News

Updates on publications, preprints, talks, and lab activity.

October 2026

  • A new preprint by Talha Özüdoğru, Andrey Chetverikov, Richard Huskey, Leendert van Maanen, and Christoph Strauch: “Generalizable experiment agents threaten online behavioral experiments”. After Andrey’s skeptical reply earlier this year, he teamed up with the authors of the original commentary to test the question directly. An agent built entirely through natural-language prompting with a consumer LLM subscription completed 26 online behavioral experiments across seven hosting platforms, mostly with human-like performance.

September 2026

  • Together with Vebjørn Ekroll, Melika Miralem, and Subhankar Karmakar, we spent two days at Forskningstorget during the Research Days in Bergen with a stand called “Can You Trust Your Eyes?”, showing visual illusions to children and their parents: spinning tops, 19th-century animation toys, a mesmerizing device made from an old record player, and lots of arts-and-crafts materials. Thunder, lightning, and rivers running through the tent did not spoil the fun. Andrey made an interactive illusions app for the event, and you can still play with it online (more in the LinkedIn post).

August 2026

  • At ECVP 2026 in Bournemouth, Andrey presented a poster, “Too Much of the Same Thing: Overweighting Correlated Visual Evidence” (Chetverikov, Bailey, Ortega & Whitney).
  • Also at ECVP 2026, Weronika Różycka presented her work from the lab in the poster “Bias in plain sight: Eye markers of contextual effects in visual working memory” (Różycka & Chetverikov) and received an ECVP 2026 Travel Award. Congratulations, Weronika!

July 2026

  • Our preprint with Sabrina Hansmann-Roth, “Noise in Competing Representations Determines the Direction of Memory Biases”, is now a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, assessed as a valuable study of the mechanisms behind inter-item biases in visual working memory.
  • Andrey served on the jury (examinateur) at Liubov Ardasheva’s PhD defense at Aix-Marseille Université, with the thesis “Perceiving and tracking ambiguous motion: the role of in-built priors, recent visual history, and sensory evidence”. Congratulations to Liubov on a successful defense!

May 2026

  • At VSS 2026, the collaboration with David Whitney’s lab continued with the poster “Stable Correlations Bias Ensemble Perception” (Bailey, Ortega, Chetverikov & Whitney).
  • Andrey gave a lecture with Mauro Manassi on “Eye movements analysis and pupillometry in visual working memory studies” at the Tracking Eyes and Mind workshop at UiB.
  • Andrey served as opponent and evaluation committee member at Alan Voodla’s PhD defense, a joint degree of the University of Tartu and KU Leuven, with the thesis “Does it feel right? Towards an affective perspective on metacognitive confidence”. Congratulations to Alan on a successful defense!
  • Alexa Cristea submitted her bachelor’s thesis, “AI attitudes and persuasion by AI-generated images”, supervised by Andrey. Congratulations, Alexa!

March 2026

  • Weronika Różycka from SWPS University in Katowice joined the lab as an Erasmus exchange student. Welcome, Weronika!
  • Andrey posted a response to a recent letter claiming there may already be bots in online behavioral and cognitive studies. The response argues that the evidence does not support that conclusion and, by the same logic, one might as well suspect bots among the undergraduates at Cardiff.

February 2026

  • Andrey visited David Whitney’s lab at UC Berkeley to discuss ongoing collaboration and gave a CogNeuro area talk, “Demixing in Visual Working Memory: How Similarity and Noise Distort Recall”.
  • A new paper led by Soha Farboud and colleagues in collaboration with Andrey Chetverikov appeared in Nature Communications: transcranial ultrasound stimulation of the frontal eye fields can rapidly shift choice behavior. Congratulations, Soha!

December 2025

  • Ayberk Ozkirli, Andrey Chetverikov, and David Pascucci published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour. Using a large mega-analysis, they show that serial dependence — a kind of serial bias in perception — is not particularly beneficial for behavior, reducing perceptual accuracy. Congratulations, Ayberk!
  • Andrey Chetverikov and Sabrina Hansmann-Roth posted a preprint on why items in memory sometimes are attracted and sometimes repelled by each other. They test Andrey’s Demixing Model predictions, pointing to competition between noisy representations as the main driver of biases.

November 2025

  • Ekaterina Andriushchenko, Andrey Chetverikov, and Gianluca Campana published a paper in BMC Biology. The paper shows that attention doesn’t always lead to changes in serial biases, while prioritization of items in memory might have its own effects. Congratulations, Ekaterina!
  • Árni Kristjánsson and Andrey Chetverikov published a commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences arguing that attention research is moving well and should not be boxed into one narrow framework.

October 2025

  • Andrey gave an invited talk at Liverpool John Moores University (hosted by Nika Adamian).
  • Andrey served as opponent at Lari Virtanen’s PhD defense at the University of Helsinki (supervised by Maria Olkkonen and Toni Saarela). Congratulations to Lari on a successful defense!

August 2025

  • Andrey and Ekaterina visited the labs of Christoph Bledowski and Rosanne Rademaker in Frankfurt. Andrey gave invited talks at Goethe University’s Institute of Medical Psychology and at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute, focusing on visual working memory biases.
  • At ECVP 2025 in Mainz, Andrey and Ekaterina presented the lab’s ongoing work on contextual bias and uncertainty in visual memory. In his talk “Biased Colors in Biased Space”, Andrey showed that biases in color and spatial memory are interconnected and depend on feature similarity across dimensions. Ekaterina’s poster, “Beyond the Noise: The Complex Interplay of Past and Present Uncertainty in Serial Dependence” (Andriushchenko, Hansmann-Roth, Campana & Chetverikov), showed that serial dependence is jointly shaped by uncertainty in both current and previous stimuli, supporting a multi-source uncertainty account.
  • Also at ECVP 2025, the poster “Confounding effects of stimulus-specific biases on serial dependence” (Ozkirli, Chetverikov & Pascucci) was presented.

July 2025

  • Work by a group of UiB students supervised by Andrey was published as a paper in Journal of Vision. The study replicates a key serial-bias finding and clarifies when attraction versus repulsion is most likely to appear. Congratulations to the students on their publication!
  • Ekaterina joined the Neuromatch Computational Neuroscience Summer School to hone her skills and expand the lab’s computational toolkit.

June 2025

  • The first Nordic Vision Science Network (NVSN) meeting was held in Bergen, organized by Andrey Chetverikov, Vebjørn Ekroll, Melika Miralem, and Subhankar Karmakar. Supported by a Bergens Universitetsfond grant (about USD 9,000), the meeting brought together vision scientists from across the region to kick off a stronger Nordic network (meeting page).

May 2025

  • Andrey gave a virtual invited talk, “Representation of variability”, at the Wichmann Lab colloquium at the University of Tübingen, at the invitation of Felix Wichmann.
  • At VSS 2025, our collaborators at UC Berkeley, including undergraduates Katrina Wolters and Richard Bailey, presented three posters from the ongoing collaboration with David Whitney’s lab:
    • “Spatial weighting of orientation ensembles is shifted towards highly correlated regions” (Bailey, Ortega, Chetverikov & Whitney)
    • “Asymmetric Variance in Ensemble Orientations Modulates Serial Dependence” (Schmit, Ortega, Chetverikov & Whitney)
    • “Hidden Markov models reveal attractive and repulsive perceptual modes during an ensemble judgment task” (Wolters, Weilnhammer, Ortega, Chetverikov & Whitney)
  • Several bachelor students in Bergen submitted their theses and graduated under Andrey’s supervision. Congratulations to all of them:
    • “How does the stable-world assumption influence serial dependence?” by Ingrid Wessel Eide & Josefine Hestdal Eikevoll
    • “Correlation Neglect in Lower-Order Cognitive Decisions and its Connection to Susceptibility to Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories” by Birk H. Ekeli & Jesper B. Eriksen
    • “Contextual Biases in Visual Working Memory” by Trine Gravdal Hornnes & Mathilde Gjesdal Standnes
    • “Effects of Distraction and Prioritization on Visual Working Memory” by Rav Brithsønn Seime

April 2025

  • Árni Kristjánsson, David Whitney, and Thomas Alrik Sørensen visited the lab. David Whitney spoke about the “aperture problem of emotion perception,” showing how people rely on spatial and temporal context, not just faces, to read emotion in natural scenes. Árni Kristjánsson followed with “Seeing the trees through the forest: Spatiotemporal routines in visual perception,” arguing that perception, attention, memory, and decision-making are deeply shaped by the structure of events across space and time. We discussed current collaborations and made plans for new ones.

March 2025

  • Andrey visited the University of Aberdeen and gave an invited talk on the Demixing Model of inter-item bias in visual working memory.
  • A preprint led by Soha Farboud and colleagues (in collaboration with Andrey) was released on transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS).

January 2025

  • In late January and early February, Andrey visited Gianluca Campana at the University of Padova and gave an invited talk at Psycho Club, “The Puzzle of Contextual Biases: Why Can’t We Ignore Irrelevant Information?”
  • Andrey began serving as Associate Editor at Cognition.
  • Andrey visited Thomas Alrik Sørensen at Aalborg University and gave an invited talk.