It looks like stimulus manipulations can be divided into "task-defining" and "auxiliary". The manipulations from each group have very different effects on accuracy vs. confidence. And all auxiliary manipulations seem to work in basically the same way. Really cool stuff by @herrickfung.bsky.social.

Huge thanks to Medha Shekhar, @kaixue98.bsky.social, @manurausch.bsky.social, & @dobyrahnev.bsky.social for their guidance and collaboration on this project.

Full article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Data and code: github.com/herrickfung/...

n/n

These findings show a clear behavioral difference between manipulating the task-defining feature (orientation) and other auxiliary manipulations that only affect stimulus clarity, offering a way to predict how novel manipulations affect confidence and accuracy.

4/n

Manipulating other features—size, duration, spatial frequency, and noise—though visually distinct, showed strikingly similar effects: they (1) affected confidence more strongly than accuracy, (2) showed sub-additive or no interaction with other features, & (3) violated the Folded-X pattern.

3/n

In an orientation discrimination task, manipulating the “task-defining” tilt offset of the Gabor demonstrated three unique effects: it (1) affected accuracy more strongly than confidence, (2) showed supra-additive interaction with other features, & (3) exhibited the Folded-X pattern.

2/n

Glad to see my first-year project is out!

In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.

1/n

🚨 Paper alert:
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop

LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models

📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io

At Neurips? You can now check out @herrickfung.bsky.social ‘s new work on modeling individual differences at two workshops! Much more to say on this awesome colab with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social very soon. 🙂

Hi Tahereh — thanks for the note! Glad to hear our study can be of use. I’d be happy to chat more and hear about your work at NeurIPS.

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

New lab preprint led by Medha Shekhar in collaboration with @axc.bsky.social. We investigate what drives confidence in decisions of real-world complexity (perception and memory questions about short videos). It turns out confidence is influenced by so many factors!

osf.io/preprints/ps...