Huge congratulations to @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social l who defended his PhD thesis today!! with his co-supervisor @sblldtrch.bsky.social and jury members @simonkirby.bsky.social @gboleda.bsky.social Paula Rubio Fernandez & Benjamin Spector.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

::slowly stands while clapping::

New paper! ⚡ With Gabriel Aguirre and Marcelo Sánchez, looking at patterns of blowgun types and use across societies of the world. We find areal patterns, similarities mediated by cultural connections, and specific types characterizing distinct branches of the Austronesian language tree. 🎯

I am on a 6 hour train journey without air conditioning, but it’s worth it because I am heading to #SLE2025! This is my first linguistics conference in a while.

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Want to easily scrape data from news media sites? There's an R package for that! paperboy "paperboy offers writers of web scrap[ers] a clear path to publish their code & earn co-authorship on the package, while deliver[ing] news media data from many websites in a consistent format."

For some reason bluesky doesn’t work on Firefox anymore, event after I updated it. Is it the case for anyone else?

:: (not really) Trigger warning:: Stay in your lane, or pay a career penalty www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Language depends on copying (e.g. of words, signs). And language in turn is needed for many other things. When and why did our ancestors gain this ability to copy? Our (Ron, Elisa & me) archaeological reanalysis says: in the last million years. Just out: dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

🚨New publication alert! "Corpus-based approaches to evolutionary dynamics in language" (w/ @stefanhartmann.bsky.social) out now in the in the Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution. Kudos to @limorraviv.bsky.social & @cedricboeckx.bsky.social for putting this great volume together!

you know all gen 1 pokémon, of course you could. reminded of brandmaier.github.io/ggx/

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)

Out now in @pnas.org! 🌹Is a rose by any other name still as roselike?🌹 We study the prevalence of iconicity (does a word look/sound like what it means?) and systematicity (are pronunciation/meaning relationships shared across multiple words?) in large datasets of ASL, English, and Spanish. 🧵1/N

Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

"Emissions linked to Chevron, the highest-emitting investor-owned company in our data, for example, very likely caused between US $791 billion and $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses over the period 1991–2020" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Apply for our PhD position in language acquisition / computational linguistics in Groningen until 24 April! Job ad is here: www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

Psych-DS is (1) spellcheck for your datasets and (2) a pathway to standardizing data in our academic fields that *everyone* can learn. And it's live RIGHT NOW! psych-ds.github.io (This is the announcement post I've been leading up to)

This looks useful -- A Dataset on Linguistic Connectivity Across and Within Countries #linguistics #languages www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

Game changing study in @science.org by @berthetmelissa.bsky.social and co. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Inspired by my reading this week, I wrote a list of the resources I think every cognitive science researcher should read/listen to about theory development. It's in this google.doc (feel free to add your own suggestions) and in the thread below. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

🚨 Our Call for Papers is out! 🚨 We continue our tradition of providing a dedicated platform for presenting computational work that bridges formal methods and traditional inquiry in the arts and humanities. Check out the website for all details: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/

🚨PAPER ALERT! Unlike chimpanzees and marmosets, vocal sequence production in mangabeys does not show a developmental trajectory. We also present a novel largely applicable Bayesian approach to evaluate individual vocal repertoire size. This can be applied to any signal type doi.org/10.1038/s420...

While waiting for the cricket to start, I thought I'd see what the citation data said about this question. Which new-ish books have been cited at the highest rate in philosophy journals in recent years. brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...

i think where i'm at personally is i want my academic papers to be easy and free for humans anywhere to read and download, but i don't want people to put them into a big woodchipper to produce specialized woodpulp that they're trying to sell to get rich and ruin the world.

Hello, Bluesky! Pleased to share that my first public-press article, on the shifting debate over what makes human culture unique, was published today in @us.theconversation.com. I review recent literature suggesting that cultural open-endedness, not cumulative culture, is our true defining trait.

🚨🚨🚨 I'm hiring a Postdoc for a 3-year position to come work with me at the University of Oslo using iterative learning experiments to understand the evolution of sound symbolism. Please share widely. 🔴 Deadline is May 31st '25 ⏲️ Desired starting date is Fall '25 shorturl.at/vSTZx

I can confirm that this is one of the best PhD opportunities available right now, if not the best.

Why did @cos.io stop showing the contents of attached GitHub repositories? I know for a fact that the repository is correctly linked with this OSF archive since all the files were displayed before they were moved to the "Files" tab. How am I supposed to anonymize my data files now?

Does compositionality exist before/outside language? And what does non-linguistic compositionality mean btw? Some new thoughts and results on this: rdcu.be/ecVZI #ThoughtOrigin #ERC

Interested in a paid PhD position in the Netherlands? Join me, Annemarie van Dooren, and @arianna-bis.bsky.social on a project to develop computational models of modal verb acquisition. A job ad will be out soon, but here's a preview: yevgen.web.rug.nl/phd.pdf

This excellent interactive tutorial on misleading data visualizations explores the idea of a "counter chart" — the graph you draw in response to refute a misleading claims flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

Last call! Deadline for our summer school on political intuitions is tomorrow. Application docs are few so there is still time to apply

Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

FIIINNNAALLLLYY omg YES YOU DID IT YOU PUT AI IN IT MOOAAAAARR GIMME MORE KEEEEPPP IT COMIN PUT IT IN MY CEREAL PUT IT IN THE WATER PUT AI IN MY MICROPLASTICS CRACK OPEN MY BONES AND PUMP IN AI SLAUGHTER EVERY BEAST OF LAND & SEA KILLEM ALL PUT AI IN INSTEAD YESSS MOOAARR AI

JOB ALERT! Come work with me! 34-Month Postdoc Position here at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in my project "Paths to Polysemy" Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas... Please repost & share widely!

How important are your #postdoc years in the likelihood of you staying & succeeding in #academia? In our newly published paper in @pnas.org, "Postdoc Publications and Citations Link to Academic Retention and Faculty Success," we study the journey of #CareerSuccess of ~45,000 #postdocs. 🧵1/7

Macaques on Japan's Shodoshima Island enjoy leaving chalk marks on stones. They have no symbolic purpose, but recognisable geometric features (parallelism, intersections, repetitions). (paper) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-024-01176-y

So cool!

Does effort make life more meaningful? Was Sisyphus living the dream? In our new paper (now accepted in Cognition!), across 6 studies with nearly 3,000 participants, we found that more effortful tasks feel more meaningful 🧵

A new preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... about one paradox in word order #typology. On the one hand, SOV has longer dependency distances and therefore higher processing costs than SVO (@rferrericancho.bsky.social, H.Liu, Futrell et al...)

Pigeons navigate along idiosyncratic routes that improve between generations. Cumulative cultural evolution? This study shows that the same cumulative route improvements spontaneously emerge in simple artificial agents. Paper in @plosbiology.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1371/jour... (1/4; video at end!)

More people speak English today than any other language in human history. But what do we lose, psychologically and culturally, as a result? For this week's @newyorker.com, I explore how English shapes thought—from our conception of time to how we talk about the senses.

Challenging game of draw the time series on.ft.com/3DpQ8vZ

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We’re moving inexorably towards a world where communication will involve human senders entering brief telegraphic summaries, machines expanding these into wordy prose to be sent to another machine that will produce brief telegraphic summaries for the human receiver.

I am delighted to share our latest piece of research: ‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’. This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date. A thread: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Check out our new paper with Olivier!