Exciting PhD opportunities in Aberdeen (inc. international)

#PortfolioDay N° 04142026 Greetings fellow denizens of the blue skies. I'm and old school D&D nerd who draws fantasy maps for a living. While sharing is much appreciated, it's not mandatory. Comments, though, are most welcome. You may now resume scrolling and have a pleasant day.

My recent comment extends Shiffrin et al.'s (2026) essay on "Illusions of understanding". While they focused on multiple ways of understanding linear regression, I extend these ideas to a complex model class in cognitive science: Evidence Accumulation Models (EAMs). (1/6)👇

This is great! I've used Stan and JAX separately for different projects in the past, both are great, so hopefully this will be a huge step forward towards making Bayesian models faster. And then perhaps brms can now be used with Stan -> Jax as well?

Interesting, but as a person engaged with normative behavior modeling, I cannot help but notice that based on this plot, choosing AI would lead to better overall performance if I had to decide whether to use AI or not. And from a practical perspective, people use LLM differently depending on goals.

New paper with Stefan Glasauer now out in PloS Comp Biol, explaining repulsive and attractive biases in vertical perception within a single Bayesian framework. dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

I've spent last week trying to decode orientation from EEG data. The biggest insight I got is how noisy it is compare with fMRI signals I'm used to =) And I seemingly cannot get IEM (or PRINCE-like model) to get above-LDA accuracy (measured as circ correlation), and not for the lack of trying.

1/n New preprint with Ziyu Zhao, @dougaparry.bsky.social, & @jacobtfisher.online Can an AI bot complete a live online reaction-time task & produce data that passes as human? We built an autonomous bot to take the Attention Network Test (ANT) in real time Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I think this is a realistic assessment of the effort needed to build a bot.

🧠 What makes threat memories so hard to forget? 🐍😱 Using focused ultrasound we provide causal evidence that the human amygdala drives rapid threat learning 🐍⚡ and determines how resistant those memories become to subsequent extinction 🐍🚫 🆕📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I've got another #visionscience YT video for you, this time about the optical reason behind the tilted wheels we draw when we want a car to look like it's speeding. Enjoy! youtube.com/shorts/7ilxy...

The effect of sequence stability on serial dependence jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

A reply to my reply about bots in online studies - and a very cool demonstration! I summarized my thoughts in the comments to this post.

I have a joke about a grant but you probably won’t get it

Interesting paper! I think a lot of research in vision science is shaped by history, like how in tachistoscopes era it was difficulty to generate stimuli randomly, so researchers most often used discrete stimuli categories (red vs. green).

Quick YT short about an excellent color #illusion that just came out in @pec-ipe.bsky.social - enjoy! #psychology #neuroscience #visionscience

🏆 @simine.com, psychologist at @psychunimelb.bsky.social / @unimelb.bsky.social and Editor-in-Chief of Psychological Science (@psychscience.bsky.social) is a leading voice in the reform movement in psychology - and is now being honored with the €150K Individual Award. Huge congratulations! 🎉

Traditional polite reminder: If you don't want to review, please click on the decline link (those 'un-invited' are when the potential reviewer does not reply anything within a week).

Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide? Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures. Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops. New preprint: Top of the World osf.io/preprints/so... Thread:

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

@ecvp.bsky.social when is the abstract submission deadline? The website mentions early bird registration deadline but not the one for abstracts submission.

Government-Funded infomercial from Norway striking back at US corporations and the tech Bros for filling the Internet with slop. youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?...

Join our lab in Geneva, as a postdoc working on #workingmemory, with both Jarrod Lewis-Peacock and myself !

In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication. We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #CodeSharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing.

I built a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods. 1️⃣ follow/subscribe to: @neuromethods.bsky.social 2️⃣ like the post with your favorite method ➡️ get a shiny methods label in your profile/posts. 🌟

Awesome work by @sohafarboud.bsky.social! It was a difficult project starting with "let's replicate some animal work" and ending up being so much more.

Our new paper is out in Cognition! What determines whether confidence follows the classic "folded-X" pattern vs. the "double-increase" pattern? The answer lies in the type of stimulus manipulation. Big thanks to my advisor Doby @dobyrahnev.bsky.social and co-first author @herrickfung.bsky.social !

Shhhhh academia still runs on this illusion. How many leading young scholars are below 40?

OSF has been misbehaving for me recently, a lot of "unexpected errors". Would be nice to see a simpler, less error-prone design.

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

With all due respect to the authors, isn't it a bit early to raise alarm? People are different, some don't show "standard" effects. And if you take a bunch of parameters, you'll find some unique patterns. I mean, very strong conclusions based on 36 participants with 2-6 (!) suspected bots.

Set-Size Scaling Effects in Visual Working Memory Models Identify the Decoding Rule Used in Retrieval: https://osf.io/6wk73

This is easily the funniest thing I’ve seen in academia in a while. I’m not sure what the VSS version would be if one went over the time limit for a talk. Thoughts?

Compositional data (proportions that sum to 1) behave in ways standard models aren’t built for I walk through why Dirichlet regression is often the right tool & what extra insight it gives using a real ex of eyetracking #Dirichlet #r #brms #guide #eyetracking open.substack.com/pub/mzlotean...

Ok researchers rise and shine, it's groundhog day - what better way to get you up to date with what has been going on at the FORRT Replication Hub? forrt.org/replication-...

Dear colleagues, please use decipherable axis titles or at least write in the caption what your Greek letters mean precisely =)

I'm curious though if different scoring is a) intentional and b) linked to different interpretation. Do people make a new score because they want to interpret IGT differently?

I'm thinking of where to put the data and code for our recent preprint. Usually, I use OSF but it would be nice to be able to upload / update directly from VSCode. So is Github -> OSF the best way?

A weird column in Nature. First, I find it weird that "two years of academic work" are equated with ChatGPT chat history. Also, hello, backups are useful? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Vision people, we must investigate!

Here’s a thought that might make you tilt your head in curiosity: With every movement of your eyes, head, or body, the visual input to your eyes shifts! Nevertheless, it doesn't feel like the world does suddenly tilts sideways whenever you tilt your head. How can this be? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵 1/n

We're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered. For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...

This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher

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

Dear statistical hivemind, can anyone explain how can plots like this arise when individual differences in two conditions are plotted? Like when estimates in one condition seem to be reversed around some mean compared to another condition. Is it smth about GLMM effects plotted instead of raw data?

I am happy to share that our preprint “𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮: 𝗔 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵” is now out. Huge thanks to @bayslab.org, Julie de Falco, Zahara, @cjungerius.bsky.social, @ivntmc.bsky.social, Adam, and Xiaolu for the lovely collaboration. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺 This Friday, January 16th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Janneke Jehee giving a talk entitled "Uncertainty in perceptual decision-making" In person or online. For more information: www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event