2025 has been a heavy year, but a few fun studies (finally) came out! Check the thread(s) for work on turn taking, causal inference, vowel hyper-articulation, vocal markers of schizophrenia and prehistoric symbolic behaviors! 1/

Detailed vignettes demonstrate basic and advances use cases github.com/michaelchime....

My book is now available as a PDF here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It will still always be available in HTML (here: jamesblandecon.github.io/StructuralBa...), and HTML will be my preferred version (the tables look better).

Now out in TopiCS as "Simulating Symbolic Evolution in the Lab: Potentials and Implications of Using Transmission Chains to Study Early Symbolic Behavior at the Emergence of Homo sapiens" doi.org/10.1111/tops... Thread below! w @felixthehauskat.bsky.social & many others.

I spent my last 2w of research time understanding and implementing hidden markov models in Stan. I had an application case (improving automated diarization, based on manually coded snippets), but really I wanted to learn HMMs :-) What happened? <fig courtesy of @betanalpha.bsky.social> 1/

Two-year post-doc position in my department working on a cool project applying cognitive science (transmission chain experiments and natural language processing) to study cultural evolution: tinyurl.com/bdeju6kw

kids changed the game to make it harder when playing for fun than when playing to win (& chose similar win-irrelevant stuff in both) So, 'playing for fun' optimizes for something other than external outcomes (e.g. knocking down all the blocks or getting a prize)

it took a few days of steep learning and fun Stan coding, but I think I'm onto something (hidden markov models to correct automated annotations of time series based on a few snippets of manual annotations). Now onto stress testing the algorithm with way more noisy emissions!

Academic publishing is broken due to for-profit actors. Time to explore alternatives as researchers → A Diamond Open Access conference, Feb 5-6, 2026 in Nijmegen NL. Free registration (limited seats): horizondiamond.nl Let's build a sustainable publishing infrastructure together.

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

A really neat new paper on interpersonal heart coordination in the wild following 3 groups during organized trips in New York.

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...

The Groningen Spring school on Cognitive Modeling is back! Join us from March 30th-April 2nd, 2026! www.ai.rug.nl/springschool/

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.

🧠⚙️ Interested in decision theory+cogsci meets AI? Want to create methods for rigorously designing & evaluating human-AI workflows? I'm recruiting PhDs to work on: 🎯 Stat foundations of multi-agent collaboration 🌫️ Model uncertainty & meta-cognition 🔎 Interpretability 💬 LLMs in behavioral science

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

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof). We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice! international.au.dk/about/profil...

Our Tuesday guest speaker @interacting-minds.bsky.social 25th Nov will be @graceqmiao.bsky.social joining us remotely. All are most welcome in person or online interactingminds.au.dk/events/singl... Thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social for organizing

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

for all of you using the ALIGN library (to measure lexical, syntactic and semantic alignment in conversations), Nick Duran has put together a great refactoring: ALIGN 2.0 (github.com/nickduran/al...), now integrated with Spacy and Bert

A new paper suggests that variance in length of utterance might be a better measure of linguistic skills than mean length of utterance: pubs.asha.org/doi/abs/10.1... I had that thought while working on this: doi.org/10.1016/j.co... but never pursued, yet it seems very persuasive: 1/

I remember reading a paper on the causal confounds involved in analyzing only RTs from successful trials, but I can't find it again. Maybe, @dingdingpeng.the100.ci, you mentioned it at a certain point?

Speaker diarization issue: I have long audios automatically diarized (timing and labels of vocalizations) + 5-minute snippets manually diarized. What is the state of the art to assess matches and biases? I wrote a script to get familiar w the issues (1toMany, ManyTo1 matches, etc), so 1/

just spotted this while double checking a collaborator's scripts before uploading them to OSF - @solomonkurz.bsky.social :-)

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

that was 56 mails needing actions, and about 300 that got archived or deleted (probably missing out on some info, but alas...). Good news is that I'll likely send the computer to repairs before being done with all the 56 mail-related task (let alone those who cumulated in the meantime) :-)

Hey complexity and complexity-adjacent people: What are some of your favorite pop-sci books? Are there any you've had your eye on but haven't had a chance to read yet? They can be new or old. I'd just love to know what y'all are reading!

The computer has been at the repair shop for three days and with it my access to work email and calendar. I forcefully got it back, still unfixed. I think I need a glass of wine before opening my email (or to put my mind to better things instead)

Do parents exaggerate the pronunciation of words they believe their infants don’t know yet? Our new paper suggests no. ❌ w/ @julienmayor.bsky.social & @nataliakartushina.bsky.social 🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy

Today at 11am @interacting-minds.bsky.social, we have Aaro Tupasela, senior research fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki coming to give a talk: Building health data spaces for research in Finland - Some cautionary tales for the EHDS

Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)

This year Demis Hassabis predicted AI could cure all disease in a decade. But other scientists like Claus Wilke & Derek Lowe say biology is far more complex, or progress will be limited by clinical trials & economics. In a new 4hr podcast episode of *Hard Drugs*, we answer: Will AI solve medicine?

Just out - "Art Beyond Cognition: Reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission" by Straffon & Tennie

Silly 2012 me visiting a village in New Mexico that had been inhabited continuously for 1000 years: err, is that impressive? My not so impressive hometown is at least 2000 year old... that was idiotic, but I now discovered that the oldest hominin remains in my hometown are 800000 year old 1/

italian pools: take a shower before the pool. NO NAKED SHOWERS! scandinavian pools: take a shower before the pool. ONLY NAKED SHOWERS! japanese onsen: the personnel will chase you if you try to cover yourself your nakedness with the tiny towel provided and inform you it's only for the head

Revision posted! An evolutionary model of identity signaling with nested/overlapping/intersectional identities, complex multidimensional signaling capabilities, and a primer on ancient Mesopotamia. What more could you ask for? osf.io/preprints/so...

Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I happened to (re)read an autobiography of an Italian ethnographer, Fosco Maraini, amazing (biased) character. His childhood and ebullient youth climbing mountains meshing with intellectuals, his trips to Tibet and Japan, the japanese prison camp for being an anti-fascist and much more. BUT 1/

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

It never gets old, does it?

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

🌍Introducing BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data! LLMs learn from vastly more data than humans ever experience. BabyLM challenges this paradigm by focusing on developmentally plausible data We extend this effort to 45 new languages!

Thinking of your academic paper as less your magnum opus and more as a line of dialogue in a greater conversation can take the pressure off scientific publishing. Here are my most recent thoughts on "Science as a Conversation": niklaselmqvist.medium.com/science-as-a...

Happy with this popular science article about our work (with @lindadrijvers.bsky.social and @judithholler.bsky.social), showing that listeners use co-speech hand gestures to predict upcoming meaning ✋ www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...

Conversational turn-taking feels effortless, but it's a complex dance. We find social context—who you're talking to and what you're talking about—fundamentally changes conversational dynamics in both autistic & TD children. 1/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... w @chrismmcox.bsky.social

I haven't given any news a while, I've been nose deep into this novel preprint with my excellent collaborators @stepalminteri.bsky.social, @urihertz.bsky.social and Bahador Bahrami: "Uncovering the semantics of teaching in experiential learning with Large Language Models". doi.org/10.31234/osf...

The first publication of the #ERC project ‘LaDy’ is a fact and it’s an important one I think: We show that word processing and meaning prediction is fundamentally different during social interaction compared to using language individually! 👀 short 🧵/1 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... #OpenAccess

www.envisionbox.org has been shortlisted for the Leo Waaijers Open Science price: ukb.nl/en/news/shor... @babajideowoyele.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @sarkadava.bsky.social @DavideAhmar @acwiek.bsky.social Amazing Markus Küpper made an animated video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduI...