et al:

Disarming emotional memories using targeted memory reactivation during rapid eye movement sleep

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
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Reposted by Saurabh
matanmazor.bsky.social
Matan Mazor @matanmazor.bsky.social · 4d
Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations

my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
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Reposted by Saurabh
emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 4d
This paper shows that you can predict actual purchase intent (90% accuracy) by asking an off-the-shelf LLM to impersonate a customer with a demographic profile, giving it a product image & having it give its impressions, which another AI rates.

No fine-tuning or training & beats classic ML methods.
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Reposted by Saurabh
kendraserra.bsky.social
Kendra Albert @kendraserra.bsky.social · Sep 11
Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai
Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers
We align the aligners
alignmentalignment.ai
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 4d
Whereas believing Consciousness doesn't exist risks infinite loss (lack of humanity) if Consciousness does exist."

3/End-of-Post
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 4d
"Betting on Consciousness's existence in NhA because believing in Consciousness offers potentially infinite gains (like humanity) and minimal losses if Consciousness doesn't exist, ...

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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 4d
Seeing all the consciousness and non-humans/AI (NhA) theories coming up, I feel like there will be a point of "Consciousness Pascal's Wager".

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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 4d
A fun backstory for my paper: a Blade Runner-style test to distinguish humans from AI using only language. We used network science to probe their imagination and internal world models. This pic is from our first LLM tests.

#AI #BladeRunner #NetworkScience #NLP
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Reposted by Saurabh
drlaschowski.bsky.social
Brokoslaw Laschowski @drlaschowski.bsky.social · 7d
Imagine a brain decoding algorithm that could generalize across different subjects and tasks. Today, we’re one step closer to achieving that vision.

Introducing the flagship paper of our brain decoding program: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroAI #compneuro @utoronto.ca @uhn.ca
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Reposted by Saurabh
mariamaly.bsky.social
Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 12d
Are you an early career scholar interested in learning more about peer review?

Join us for our virtual @reviewerzero.bsky.social workshop! We will help you understand how peer review works and give advice on responding to reviewer comments.

9-10:30am PT / 12-1:30pm ET on October 30th. Register👇🏼
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Peer Review 101. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Peer Review 101. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
northwestern.zoom.us
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Reposted by Saurabh
kerblooee.bsky.social
Dr Reshanne Reeder @kerblooee.bsky.social · 21d
Ahem. Mental imagery (& imagery-critical) researchers should read this:

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Self-reports are better measurement instruments than implicit measures - Nature Reviews Psychology
Implicit measures are widely used because they are assumed to be superior to self-reports. In this Perspective, Corneille and Gawronski challenge this view and argue that claims about disadvantages of...
www.nature.com
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
Keep watching this space for more cool stuff in the upcoming weeks!!
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
These structural difference confirms that human and LLM agents possess distinct internal world models. Despite their linguistic capacity, LLMs lack the phenomenological structures reflected in human minds.
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
2. Clustering Alignment: LLM imagination networks often lacked the characteristic clustering seen in human data, frequently collapsing into only a single cluster, and lacked clustering alignment with humans. 🧵6/n
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
But LLMs? They demonstrate a fundamental structural failure:
1. Inconsistent Importance: LLM centrality correlations with humans were inconsistent and rarely survived statistical corrections 🧵5/n
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
My results showed that human IWMs were consistently organized, exhibiting highly significant correlations across local (Expected Influence, Strength) and global (Closeness) centrality measures. This suggests a general property of how IWMs are structured across human populations. 🧵4/n
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
In this paper, we utilized imagination vividness ratings and network analysis to measure the properties of internal world models in natural and artificial cognitive agents.
(first three columns from left in the pic are imagination networks for VVIQ-2, next three columns for PSIQ) 🧵3/n
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
The study was based on the idea that imagination may be involved in accessing internal world models, a concept previously proposed by leading AI researchers, such as Yutaka Matsuo and Yann LeCun. 🧵2/n
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Saurabh @saurabhr.bsky.social · 7d
World models are a highly speculative topic in AI as well as in cognitive science. I’m excited to share my manuscript on investigating internal world models using imagination networks in humans and LLMs! 🧵1/n

arxiv.org/abs/2510.04391
Internal World Models as Imagination Networks in Cognitive Agents
What is the computational objective of imagination? While classical interpretations suggest imagination is useful for maximizing rewards, recent findings challenge this view. In this study, we propose...
arxiv.org
1 2 10
Reposted by Saurabh
jorge-morales.bsky.social
Jorge Morales @jorge-morales.bsky.social · 13d
Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵
Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models
This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...
arxiv.org
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Reposted by Saurabh
sampendu.bsky.social
Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 12d
Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg:
#psychskysci #neuroscience

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
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Reposted by Saurabh
louisekauffmann.bsky.social
Louise Kauffmann @louisekauffmann.bsky.social · Aug 28
Happy to share @c-carrez-corral.bsky.social 1st PhD paper with Pauline Rossel & Carole Peyrin which is now online at link.springer.com/article/10.3... in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics! Thread below👇
Effects of predictions robustness and object-based predictions on subjective visual perception - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
Learned regularities about contextual associations between objects and scenes allow us to form predictions about the likely features of the environment, facilitating perception of noisy visual inputs....
link.springer.com
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Reposted by Saurabh
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social
bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Aug 24
Tension shapes memory: Computational insights into neural plasticity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.20.671220v1
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Reposted by Saurabh
edouardmachery.bsky.social
Edouard Machery @edouardmachery.bsky.social · Aug 24
In case you missed that paper
Most people turn inward to make tough decisions, a new Pitt study found
Center for Philosophy of Science director Edouard Machery was a senior author on the research, which spanned 13 languages, 12 countries and five continents.
www.pittwire.pitt.edu
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Reposted by Saurabh
mehr.nz
samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Aug 23
While we're on the subject of coffee, one of the espresso influencer gearheads posted this informative video about why different espresso drinks are called what they're called
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