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:

2025 Recipient

Freek van Ede

Associate Professor, Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Freek van Ede obtained his PhD in 2014 at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (Radboud University Nijmegen), working with Eric Maris, Ole Jensen, and Floris de Lange. He then received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and a Newton International Fellowship to pursue five years of post-doctoral research at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (University of Oxford) in the Brain & Cognition Lab, working with Kia Nobre and Mark Stokes. In 2020, he received an ERC Starting Grant (European Research Council) to found the Proactive Brain Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and in 2022 he received an NWO Vidi grant (Dutch Research Council) to expand the lab. Freek received various recognitions, including the Young Investigator Awards from the Dutch Society for Brain and Cognition (NVP, 2022), the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN, 2023) and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS, 2023). In 2024 he was featured on the SN10 ‘Scientists to Watch’ list from Science News Magazine. Freek currently serves as associate editor at The Journal of Neuroscience as well as on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Visual Cognition. At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he is board member of the Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, serves as department PhD-candidate advisor, and teaches the research-master course on Cognitive Electrophysiology. Together with his team, he investigates how the human brain dynamically selects and transforms information in working memory to prepare for flexible goal-directed behaviour – developing experimental approaches to track the dynamic nature and neural basis of the human mind and bringing together research on visual working memory, selective attention, timing, decision making, and action.

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.”

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, Jeremy Wolfe.

Vision Sciences Society