It was so great! Really lucky to have been able to listen and learn from Barbara, Liuba, & Benedek. Some of the most insightful research happening today, from just the absolutely nicest, coolest people.

I hope those reporting on Alpha read this thread (or better yet, the article). bsky.app/profile/vauh...

Heading for my last day of the ESPP in Warsaw. Amazing to see philosophers and psychologists in one room. It was a privilege to talk about how symbols and compositionality emerge in babies alongside @ljubapi.bsky.social and @benedek.bsky.social 💕 to @ericman.bsky.social for organizing the symposium!

This was such fun!

If you teach cognitive psychology or related topics & are willing to share your favorite teaching resources (e.g., demos, videos), please reply to/quote this post, tag me in a new post, or send me email. I'll compile them, share the list, & keep updating it this summer. Let's inspire each other!

Gorgeously fuzzy regent parrot bub 🤩

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️! We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺 🔗 minds-making.github.io June – July 2024, free & open to the public (all career stages, all disciplines)

The quality of evidence in psychology publications has improved substantially over the last two decades, across all subareas. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Ecologists’ horror as nature reserves around the world are emptied of insects - with rising temperatures joining habitat destruction as likely causes: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A little bear figurine carved out of amber some 6,000 years ago 🐻 ❤️ A hole runs through the bear’s torso, suggesting it was threaded onto a cord and perhaps worn as a protective amulet. Discovered in a peat bog near Slupsk in Poland. 📷 National Museum in Szczecin. #Archaeology

important historical perspective on the value of federal funding of basic research at universities: "These are the building blocks of America's extraordinary strength, created over the last 100 years, and they are now being dismantled in 100 days" 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qk4...

<<help requested>> Folks working with human volunteers: What do you do to ensure your advertising and recruitment texts use *inclusive language*? Looking for examples; the more specific the better. Feel free to reply in thread or direct message. Please repost and share for visibility. Thanks! 👍

🚨 Language connection FOUND in chimpanzees? 🧠🗣️ For years, scientists thought the key to human language was a fibre connection, missing in chimp brains. New high-res brain scans just changed the game. 👀🐒 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Neuroscience #LanguageEvolution #Chimpanzees 1/n 🧵👇

A deep sense of gloom descended on Birmingham‘s York Road this evening as people came out in number to mourn the absence of cars.

Labour is handing this country on a silver platter to Reform. People do not vote Labour because they hate immigrants and want Reform-lite. They vote Labour because they want it to make a positive difference to their lives.

I'm THRILLED that our book is out. This book, with other 60 contributors from across the globe (!!!) is a love letter to the science we want to do, and a how-to guide for how to do it. Please read it and share it!

TLDR: new paper headed up by @vestaeleuteri.bsky.social & with an awesome team, incl @andrearavignani.bsky.social , showing chimps have rhythm in their drumming & differences b/w east & west drum rhythms! www.cell.com/current-biol... But didn’t we know this already you ask? Well… 🧵1/16

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Wonderful cover, and amazing research by Zhang et al. - they used classic Chinese poetry that mentions the Yangtze finless porpoise (724 poems in total!) to estimate the range contraction of the species over the last 1400 years. Such a creative approach to generate truly novel data!

Very much looking forward to the first "BabyLab Session" today! Created from a wonderful collaboration between The Exchange @unibirmingham.bsky.social and @bbabylab.bsky.social, the series will be a wonderful opportunity for families to learn about fascinating science in a baby-friendly context.

🗓️ Thursday 8th May ⏰ 10:00-12:00 📍The Exchange, Birmingham ✨completely FREE✨ but sign up here: www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/the-e...

It's Fustilarian Friday, so today NSF is announcing that they, too, are slashing overhead rates to 15%. www.nsf.gov/policies/doc...

My dream of organizing science-based community events for babies and parents to share our research, hear from families, and learn together is now coming true thanks to the wonderful teams of The Exchange University of Birmingham and @bbabylab.bsky.social and many fantastic colleagues and students 💕

We're looking for a PhD student interested in developing brains and developing new methods to study them! Anna Kowalczyk and myself have a fully funded PhD position to advance OPM-MEG methods for infant and neonatal brain imaging. 👉 Please repost to help us spread the word 🙏 More info & links 👇

New Peekbank preprint! A snapshot of what we've learned so far about developmental change in word recognition using the large-scale repository of infant eyetracking data we've been building (~ 2000 infants; ~3500 individual test sessions)

Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years as a result of a deliberate strategy. Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people. Good trade.

💕

Very pleased to share the fMRI pipeline paper from the fetal release or the developing human connectome project, a true labour of love and incredible work from Slava Karolis #dhcp #connectome #fmri direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

📢 Call for Reviewers 🔍 The 2025 Program Committee is looking for FIT'NG members to help review abstract and symposium submissions in late April. ℹ️ If you are interested in being a reviewer, please fill out the form linked below. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #FITNG2025

I hope that they will at least remove the Code of Conduct from their website. Its function appears to be purely decorative

As drawings were transmitted across generations, they became increasingly regular, organized, and symmetrical, despite participants trying to copy accurately. These changes are argued to reflect general cognitive biases in perception and memory (ht foundational work by @simonkirby.bsky.social ). 5/

What are we talking about, when we talk about 'representations'? My undergraduate student, Oyinkansola Olorunleke, is conducting a thesis project on the concept of representation in cognitive sciences & neuroscience. We are seeking interested participants in the below survey: tinyurl.com/2e6rcnxv

An important bit of detail in this story: “They also lower the intensity of bushfires by burying leaves & branches that fuel fires, thereby shaping whole ecosystems.”

Data management (and sharing) in neuroscience: balancing possible, practical and perfect solutions | Brain Communications | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/braincomms/a...

A brilliant lab manager in my dept will likely have her only PhD offer rescinded due to reductions in funding. Her visa runs out this summer so this has turned her world upside down. If you know of any post-bacc psychology jobs that would sponsor an international applicant (H1B/J1) please share. 🙏

People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

1/7 Cumulative culture/knowledge occurs when information builds up across generations through a combination of innovation and transmission. In our new paper, we investigate the role of teaching and its coevolution with learning in this process. 🔗 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Proud of our students 💕 grateful for the opportunity ☺️ always a pleasure to connect with children and families.

Still a couple of days to apply for this fantastic job (DEADLINE: 2nd March 2025). Join us to do amazing neuroscience in one the most collegial lab ever. We study brains at all ages!

#neurojobs Looking for a new role as Professor in Human/Cognitive/Translational Neuroscience? @thechbh.bsky.social has great facilities, lovely people...and an open position: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLW735/p...

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩 Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365... Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

6/8. In science, and in institutions of learning like colleges and universities, there is a shared understanding that edicts should not go unquestioned—that we all have a duty to systematically investigate the world around us and to interrogate claims about it. We do not simply obey.

I told you to read Hannah Arendt.

How do languages become learnable for young children? Our new paper in Current Biology shows how “Immature vocalizations elicit simplified adult speech across multiple languages.” 🧵 of our findings below: www.cell.com/current-biol... 1/9

Grid cells have a geometry in time. Thanks to @azvollan.bsky.social l & @rjgardner.bsky.social for this heroic discovery. @ercresearch.bsky.social #KiloNeurons @m-bmoser.bsky.social @kavlintnu.bsky.social @nature.com @kavlifoundation.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are humans the only species that communicates when a collaborator is missing information? In @pnas.org, Luke Townrow and I show that our closest relatives, bonobos, can track when a partner is knowledgeable or ignorant, and tailor communication accordingly www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

✨ New paper in @openmindjournal.bsky.social ✨ If you're curious to find out *how* babies and young children understand *helping*, have a look at this new paper from our lab (by @bpomie.bsky.social and collaborators) 👇

New academia-industry PhD opportunity in my lab co-supervised by Dr Dave Punt, Physio for Stroke clinic at @unibirmingham.bsky.social, and Dr Naveed Ejaz, MindMaze. www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/cen... Deadline*: Wednesday 5 March 2025 at 5pm. Funded by Centre-UB www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/cen...