Wonderful opportunity to read for a PhD with two of the most amazing cognitive and computational neuroscientists around!

My 5-year-old is playing "Australopithecus" (pronounced correctly). This is pure luck of the draw, but expect a smug book on how to parent in a bookshop near you soon.

After previously showing kids are gross (see doi.org/10.1177/2398...), we now find that parents get used to it! After starting the weaning process, they stop avoiding soiled diapers. This disgust habituation even generalises beyond child-specific stimuli. Paper: doi.org/10.1111/sjop...

After previously showing kids are gross (see doi.org/10.1177/2398...), we now find that parents get used to it! After starting the weaning process, they stop avoiding soiled diapers. This disgust habituation even generalises beyond child-specific stimuli. Paper: doi.org/10.1111/sjop...

Funded ESRC DTP Strategic joint PhD studentship with me at @notts-psych.bsky.social and @alexhendry.bsky.social on play interactions to improve executive functions. Application details in the link. Deadline: 18th Feb. Please share widely with interested students! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQE738/e...

main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂 looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible. science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv

⏳ Just over 2 weeks left to apply! ⏳ We are looking for talented Cognitive Neuroscientists to join our team at Trinity College Dublin for postdoc positions funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV296/r... www.ktsetsoslab.net/_files/ugd/0...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

I was 2 characters over the limit in a box on a grant proposal, so I did what any self-disrespecting English speaker would: removed the additional Ss (e.g. "focussed") and Us (e.g. "behaviour"). Now I’m 2 characters under. I might apply for citizenship at some point, so nobody tell the Home Office!

I left Twitter when Musk took over, and haven’t really kept up since. It looks like they’ve added two more Xs?

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

1/4 New preprint! We designed an open-source system for auditory brainstem response (ABR), a research & clinical auditory test. Costs $400 to build (vs $10K to buy a proprietary one) and works great! All open-source if you want to make one for your lab or classroom. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

To be fair to the Bold signal, I was also past my best after 35 years

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...

“a tutorial on the acquisition and analysis of the human electrogastrogram. Because dedicated equipment and software can be prohibitively expensive, we demonstrate how data can be acquired using a low-cost OpenBCI Ganglion amplifier.” arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260

Are you curious about electrogastrography, but keep getting chicken-related results when googling "EGG"? We have the preprint for you! In this tutorial, we describe how to acquire and analyse gastric data from human participants. Plus FREE software! Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260

Hey, @collabrapsychology.bsky.social , I love what you're doing overall! But... rejecting review requests is too hard! Declining requires logging in (why?!), and nobody seems to monitor email replies to your requests. Instead, I keep getting automated reminders for a paper outside of my expertise.

Talking today about whether attention can modulate retinal activity, come join! 👁️ #nvp25

I have become what I hate: someone who submits manuscripts just before the winter break. (Mostly due to reviews coming back this week!) If you’re asked to review please feel free to postpone until January. (It’s what I’m doing, and journals usually happily accept. If not, less work for us 🤷)

🎄Early Christmas present: we still have a few presentation spots available! If you’d like to share your research at the Culture Conference but haven’t submitted yet, you can send us your abstract until this Friday, 19 December. Submission details are on our website (link in bio).

Children need mental health care provided by humans, not chatbots. The govt must expand the mental health workforce so that teenagers who are struggling can access timely, in-person support. Our president, Dr Roman Raczka's letter published by @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Look at these thicc zebras… their posteriors attracting ALL the simulated boys to the yard*, like vision scientists to a phase-shifting Gabor grating 🫦 (*So that their pursuit is less likely to be successful compared to neck-targeted attacks.)

🚧 Planned Pavlovia Maintenance – December 27th 🚧 During this time Pavlovia Servers will be offline. You may need to update old PsychoPy releases to continue smooth syncing to Pavlovia - see this discourse post for details. discourse.psychopy.org/t/pavlovia-m... Thanks for your patience 🙏

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

Quick post on @jonaspotthoff.bsky.social new paper! We found people looked more at novel foods at an experimental buffet, including insects that they find gross! People suppress disgust avoidance when making foraging decisions. Blog: www.dalmaijer.org/2025/12/fora... Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.fo...

Would you eat insects, or is that disgusting? @jonaspotthoff.bsky.social used mobile eye-tracking as people browsed a buffet. They looked longer at insect and unfamiliar snacks, but only rated insects as disgusting. This suggests disgust isn't always avoided when foraging decisions have to be made!

SEND ME YOUR BOOKS! Brandi Lee Drisdelle and I are taking over as @pec-ipe.bsky.social book review editors. Have you written or read a new book in this space? Please let me know! Note that perception is broad: it encompasses the outward senses, but I'm also open to e.g. interoception suggestions!

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)

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

This paper is now out in Artificial Intelligence Review Bottom line: using LLMs to "simulate humans" sits in a no-man’s-land between theory and empirics—too opaque to function as a model, too ungrounded to count as evidence. Validation remains the core challenge. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New paper out today w @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social and @lucymaplin.bsky.social as part of the Phil Trans special issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb.... Over 2 years, we studied a population of cockatoos thought to be the source of the innovation of bin-opening.

On to our 2nd session on pathogen disgust in humans! @dalmaijer.bsky.social showed how the brain and stomach talk during disgust, revealing fast brain-to-gut signals, longer gut-to-brain feedback, and gastric rhythms acting as a “reservoir of caution” against contaminants 🤯 !

The perceived embodiment of proper disgust is entirely different than that of “political disgust”, which actually closely overlaps with anger. Excellently timed preprint, with @disgust-nerds.bsky.social starting tomorrow. Hope someone brings this up in the “Is moral disgust really disgust?” debate!

I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X. Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.

Are you working on a project where you need to infer whether individuals are socially learning? pathways, correlates of, and individual variation in sensitivity to social transmission? Consider joining the hand-on STbayes workshop to learn about the latest update to the NBDA framework

The spirit of this is fine: basic research is the foundation for any useful technology. But also important to note that it’s not always physicists! Sometimes it’s a random weirdo in a university basement trying to measure telepathy and accidentally discovering modern electroencephalography.

Isn't "nah, mate, on paper we just rent this thing we seem to own" the exact type of thing First Brands just got in trouble for? Love to see these kinds of innovative stress tests of the financial sector. Glad we all learned a lot since 2008.

Very cool findings on socially transmitted knowledge across generations of orangutan. What a great day for ape papers!

WOW! What an AMAZING new preprint by @csarabian.bsky.social et al. on disgust and fear processing in chimpanzees. Responses are less accurate and slower for visually induced disgust, and initially better but ultimately worse for disgusting smells. FOUR experiments! Read it! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Stepped away from my desk for a bit, and noticed that I could somehow hear my music in a different room. Tried to figure out how it was carrying over, only to realise I was vibing on the reverberations of the kitchen extractor fan. Does not reflect well on my taste in music.

By-effect of Cloudflare being down (www.cloudflarestatus.com ): can't access some papers, as many publishers use it to screen traffic. OOPS! Ironically, copies that people uploaded to their personal websites are still accessible. Who would've thought THOSE copies would be the most robust?!

For a rapper, @suryagayet.bsky.social has been prolific in vision science. Nevertheless, it’s exciting to hear a new music release! (Language warning: all in Dutch. Although so far less profane than some of his earlier work 😜)

Cognition as yeast action.

A recent redesign of OSF by @cos.io led to widespread access failures. What began as a few broken download links became for me a total disappearance of eight years of DOI-registered work. What happened, how was it resolved, and what it reveals about trust and infrastructure in open science

More useful material for the @royalsociety.org’s bio of their esteemed fellow. Though I’m still struggling to understand how a society that claims to value scientific rigour continues to honour someone who spreads so much disinformation.

I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social. We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits. tiu.nu/22989

Delighted to see another validation of MouseView.js, this time to test its usability for biases to alcohol-related stimuli. It was reliable, and captured overt attentional bias in those with high problematic drinking scores. For more info, read the paper by Thulin et al.: doi.org/10.1016/j.ps...

📈🧠 We're looking for brains! 🧠📈 Postdoc + PhD positions are available to help pioneer fetal MEG with optically pumped magnetometers, measuring prenatal responses to sound and light to understand how we start making sense of the world even before we're born. 🐣 Please get in touch to hear more!

Found myself nodding along to the first post, and being pleasantly surprised by the data in the rest of this thread.