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
I am on the job market!
Looking for postdocs and/or teaching-focused roles
I study explanations for inequality & what motivates civic engagement, at the intersection of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology with philosophy and policy
I appreciate any leads! lewry.princeton.edu/home
A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:
The Deliberation Taboo
Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Boston French Toast Alert Level: 5 Slices/Severe
Heavy snowfall (10-20 i.!), wind gusts up to 60mph, power outages, coastal flooding (stay off Long Wharf!) and references to the dreaded 40/70 Benchmark! Starting late Sun. or early Mon.
Head out now, with grim determination, to fill your trunk with bread, eggs and milk!
bostonfrenchtoast.com
I have news! After 4 fabulous years at Northeastern, this July I will be moving to Duke—with tenure! It’s hard to convey how grateful I am to everyone who has made this possible: from old professors in Mexico and mentors in the US to students, colleagues, and, of course, my amazing wife and family.
This is one of the main reasons I agree to review papers so often - forces me to carve out time to read them.
Imagination in bonobos!
I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org
We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative
youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
actually looks super interesting though and I'm looking forward to reading it so overall a win
Anyway my nous paper just came out properly if you wanna read way too much about perceptual category representations
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
almost painfully close close up of peregrine falcon in the golden light
New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social! We argue that children's struggle to represent the past and future in common tests of knowledge may stem from difficulties in hypothetical reasoning about imaginary timelines, rather than a lack of knowledge about time. 1/n
academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...
I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊
Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
Dear infant scientist friends,
What's the latest in infant eye tracking in terms of hardware? What are you using, are you happy, is there something I should consider, has there been some development in the last 10 years that I might not know about, etc etc?
Thanks!
#devpsy #PsychSciSky
This was my experience with Tobii too. I regret spending the money on it, because now it's just sitting there after we ran into issues with hardware compatibility that they couldn't (wouldn't?) help with.
hey hey! :) what metric is this btw?
I received a similar response from them.
Remember a true pre-storm French Toast run includes:
Milk
Eggs
Bread
A nice beverage as a treat from Page & Leaf cafe
A beefy book or two recommended by a libromancer
Candles
A journal to finally start your novel
Ingredients for the hex
Anything less is just screwin' around at Market Basket
I love this. Every cog/perception journal should have a Philosophy Corner!
Great new initiative from the editors of Perception: Philosophy Corner. A forum for "accessible reflections on the conceptual foundations of sensory/perception science where empirical insight meets philosophical inquiry". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20
📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣
new york times headline that says "Dogs Build Their Vocabulaies Like Toddlers"
no they do not, thanks for coming to my tedtalk.
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?
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, but rather underwent fission into two separate streams of consciousness which we may, for convenience, dub Lefty and Righty...
It certainly caused me more anxiety than I would "experience in everyday life" 🙄
It was certainly foreseeable, because they explicitly mentioned it in the email they sent!
I think the issue is less about the license itself and more about the fact that the researchers used *individual* people's names and work (rather than an aggregation) without their consent. I didn't do the survey, but I imagine my name (and certainly the title and topic of my work) was used directly
Dear Author, I am Honglin Bao (www.hbao.info), a data science PhD student in Knowledge Lab (https://knowledgelab.org/) at the University of Chicago, working on a study about “The Capabilities and Potential of AI for Automating Scientific Idealization: A Large-Scale Human-in-the-Loop Study” (under UChicago IRB25-1372). As AI plays an increasingly significant role in scientific discovery, this project aims to evaluate how far AI helps scientists extend their work in new directions – or if it is not useful in this regard. This is a research project – it has no commercial purpose. I will share the final draft, technical details, and aggregate results from scientists once the study is complete. We came across your preprint "Principles of music perception" and applied custom AI models on it in accordance with the terms of the preprint license, which generated five new extensions (i.e., ideas proposed by AI based on the same context as your paper). Our pilot study of 400 scientists (excluding you) indicates that around 60% found at least one of the proposed extensions thought-provoking and actionable. However, the remaining reported that AI only generates seemingly plausible but vague sentences. We solicit your help in evaluating whether you think AI is useful or not, since we believe you are the best judge of new ideas proposed from your own paper. No matter where you stand regarding AI and science: From principally believing that AI is prone to producing fake and morally problematic science to finding it useful, or something in between, we hope to receive evaluations that reflect a spectrum of views. The AI-proposed extensions are included in the survey link below. If you consent to review them and participate in the survey, we would appreciate it if you could do so within the next 14 days (it will take you < 10mins). If you do not consent, we will not use your research in this study. If you find these ideas valuable, you are welcome to purs…
Please remove my data from your study. I want nothing to do with this — and I would also point out that if you had done appropriate background work in the selection of articles you fed to the plagiarism machine, you would have found that the preprint of mine you used is way out of date and has been updated substantially since it was first posted. ——— Samuel Mehr School of Psychology, University of Auckland and Child Study Center, Yale University Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!
somebody at UChicago is feeding preprints to LLMs without authors' consent, in a research study
they have the gall to suggest to authors they've opted-in that they volunteer to evaluate the LLMs' suggestions regarding their own work.
lol, lmao even. here is the invite and my reply
I had to spend time looking these people up to make sure it was "legit". I'm still not even sure it is...
agreed. And the email I got back to my queries about this was short, uninformative, and unprofessional.
The worst part of it was that, as an incentive for participating, they offered me the AI-generated ideas that came from scraping my work "for free". Gee, thanks. And hell, no.
