"However, the education system alone cannot eradicate the attainment gap, so a true strategy would include a plan to reduce and ultimately to end child poverty in the UK"

Research led by Dr Sam Forbes and Prof John Spencer shows that young children who experience richer, face to face interaction develop stronger neural pathways for language processing than those primarily exposed to screens www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... @samhforbes.bsky.social

> LLMs are labor intensive, are economically infeasible, and pollute the environment, and these properties may outweigh any proposed benefits. For example, poor quality air directly harms human cognition, and thus has compounding effects on educators' and pupils' ability to teach and learn.

🚨🚨JOB ALERT🚨🚨 I'm hiring a cogsci/philosophy/compneuro postdoc at @ucl.ac.uk @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH486/p... Come to London & work on frameworks for "testing" for consciousness using Bayesian belief updating & latent variable modeling. Pls share!

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share our new paper in Child Dev! 🎉 We taught children names for 'monster' toys. Some names matched the sounds they made, some didn't. Children, especially 3-yr-olds, learned matching names more easily. Iconic words support word learning. Read here: track.smtpsendmail.com/9032119/c?p=...

Are you a #secondaryschool teacher or school leader? We're looking to hear from educators across all areas of the curriculum about how #vocabulary is being supported in your school. Please share, thanks! ⏱ 15–20 minutes (can leave & return) 🎁 Chance to win a £20 voucher tinyurl.com/UoYVocabular...

As always, clear thinking from @mcxfrank.bsky.social but I’d emphasise two things that he implies: 1. If you are going to use it make sure you check everything (and that may not save you any time by the end) 2. You don’t have to use it. You aren’t going to miss the boat.

@samhforbes.bsky.social and I wrote about this exact thing with air pollution and iirc back when we were all on twitter more than a few bros got upset we said it To Improve Literacy, Improve Equality in Education, Not Large Language Models doi.org/10.1111/cogs... pdf: philpapers.org/archive/FORT...

New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending osf.io/ucxra_v1

My friend @samhforbes.bsky.social doing the most incredible research www.instagram.com/reel/DXT1kiu...

Why do kids learn better from gestures than visually similar actions with objects? In our new paper out in JoCN, we looked at how the brain responds to both. Check out the full paper here: doi.org/10.1162/JOCN... Thanks to @ycleong.bsky.social Susan Goldin-Meadow, Marc Berman and all collaborators!

Only a few more days left to apply for a 5 year postdoc with me and Sergio on the neurobiology of child language development. Apply via the MPG postdoc program portal www.mpg.de/en/max-planc... Deadline 13th April

lingthusiasm is always fun, but this episode is *extremely* fun

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited! - `filter_out()` for dropping rows - `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats! tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Recurring Crises in Psychology "The current responses to the replication crisis, although valuable, are not ultimate solutions because they deflect fundamental questions and postpone the reconsideration of the ideals of psychology as a science." Open Access: doi.org/10.1177/1089...

Pretty neat stuff!!

In case you are unaware of this. @olivia.science is great!

There are a few good books and guides, my (biased) suggestion is the text I wrote for this very purpose engra.me/books/matlab/

Critically, we also need the public to support actions that enable older people to live great lives without having to drive for when they fail the eye tests. So the public need to get onboard with no pavement parking, pedestrian priority, denser housing, fewer out-of-town shopping centres, etc etc

For people using the @ukbiobank.bsky.social UKB RAP cloud system for brain imaging analyses: In order to make RAP much easier to use, we have created a Docker which is easy to install and gives you a graphical desktop, FSLeyes and the HCP wb_view. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Seems like a genuinely horrible idea that will only serve to amplify existing biases in selection

I won’t tag them but there are a few fairly large science-adjacent accounts on here (who are followed by a lot of y’all) who have been bashing the work and person of @irisvanrooij.bsky.social for the last few days. I feel it important to note that, as far as I can tell, those people are full of shit

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

And for anyone looking to recruit a superstar post-doc 👉 @anavili.bsky.social 🏆 has just submitted her thesis and is on the lookout, mainly in the fields of #perception, #attention, #workingmemory, #pupillometry, #eyemovements! #nvp2025 #psychology

Rethinking power in #AutismResearch: Intersectional, Participatory, & Afrocentric Futures? Book our January seminar with @drmbothapsych.bsky.social & Dr Olivia Matshabane, facilitated by Dr Sohail Jannesari. @kingsioppn.bsky.social @journalautism.bsky.social www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/quahrc-sem...

Scientists now believe that the human brain--a magic goo for worrying--can also be used to do other things

Nominations for the UKRN Dorothy Bishop Prize 2026 have opened! Named after @deevybee.bsky.social, the prize, first awarded in 2022, celebrates the contributions of early career researchers to research improvement. Nominations close 18 January 2026. #AcademicSky #Research

Good morning! My dissertation students and I would appreciate your help with our study investigating how neurotypical and neurodivergent people approach multi-tasking. As compensation, you can enter to win 1 of 4 £20 vouchers. Links are below! Email any questions to [email protected] :)

New paper from our work on Project NeuroSync published in Infant and Behavior Development. The interaction between caregiver scaffolding and infant object engagement is associated with better visual working memory in 6-to-10-month-old infants. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"It is noteworthy here that in all likelihood, the wealthy would still continue to receive high-quality personal instruction while the less wealthy would be taught by these potentially problematic LLMs due to resource constraints." — me and @samhforbes.bsky.social ☹️

We're looking for great students interested in language processing and cognitive development in fNIRS. We use HD-DOT / fNIRS and eyetracking to understand how infants develop. If interested see the scheme and please get in touch.

Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

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

library(dplyr) Haul %>% group_by(candy) %>% arrange()

Gosh with any luck you might be able to avoid doing science altogether

This isn't research... sorry

Proudly published with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: A metatheory of classical and modern connectionism. doi.org/10.1037/rev0... We touch on what has been up with connectionism as a framework for computational modelling — & for everything it seems these days with AI and LLMs — pre-2010 vs post. 1/n

Take a look here, article linked to is: Guest, O. & van Rooij, I. (2025). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. PsyArXiv. doi.org/10.31234/osf... bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Excited to share my first PhD article, published in Scientific Data 👉 rdcu.be/eIRqD We present the Shared Book Reading Corpus: 44 caregiver-infant dyads, 3 camera views (headcams + overview), speech transcriptions & developmental measures. Access on Databrary for discovery & reuse! ✨ #OpenScience

Check this out! 🌟 👇 👍 🧪

Weird ggplot thing that got me this week with the update to 4.0 - it supports new ink and paper arguments (www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09... ) and they've changed how transparency works! If you a transparent bg, you can control it with theme_*() now #rstats

Ode to the original language model, or: Give me literally Anything* instead of Large Language Models (LLMs) *(no predictive coding either!) By Lady Byronadrea LLMartin 1/n

It would be really nice if academic institutions and governments pushing "AI is the future" stopped buying the hype and admitted they were conned, so we can get back to thinking through useful solutions to world problems.

Don’t miss it! 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞: 𝐀 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 Organised by the Diversity in Developmental Science Network, featuring 𝐃𝐫.𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚 𝐀𝐧𝐞𝐣𝐚 as a panellist. 📝 Registration: forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

Deleted...should have done it ages ago

Woah! Amazing PhD positions on children as agents of cultural evolution with one of the foremost experts on the topic.

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...