If I were on a mission whose computer system required me to deal with Microsoft Outlook in space, I’d give up and go back to the slide rule

Sadly, not an April Fool & also not surprising. “An analysis conducted by @nature.com in collaboration with Grounded AI suggests that at least tens of thousands of 2025 publications, including journal papers, books, & conference proceedings, probably contain invalid references generated by AI.” 🧪

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

As a belated contribution to promoting our new paper about animal calls, here's one of my all-time favourite animal vocalists: the magpie ♥️ This one was particularly friendly and had seemingly learned to sing to people at the camp ground in exchange for sandwich crumbs.

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/ NEW in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology — our first review of a decade+ of research on understanding & predicting cultural change, with Michael Varnum. This one is personal. A thread on what we found, what surprised us, and how two kids reading Asimov ended up here. 🧵

Thank you NPR for this great coverage of our research!! you can read the paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Start calling literature reviews “the lore”

who wore it better? #australia

I loved this piece. I think sincerity is our greatest weapon. My experience as a professor and parent is that there is a desperate *craving* for authenticity nowadays, perhaps even especially among those who have poisoned themselves with irony and think that earnestness is cringe.

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Super excited about this new paper! and eternally grateful to the amazing coauthors, the wonderful network of colleagues who gave us stimuli, and all of the thousands of people that listened to animal sounds for us!

Update: we've extended our timeline! Review of applications will now begin March 24. Still plenty of time to put together an app! disi.org/apply/

Out now in Science: The Truman Show, but with killifishes! "Continuous recording of a vertebrate’s adult life from adolescence until death would provide a complete view into the behavioral architecture of aging." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In one week I'll be talking about tips for reproducible R code and why science would love you to try these tips on your own code too 🧪😍🌏 It's an online talk, so feel free to watch comfortably from your couch. Hope to see you there! @sortee.bsky.social #rstats events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...

Oxytocin is typically described as a "social" hormone. In our new article, we propose that it should instead be viewed a hormone that modulates behavioral flexibility doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

"Analyzing video footage and location data from headcams and GPS devices, respectively, the authors found that social information, specifically where other participants were fishing, influenced foraging behaviors, especially for women" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

The canvas() function from the ggview R package is very useful for previewing/tweaking a ggplot into publication-ready format: it renders a plot "as it would appear if saved to a file with the specified dimensions". cran.r-project.org/web/packages... #RStats #ggplot #ggview

I am writing to announce a 5-year Research Fellowship in Music Science at the MARCS Institute, Australia. You will design and lead research projects that use mathematical and computational approaches to investigate music and its cognition. Further details: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/WesternSydne...

Riffing off this. I think a further risk with LLMs is that it de-socialises knowledge by circumventing human sources and training people to just ask a bot when they need info rather than another person. I don't think that is inevitable, but I think it is a real risk with long-term consequences.

A new paper dropped out on "Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Understanding the evolution of human semiotic behavior is a crucial (basic) scientific enterprise & really difficult, so kudos! I have thoughts: 1/

Since it has escaped the bubble, and people are talking about how evolutionary just so stories are used to legitimate rape, let me mention one of may favorite papers: Lisa Lloyd’s demolition of Thornhill & Palmer’s book “A Natural History of Rape”. #sts #hps repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Cheers to that (or Bula! / Manuia! / etc depending on which island you're on...) Cool paper from @vaclavhrncir.bsky.social, Olly Sheehan, @scottclaessens.bsky.social & Russell Gray with a nuanced take on whether kava consumption is associated with the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania

I've been reading comparative cognition for almost 30 years now, and it continues to be frustrating how terrible other primates are at vocal learning and music perception, two hallmarks of human cognition. The gulf is so great, makes it hard to test theories of our cognitive evolution.

**Postdoc position in human category learning** @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social. www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

For-profit academic publishing companies: We add value to make science better 🙏🏻 😤 Also for-profit academic publishing companies: Hmm, you tried to access some academic articles. Seems suspicious. You're blocked! 🚫 🙅

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

The Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) and Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) are holding a joint meeting in 2026, to be held at the University of Auckland from July 1-4. Abstract submissions now open! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

Great to see this crazy psychophysics of pitch perception paper out, basically showing that the brain does a 'motion detection' of spectrotemporal correlations to infer pitch sometimes. lead author: Parisa Vaziri www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Very excited that this paper is out! www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

Dplyr continuing to fix and add to an already amazing suite of tools for data wrangling: tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02... Excited about filter_out!

This paper is a great for teaching phylogenetic trees. "Ancient DNA reveals elephant birds and kiwi are sister taxa and clarifies ratite bird evolution" Clearly written. It discusses hypotheses of relatedness among species via continental drift vs genetic data. 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very interesting research paper that shows that using AI with programming can significantly reduce mastery over topics. Perhaps unsurprising, but the lack of significant speed gains in this exercise are remarkable www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Now here's a good use for AI and linguistics: "Mandarin pronunciation has been hard for me, so I took ~300 hours of transcribed speech and trained a small CTC model to grade my pronunciation." simedw.com/2026/01/31/e... #linguistics

I decided to give one of my most well liked project a bit of a make over, and I wrote about it too! See how I updated the visuals of r-color-palettes emilhvitfeldt.com/post/r-color... #rstats

If you're looking for a PhD and you're interested in the cerebellum, predictions, language, and MEG, please apply by 1st March! We have two open positions. More details here: benediktzoefel.wixsite.com/home/phd

Democracy doesn’t require perfect truth—but it does require something more fragile: independent voices. The “wisdom of crowds” depends on independence between judgments. If a single actor can speak through thousands of inauthentic accounts, the apparent consensus of the crowd stops being informative

Have been searching for a particular estimate of something these past few days, and failing that, trying to indirectly calculate it... finally, I stumble across a promising osf.io link buried in the supplementary materials of a paper... but of course, OSF is down for maintenance today 😑

New postdoc position with the LEVANTE project! We're looking for someone with language development / reading knowledge to help work on our international adaptations of language assessments. Please forward to interested candidates

Deadline for submitting a symposium coming up on 31st Jan Students submitting a talk before 27th Feb may be eligible for one of 40 $500 (AUD) student travel awards

I'm excited to be organising the joint EPC*-APCV^ meeting in Auckland this year, with @sampendu.bsky.social @courtneybhilton.bsky.social @paulcorballis.bsky.social & Chris Erb. Info here! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/ *Experimental Psych. Conference ^Asia-Pacific Conf. on Vision

Useful and not really CS specific!

Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers “We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” (Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

❤️ paperbarks

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

thought provoking idea from @edhagen.net : make social media accounts for your papers