Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Nice blog by a programmer giving his experience of AI in its current form www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_th...

A variation: Scientists who claim they’re “not interested in causality” because they assume the term only applies to deterministic, law-like relationships that are unrealistic in their field. Instead, they’re interested in how “X drives Y”, the effects of X, the “extent to which X matters for Y”>

📢NEW OP-ED! Together with the brilliant @taniaduarte.bsky.social, @markwong.bsky.social, @suoman.bsky.social & @timdavies.org.uk we wrote for @techpolicypress.bsky.social why the new UK Government AI Skills Hub is undermining our democracy. Our 🔑 points are->🧵 www.techpolicy.press/the-real-cos...

The lesson for all the students out there is that science is a community project. Most of us make individually small contributions to this project. Success is measured at the collective level. Many of our professional (and personal) dysfunctions could be fixed by more fully embracing this view.

The publisher estimates the Bayesian Workflow book will ship in June www.routledge.com/Bayesian-Wor...

Do goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6

The Iowa Gambling Task is an extreme example of Jingle Fallacy and schmeasurement. In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99. At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.

It's good to hear that the English government is investing in SEND training for teachers, but it matters enormously *what* they're being taught, and *who by*... and have they considered ensuring that kids learn about this stuff, too? Here's one of my talks about this stuff: youtu.be/kDVBkGEmvFw?...

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

"The rewards to 'discovering' a spectacular scientific finding [in psychology] are large; the rewards to debunking frauds or deflating exaggerated claims are small if not non-existent. If these are the rules of the game, we should not be surprised at the way the game is played."

“You cannot change a reality that you cannot name.” —Kimberlé Crenshaw Name the systems of power. stimpunks.org/pathways/sys...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Anthropomorphizing language conceals the limitations of AI, promoting misplaced trust. @emilymbender.bsky.social & @nannainie.bsky.social suggest focusing on a system’s functionalities: instead of saying a model is “good at” something, say what it is “good for." www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-t...

Feel like this fresh year needs some serious culture change? We got you covered! With @clarekelly.bsky.social @eikofried.bsky.social Anna van 't Veer 📝 rdcu.be/eXja4

Gavin Monks, 48, is vaguely aware that before this morning he had hobbies, interests, and possessions, but has no idea what those could be, and even less idea where such possessions could ever be found.

Here, have a #painting. "Savage Rowan" came out of a challenge from an artist friend of mine where we both painted the same scene. This was mine and it eventually went to a good home in Galway. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtYear

Where are the engineers, materials scientists, physicists who care about artificial lighting and noise reduction or dampening in different environments? Is anything being explored in terms of friendlier solutions that are sustainable and inexpensive? (1/2)

New podcast. An investigation of the emotion of shame as it applies over the festive period open.spotify.com/episode/0rW5...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Passionate about women's mental health? Interested in brain stimulation? Excited by cutting edge neurotech? Come do a PhD with me! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (thread)

Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2) www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...

Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2) www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...

A #painting from a series I did of a bay in the west of Ireland. "Bertraghboy Bay 5" came out of a day cycling in Connemara where I was on a high from the incessant beauty of it all as every bay and mountain came into view. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtAdventCalendar

Teach like a Luddite! In which I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to argue for a Luddite praxis in education grounded in three elements: embracing strategic playfulness; developing localized tactics; and building networks of resistance. Read the article at Kappan:

An excellent letter from @cjcrompton.bsky.social on the profound challenge that the double empathy problem poses to how autism is described and researched.

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!

This is also a #neuro-affirming & integrative approach that suits autistic and other neurodivergent YP. @thewoodbug.bsky.social is fab on this topic! www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1... #monotropism

New editorial with @sarah595.bsky.social and @heasutherland.com We use our experiences working in UK special education and social care settings to explore some of the challenges of including autistic people with complex support needs in research. With recommendations!

On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

A complete and utter cockwomble has reportedly appointed themselves as an expert in your personal circumstances, deciding in their infinite wisdom that your autism is “only mild”.

Donders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠 Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇 www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

New paper with @statsepi.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social in which we show there's really no evidence for a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

First up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

This work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉 Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6 Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social

I'm looking to create an advisory group for a project on Monotropism, an attention-based theory of autism and potentially ADHD. If you or anybody you know is interested, please fill out the form below. Thank you! forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Parents of neurodivergent children in West Yorkshire seek support “They gave us a couple of sessions after the diagnosis, then some leaflets, then we were dropped from that service. It makes you feel unwanted." www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/...

"It’s essential that autistic people, regardless of age, have a way to communicate. Spoken words should not be valued above other methods, & AAC should never be taken away by parents, teachers, or caregivers. For many autistic people, using alternatives to speech is not a choice – it’s a lifeline."

@garymarcus.bsky.social argues for developing different, specialized AI tools for different domains, rather than hoping that one general artificial intelligence will be able to do everything. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/o... #AI

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ammar I. Marvi, Nancy G. Kanwisher, et al: An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

happy to share this new article on reporting standards in autism intervention science: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41070555/ Autistic people deserve the highest standards of evidence based practice and reporting practices in this field fall woefully short. We offer recommendations to improve that.

“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.” collectivefutures.blog/the-infrastr...

A #painting from Ireland's south coast. "Ardmore" is an exalted place for me, not because of the Round Tower, but because when I was small I stayed in a caravan and every day you'd jump over the dunes to the beach after first eating a bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice. #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #TidesOutTuesday