FABBS

FABBS Newsletters

Publication Opportunity for VSS Members Announced by FABBS

A message from the Board of Directors of VSS:

VSS is one of the many member societies of FABBS, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. VSS has been invited to contribute articles to an issue of the FABBS journal, Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (PIBBS). The issue will consist of 23 invited articles, selected from submitted abstracts, that summarize an area of vision research, along with its implications for public policy. Instructions for submitting abstracts for consideration, and other relevant details, are contained in this message.

What is the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS)?

FABBS is a coalition of scientific societies, including VSS, that share an interest in advancing the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. FABBS communicates the importance and contributions of research in these areas to policy makers, research funding agencies, and the public. FABBS has advocated on behalf of vision science in relation to levels of funding and the interpretation of policies regarding clinical studies.

What is Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences?

PIBBS publishes brief, reader-friendly summaries of contemporary research findings that are relevant to efforts to promote new policies and/or new funding directions. Articles must contain brief statements describing or suggesting policy implications of the work. Articles are citable. 

Where can I find examples of PIBBS articles?

Check the PIBBS website. Each article contains a summary of the research and ends with a brief, general implication for policy.

What does “policy” refer to?

Policies may include advocacy for research or funding directions, industry-academic partnerships to accomplish shared goals, formal establishment of new international collaborations, or new practices or guidelines relevant to education, health, or the workplace.

What types of research in vision might have policy implications?

Many research directions in vision science have practical implications for policies. Some examples:

  • Application of perceptual research involving VR or other emerging visual technologies to benefit education, the workplace or health;
  • Applications of research on perceptual learning, visual memory or perceptual aspects of reading to education policies, practices or funding;
  • Use of research on perception to develop technologies or practices relevant to young, aging, or special populations;
  • Application of research on face perception to identify biases in judgments that may impact social policies;
  • Development of effective visual presentations of publicly-available data.

What is the value to vision science or to me in submitting an article to PIBBS?

FABBS circulates PIBBS to policy makers and funding agencies. A PIBBS article is also a citable publication that may be useful to you in disseminating the applications of your work to a wide audience.

Who can submit?

This opportunity is open to any 2022 or 2023 VSS member from any country, including student and postdoctoral members. Even though FABBS is a US-based organization, it is interested in policies that enhance international collaborations and cooperation.

What is the process?

Any VSS member (2022 or 2023) can submit an abstract (no more than 200 words) for consideration. Your abstract should summarize the previously-published research that will be reviewed in your article and include a description of the policy implications or applications. (Abstracts presenting new unpublished findings will not be considered.) Include title, authors, authors’ affiliations, authors’ contact information, and a brief bibliography.  Indicate which author(s) are VSS members (one or more must be a 2022 or 2023 VSS member). Send your abstract as a PDF file attachment to  by January 17, 2023. From the submitted abstracts, 23 will be invited to prepare and submit a manuscript.

Are there costs?

There is no cost to authors.  

What is the timeline?

Abstracts are due January 17, 2023. Invitations to prepare an article will be sent to those selected by the end of January. Articles will be due May 1, 2023. The submitted articles will then be reviewed with an eye to acceptance. FABBS manages the process in collaboration with the VSS Board.

What if I have questions?

Email any questions to 

FABBS Early Career Impact Awards

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) Early Career Impact Award honors early-career scientists of FABBS member societies during the first 10 years post-PhD and recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. The goal is to enhance public visibility of these sciences and the research of the awardees.

VSS is asked to submit a nominee for the FABBS Early Career Impact Award every few years. VSS selects the nominee from among those who have been nominated for a VSS Young Investigator Award in the same year. The recipients of FABBS Early Career Impact Awards are:

2022 Recipient

Radoslaw Cichy

Professor of Neurocognitive and Experimental Psychology
Managing Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Freie Universität Berlin.

Radoslaw Cichy is a cognitive and computational neuroscientist who studies how the brain allows us to perceive and recognize objects and scenes. He has developed innovative new computational approaches that combine the strengths of different ways of measuring brain function in humans (EEG; MEG; fMRI), while at the same time relating brain function to the ground truth of perceptual experience. His contributions include the development of M/EEG-fMRI “fusion” (2014, 2020). The central idea behind fusion is that even though different types of neural signals capture different aspects of the neural response (MEG or EEG are better at capturing changes over time, while fMRI is relatively slow, but has more spatial precision), it is nevertheless possible to mathematically exploit the similarities in how each type of signal responds to different experimental conditions to extract a composite picture of how visual signals are processed by different brain regions over time. Prof. Cichy has applied fusion to models of the neural representation of objects throughout the processing. In other work using deep neural network models, Cichy and colleagues (2019) showed that the evolution of neural signals in different brain regions over time reflected the role of both bottom-up and top-down (recurrent) processing. has published over 40 articles. Cichy’s work is supported by a German Emmy Noether award (1.2 Mill Euro) and an ERC Starting Grant (1.5 Mill Euro). He is also co-founder of the Argonauts Project, an “open challenge” to investigators to propose and test computational models of the brain’s response to objects. The Argonauts Project also is a novel and engaging approach to open science, where researchers share data and findings with each other and with the public.

2019 Recipient

Julie Golomb

Associate Professor
Ohio State University

Julie Golomb earned her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Brandeis University and her doctorate from Yale University. She completed post-doctoral research at MIT before joining the faculty at Ohio State in 2012 and receiving tenure in 2018. Her lab’s research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. For more information about Dr. Golomb and an overview of her article, go to Making Sense from Dots of Light on the FABBS website.

Making Sense from Dots of Light

For Julie Golomb, it all started with a college course in visual perception. “I realized that all of these things I take for granted about how I perceive the world are actually really hard challenges for the brain to solve.”
How do we recognize our coffee mug? How do we pick out a friend’s face in the crowd? Or know that the round, white and black thing flying at us is, in fact, a soccer ball?
This constant bombardment of rich and usually moving pictures start out simply as dots of light hitting different spots on the retina.
Those dots create a map of where things are in the world before heading to the brain, where the deep processing takes place that Golomb studies in her lab.
While the brain is busy almost instantaneously processing incoming data, the world outside is continuously moving and changing, as are our eyes–an emphasis in Golomb’s lab.
In one experiment, Golomb may ask volunteers to determine whether two objects that appear on a computer monitor are the same shape. “Or we’ll flash a bunch of different objects on the screen and then ask, ‘What color was presented in a certain location?’”
Among interesting findings: When asked to pay attention to two squares of different colors, such as red and blue, volunteers might mistakenly describe one of the colors afterward as purple.
“The brain has a hard job, and it does a remarkable job,” Golomb says. “But it is not perfect.” A lot of learning about the brain is based on its mistakes.
Golomb also asks volunteers to complete tasks while connected to tools such as functional MRI, which images their brain, or an EEG machine, which records electrical activity on the scalp. She uses sophisticated computer models to analyze how the brains are processing information.
As the technology changes and develops, so do the possibilities with brain research. And it’s not just new equipment. “We’re asking better questions and new questions based on what we’re continually learning.”

2019 FABBS Early Career Impact Award

Congratulations to Julie Golomb, the VSS nominee and recipient of the 2019 Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) Early Career Impact Award.

The FABBS Early Career Impact Award honors early career scientists of FABBS member societies during the first 10 years post-PhD and recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. The goal is to enhance public visibility of these sciences and the particular research through the dissemination efforts of the FABBS in collaboration with the member societies and award winners.

Julie Golomb

Associate Professor
Ohio State University

Julie Golomb earned her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Brandeis University and her doctorate from Yale University. She completed post-doctoral research at MIT before joining the faculty at Ohio State in 2012 and receiving tenure in 2018. Her lab’s research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. For more information about Dr. Golomb and an overview of her article, go to Making Sense from Dots of Light on the FABBS website.

Making Sense from Dots of Light

For Julie Golomb, it all started with a college course in visual perception. “I realized that all of these things I take for granted about how I perceive the world are actually really hard challenges for the brain to solve.”
How do we recognize our coffee mug? How do we pick out a friend’s face in the crowd? Or know that the round, white and black thing flying at us is, in fact, a soccer ball?
This constant bombardment of rich and usually moving pictures start out simply as dots of light hitting different spots on the retina.
Those dots create a map of where things are in the world before heading to the brain, where the deep processing takes place that Golomb studies in her lab.
While the brain is busy almost instantaneously processing incoming data, the world outside is continuously moving and changing, as are our eyes–an emphasis in Golomb’s lab.
In one experiment, Golomb may ask volunteers to determine whether two objects that appear on a computer monitor are the same shape. “Or we’ll flash a bunch of different objects on the screen and then ask, ‘What color was presented in a certain location?’”
Among interesting findings: When asked to pay attention to two squares of different colors, such as red and blue, volunteers might mistakenly describe one of the colors afterward as purple.
“The brain has a hard job, and it does a remarkable job,” Golomb says. “But it is not perfect.” A lot of learning about the brain is based on its mistakes.
Golomb also asks volunteers to complete tasks while connected to tools such as functional MRI, which images their brain, or an EEG machine, which records electrical activity on the scalp. She uses sophisticated computer models to analyze how the brains are processing information.
As the technology changes and develops, so do the possibilities with brain research. And it’s not just new equipment. “We’re asking better questions and new questions based on what we’re continually learning.”

FABBS February 15, 2019 Newsletter

Posted on: by:

ADMINISTRATION

Deal Reached to Keep Government Open; Administration FY 2020 Budget Request Delayed

At press time, a budget deal to avoid another partial shutdown awaited the President’s signature. The conference report provides budgets for the remainder of fiscal year (FY) 2019 to nine departments and dozens of agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF). The bill would give $8.075 billion to NSF, a $308 million increase from FY 2018, reflecting $6.52 billion for research and related activities and $910 million for the Education and Human Resources Directorate.

During the uncertainty leading up to the budget deal, FABBS joined nobel laureates and science community leaders on a letter to Members of Congress and the President. The letter explained how the shutdown harmed the American scientific enterprise.

Congress will turn their attention to the FY 2020 budget and will once again be facing budget caps, according to a 2011 deficit reduction law. Since the Budget Control Act of 2011, Congress has waited until the very last minute before coming to bipartisan agreements to raise the caps. In the absence of an agreement, Congress will face spending cuts of $126 billion from this year’s levels.

AGENCY ACTIVITES

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health has issued a request for information to gather broad public input on a revised definition of behavioral and social science research. The definition is used to assess and monitor NIH support of the behavioral and social sciences across all NIH Institutes and Centers. Comments must be submitted through IdeaScale by February 22, 2019.

NSF Announces Substantial Funding Opportunities Relevant to SBE Scientists

There are new funding opportunities at NSF for behavioral and brain sciences. They are called the “Big Ideas” and they focus on critical issues in science and society. The purpose of each Big Idea is to motivate dynamic and innovative scholars to create and implement new and potentially transformative interdisciplinary approaches to some very large societal challenges. See letter from NSF Associate Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arthur “Skip” Lupia here.

Joanne Tornow to Lead Biological Sciences Directorate

Dr. Tornow has served with NSF for nearly two decades, including two years as deputy assistant director for NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate (SBE); and a year as acting head of SBE. This past year she led BIO in an acting capacity Her work at NSF has included supporting cross-disciplinary, convergent research that draws on the strengths of scientists and engineers across multiple fields to solve problems.

FABBS joins community sign-on letter urging the Education Department to use research and evidence to inform Title IX Sexual Harassment Regulations

Led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), FABBS joined 72 scientific societies to submit comments to the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed changes to Title IX regulations.

Title IX is the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities that receive federal funding. In November, the Education Department issued draft changes to Title IX that would narrowly redefine sexual harassment and restrict the processes at U.S. schools and colleges for reporting and responding to charges of sexual harassment.

FABBS President, Nora Newcombe, said “The potential rollback of Title IX protections for women has serious implications for science and is of concern to us all. These comments are based on evidence and aim to create safe and productive environments for scientific discovery. FABBS appreciates the opportunity to take a stand to support our female colleagues and the women who we teach and train.”

The comments submitted by the scientific societies today emphasize three major concerns and cite relevant research:

  • The Definition of Harassment Has Been Narrowed at Odds with the Intent of Title IX
  • The Circumstances Under Which Title IX Applies Are Too Restrictive
  • The Notice Requirements Are Too Restrictive

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Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS)

In 2018, VSS became a member of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS).

FABBS is a coalition of scientific societies that share an interest in developing knowledge for the betterment of society by advancing the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. FABBS represents the interests of its scientific societies by

  • Educating federal representatives and Congress about the importance of research in the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior
  • Advocating for legislation and policy that enhance training and research
  • Providing sources of expertise and knowledge to federal agencies, Congress, and the media
  • Encouraging the sound use of science in the creation of public policy
  • Fostering effective interaction between agencies and organizations that fund research and the community of scientists and scientific societies
  • Facilitating information exchange among constituent societies as well as other scientific organizations

To read the latest FABBS news or sign up to receive the FABBS newletter, please see the FABBS News page.
If you have questions about US science policy or funding, please feel free to send an email to or contact the VSS Represenative, Eileen Kowler.

Vision Sciences Society