People form ad hoc conventions, establishing linguistic & gestural abstractions, and shift information across speech and gesture to communicate more efficiently over time. We study this in our #CHI2026 paper, led by Kiyosu Maeda with @judithfan.bsky.social @rdhawkins.bsky.social and team 🧵👇
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After watching Richard McElreath's lecture on measurment models, I got comparatively more excited about my working paper with Yaroslav on accounting for non-classical measurement error in belief-updating experiments and my foray into measurement and time-series econometrics. A thread. #EconSky

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Since I'm pontificating about good scientific practice (while procrastinating & not actually doing science), here's a reminder of my guide on the role of theory in cognitive science (NB I do not claim to be a theory-driven science expert - comments welcome docs.google.com/document/d/1...

recorders are sometimes attached to non-human animals (or left in the environment). This generates day- even week-long recordings. I want to learn more about the methods used to analyze such data. Pointers? @animal-prattle.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @manymindspod.bsky.social

My course notes have been updated to discuss how different models can be reframed in terms of a learning update rule (fusaroli.github.io/AdvancedCogn...) feedback is very welcome, as I was making it up as I was teaching the other day :-)

Well, this happened and no rpg nor boardgame was bought (hard as that actually was) and today we’ll be painting roaches. You can’t really go wrong with roaches right?

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth. Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word! More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

I'm going to a game shop to buy miniature paint with (and for) the kids. Wish me luck! (I have an almost 30 year gap in my rpg exposure, will I be utterly bewildered? will I buy everything in the shop? will i try to get my kids into Vampire the Masquerade instead?)

We’ve started the Futures Library to share key ideas and people that drive our research. First posts feature pluriversalism, cosmotechnics, a magic lantern and an allohistorical map. ideophone.org/the-futures-... thanks in no small part to @samiraibnelkaid.bsky.social !

On the publication bias discourse, I regret that metascience has become a source of decontextualized, low-res, bean-counting-focused `science is in crisis' narratives. It is largely uncurious abt science, desperately lacking in theory & measurement. I'll quote a few takes I liked & add my thoughts🧵

Curious how language can emerge within swarms of robots? 🤖🗨️🤖 Then join our "Swarm Robotics for Language Evolution" workshop at @evolangconf.bsky.social, where you'll get to explore this topic through a live-coding demo and hands-on simulations. More info and signup here: romamile.com/SwarmLangEme...

In today's modeling class I had a lot of fun trying to reconduce a bunch of different models to the update rule from rescorla wagner :-) it turns out that - at least for RL, bayesian update, kalman filters and hierarchically gaussian filters - it's "all" in the learning rate definition.

New paper in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... Coupling surveys of ~8% of the adult Danish population & results of 123 million covid-tests, we show that psychological feelings of coping lowered infection risk. Feelings of fear did not. Authorities should empower people, not scare them.

New (competition funded) PhD opportunity with me, @iaciac.bsky.social and @dralgernon.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project... Higher-order networks and animal communication. Suited to someone keen on network science theory/computational modeling and keen to adapt this to ecology & evolution.

love it when I'm teaching in class (at 8am😱), and the uni calls for cancelling in-person teaching due to snow, and the students look out to the winter wonderland and still decide to keep having the class :-)

Now the first lecture is live, but since I was so excited I forgot to share the screen on the recording for the first half of the class 🤦‍♂️: - Video: youtu.be/YLEhNc5sOFE - Slides: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/okiys...

I also want to hear about your favorite recent (<5 years 😅) Stan and Stan-adjacent developments that changed your bayesian framework (thinking about models, validating models, fitting models and checking their fit and how they break)!

as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

The handaxe enigma continues! Brand-new method shows: one can shape a handaxe without cultural models. Paper open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440326000154

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?> With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

wanna learn about cognitive modeling and love pizza? I am revising my cognitive modeling course notes and could use some feedback (or you might just enjoy learning about cog modeling in R and Stan): fusaroli.github.io/AdvancedCogn... (only chapter 1-3 are in place, the others will come)

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published: doi.org/10.1162/QSS.... @tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Last night I was reading an otherwise amusing comic book w the kids. But seriously! Who makes up Japanese this way? It took me a while to persuade the kids that I’m not a fake, this is fake Japanese 😅

I'm very excited about this paper with @yngwienielsen.bsky.social just out in @nathumbehav.nature.com in which we provide evidence for the mental representation of non-hierarchical linguistic structure in language use. 🧵 1/4 Read the paper here: rdcu.be/eZ26u

Our new review of beluga sociality and culture just dropped at Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology! Some of our key conclusions summarized 🧵 doi.org/10.1007/s002... @marine-valeria.bsky.social @dmennill.bsky.social @raincoast.org

There is an absolute banger of a case study on modeling a linguistic experiment on Michael's patreon, thinking carefully through the whole data generating process and I am so looking forward to the video run through. Absolutely worth supporting him (do that and we'll get more :-))!

Family down w the flu. Irascible kids trying to defy my directive to find something to watch together, one wants a cooking show, the other monsters. The Japanese:hold my beer! The day is saved. W not too bad discussions of ecology (of dungeon ecosystems)

The trick here is basically to run screaming away from dichotomizing findings and into the warm and loving embrace of the vast language we have for describing uncertainty and scale, interpreting whether it matters accordingly. Use figures that make it clear.

Maybe the effect is small and straddles zero? That's cool too, don't sweat it. "Treatment had a small, but likely positive effect on outcome (Beta=.1, 94% C.R. [-.05, 0.25].) Dead-centered on zero? "We found no clear effect..."

You’ve build a probabilistic model and, for a small data set, computed posterior inferences with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Everything works great and, flush with confidence, you throw the model against all of your data only for everything to go to hell....

Advance your research and expand your network at SFI's 2026 CSSS program with lectures, application-focused seminars, and team projects. Participants gain experience in transdisciplinary collaboration and explore real-world questions through complexity science. Apply by Feb 4, 2026 santafe.edu/csss

📽️ “Claims about scientific rigour require rigour” / with Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social youtu.be/qNJ8xqaObR8?... The event was organised by ReproducibiliTea UniBasel

Our machine learning competition on forecasting depression is online! We'd love for as many people as possible to participate. Please share in your respective networks — thank you :). www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/announcement...

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...

Computational Social Scientists in the Nordics, unite! 🇩🇰🇫🇮🇳🇴🇸🇪🇮🇸 The brand new Nordic Society for CSS welcomes all researchers and practitioners based in the Nordics. The Society will promote student mobility, events, and education initiatives. Join for free: nosocss.org/join.html.

may you have the joy of iSeek in identifying lice. I for sure was not that thrilled 😅

If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

it always takes a while to adjust to the faroese rhythms and weather. and yet it's always hard to leave

Applications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty. Apply by Feb 4, 2026 www.santafe.edu/gwcss

Not my beloved Romagna wine hills, still not the worst place to run (and get my first running related injury)

while this was an easy to write list of our 2025 papers (go read them, awesome ECRs spreading their wings!), it's harder to write one about lessons learned. Make time to think, make time to talk to those you care about although distant, busy, hard. don't lose sight of what's fun to do.

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