AI "impedes [theory because we're] interested in human-understandable theory and theory-based models, not statistical models which provide only a representation of the data. Scientific theories and models are only useful if [we understand them and] they connect transparently to research questions."

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I've been slowly but surely recreating half of PyTorch Lightning in Jax with Numpyro to use as a way of organizing codebases. github.com/esennesh/num...

🧪🧬🌏🦠🔭

🎓⚕️🧪🔬📰 The way we do science today is very vulnerable to clickbait and sensationalist headlines Remember the microplastics in your brain, in male testes and in your bloodstream? It didn't make sense with what we knew, but it made great entertainment. #BadScience www.theguardian.com/environment/...

"Our job is to find the correct choice of specifications, not to see how many changes a result is robust to. A result can be completely correct, and yet not be robust to even small changes; conversely, a result can be robust to many different changes, and yet be wrong." By @captgouda24.bsky.social

A Population Vector Model of Visual Working Memory for Real-World Scenes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.23.701256v1

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness url: academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Whether you love causal graphs, hate causal graphs, or just want to find out what the heck a causal graph is, you’ll want to watch my talk on how to *actually* make causal graphs. Sign up at the link below👇🏼

Grateful for this beautiful review of our book, "Teacher Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Teaching: A Sociocultural Approach" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I wrote up some thoughts on why the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument - a mainstay in linguistics and other areas of CogSci - is not (really) an argument. I also argue, controversially, that usage-based reliance on LLMs to refute the POSA are weakened. 🧵 vincentcarchidi.substack.com/p/on-misunde...

This is so, so good

Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry? New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com. Thread tomorrow. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

As an editor of a scientific journal, this essay feels very familiar: it’s about how AI coding tools are making it harder to maintain quality in open source software. The solution cannot be to just use AI agents to evaluate too, right? What historical parallels can we learn from?

Science journals retract 500 papers a month. This is why it matters

The Thing Trap: How Language Locked Us Into the Wrong Model of Mind ocrampal.com/things-to-be... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

Reliability and validity of multi-band multi-echo fMRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.16.699838v1

Wake up, babe, heir to the dead fish fMRI study just dropped. www.nature.com/articles/s41... thx @sifu.tweety.fish @jimthommo.bsky.social for the tip. Whooooof.

On Jan 15, 2026 I attended the webinar “Methodological Misalignment in Cognitive Measurement”, by Olha Sobetska. It offered a sharp reminder that many so-called cognitive errors are really measurement problems. Thank you for organizing @johanneskleiner.bsky.social #conscio #cognition

ECogS 2026: International Conference on Embodied Cognitive Science Nov 9–13, 2026 | OIST, Japan Theme: “From Embodied AI to LLMs and Back” Details forthcoming: www.oist.jp/conference/e... #embodiedcognition #AI #conference

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴? That I don't know but D Brooks discusses some ideas of my book, The Entangled Brain: '"neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions,” which, like a murmuration of starlings, “forms a single pattern from the collective behavior."' www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/o...

It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:

Congrats to @markbrandonlab.bsky.social and his lab for this exciting discovery about the hippocampus and reward:

Those really big effect sizes are one target for establishing what’s-what in particle physics and should be for us too. And then, of course, there’s the importance of understanding how human behavior & brains work /1 arxiv.org/html/2411.00...

(Cheeky ref: www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...)

I love this so much. After pushback on his recent "Medicine is the only field that reaches 6 sigma" with "my field, psychophysics is so awesome" he posted this. Hurray all Psychophysicists. LETS CELEBRATE PSYCHOPHYSICS. An island of large effects is us!

Does morphology support novel word learning through statistical learning? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

At Google, we know we are built on an open ecosystem. Supporting maintainers as critical infrastructure is vital, so we're celebrating a second year of sponsoring Alejandro Colomar’s work on the Linux man-pages. 🛠️ www.linux.com/news/celebra... Have the Linux man-pages helped your workflow?

New paper in Computational Linguistics with @giosuebaggio.bsky.social. Responding to Matt Mandelkern & @tallinzen.bsky.social's arguments about the "referential" capacities of LLMs by leveraging some internalist critiques. direct.mit.edu/coli/article...

On Smallest Effect Size of Interest: Its Development and a Simplified Procedure: https://osf.io/g2yv5

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:

If you're interested in a short behind-the-scenes of the retraction of a mega-metascience paper—the first of its kind (the retraction, not the paper)—this might be for you! Had to gloss over so many details to observe allotted time but happy to share an extended version of my slide deck with links.

Was a honor to give this SfN Special Lecture & share 10 yrs of work from the lab on its 10th anniversary! Thankful to the incredible lab members, collaborators & participant volunteers who made this work possible. Link to video recording here👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVhD...

How little we understand of the #biodiversity we are fast-trashing. And how we have underestimated the sophistication of not-at-all "primitive" creatures phys.org/news/2026-01...

Not sure why this old STS dissertation has not been cited more, but this history of neural networks (from 1991!) by Rodríguez is a very rich (laudatory) text. Based on readings of papers, contemporary news, and interviews w Minsky, Rumelhart, Webros, and many others. web.archive.org/web/20250730...

Are you thinking about doing neuroscience outreach but want to make it more exciting or hands on? Check out RetINaBox! (A collab led by the Trenholm lab) We tried to bring the experience of experimental neuroscience to a classroom setting: www.eneuro.org/content/13/1... #neuroscience 🧪

New preprint: Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making. A review I was supposed to write 3 years ago for my VSS Young Investigator Award. Better late than never 😅 I tried to organize the literature and explore the likely mechanisms. Feedback welcome! osf.io/preprints/ps...

great read if you're interested in what they're training the next round of models to be good at

Brain waves do NOT shape a sense of self The full functional explanation: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

We are pleased to announce that the first LEVANTE data release is now publicly available! To access and download the pilot data, follow instructions on researcher.levante-network.org/data. This data release accompanies the preprint linked in the thread.

New paper by Thomas Fuchs, The Experiential Basis of Concepts, is about how concepts “scale up” from embodied experience to abstract thought. Concepts are rooted in bodily action and intersubjective practice. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... #EmbodiedCognition #Enactivism #4EA #PhilosophyOfMind

Using brain lesions and DNN models, this article suggests that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Amazing news!

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

New at The Progress Bar: The system for funding science is fundamentally broken. To fix it, we need to do more than change who gets funded, we need to change how funding decisions are made. theprogressbarwpi.org/p/doing-expe... 🧪

New paper from @nigelflower.bsky.social’s 2025 thesis: an RPVP-MEG study on the neural representation of quantification finds that LATL responses are consistent w Restricted Quantification theory, suggesting discourse-sensitive conceptual combination. Congrats Nigel!! 🎉🎉

world models are in sort of the same place as 2019 image generators imho where they deliver peak dreamlike surrealism but not a lot of sanity or coherence did you know you can do parkour off the skybox? you can. if you approach it from the right angle it gets mistaken for a slanted vertical surface

Oh wow, deepseek is starting to make serious progress on LLMs that offload memory to external storage: github.com/deepseek-ai/...

Pretty wild that LLMs seem to have trained on my 2019 article of "The product-minded engineer" and I now find blog posts published in 2025 that are an exact rehash of my post. Because if you ask an LLM "write a blog about a product-minded engineer" they spit out mine!!

Been wanting to write about time perception, and here it is: syntheticselves.substack.com/p/why-time-f... Some notes on what we know about how we have subjective perception of time, the role of memory, synchronization of bodily rhythms and AI’s attempt to replicate it.

For a quick glance at our key findings, see our quoted preprint thread. Elated to finally see this published. Huge thanks to @helenblank.bsky.social, the Predictive Cognition Lab, and colleagues at @isnlab.bsky.social. This project truly took a village. 👏