andrea e. martin

An embroidery of an inner ear done in bone white thread on dark purple linen. The centre of the spiral is labeled “nave of vibration”, the body of the inner ear is labeled “plumes of sound”, and the tubes are labeled “windows open.”

It’s #WorldHearingDay to raise awareness about hearing health and accessibility. Here’s my #SciArt #embroidery of the cochlea/inner ear—nave of vibration (2017)—which I did while researching my symptoms of hyperacusis.

This is it: this why I finally snap and become the joker

Rare find of dark green Alpine #Fuorite from the Gasteiner Tal, Hohe Tauern, Austria.

Bramberg museum specimen

#mineral #crystal #mineralogy #mineralexpert

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good? - Computational Brain & Behavior I present an ontology of criteria for evaluating theory to answer the titular question from the perspective of a scientist practitioner. Set inside a formal account of our adjudication over theories, ...

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good? doi.org/10.1007/s421...

A Metatheory of Classical and Modern Connectionism doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

relevant work from @andreaeyleen.bsky.social and myself:

How Computational Modeling Can Force Theory Building in Psychological Science doi.org/10.1177/1745...

On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks doi.org/10.1007/s421...

...

Oh, and a related talk too from last week, kindly recorded by @bcbl.bsky.social, in which I analyze ANNs when used as scientific instruments of study and when functioning as emergent arbiters of the zeitgeist in the cognitive, computational, and neural sciences.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DHg...

Haitian Creole: The Complete Beginner’s Guide An overview of the sounds, sentence structure, tenses, nouns, and basic phrases in Haitian Creole

For most people, a Creole is a broken version of another language. This couldn't be further from the truth. This is an extensive overview of the Haitian Creole language!

#language #Linguistics #Langsky #Languages #Haitiancreole

medium.com/language-lab...

How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Kindness is a radical act in a violent & selfish world.
It’s our greatest, and most underutilized, superpower.

REMINDER

trying to stay calm and do work in a fascist world is itself a radical action

a world that wants to destroy independent knowledge, universities, education, still contains people who want to gently think and teach without dehumanisation and destruction

And since n-grams are all you need, this provides some nice converging evidence that speakers probably use very local representations to pace their utterances, say by retrieving phrases. We would love comments!

Less is more: Probabilistic reduction is best explained by small-scale predictability measures The primary research questions of this paper center on defining the amount of context that is necessary and/or appropriate when investigating the relationship between language model probabilities and ...

We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659

This is a wonderful thread of quotes from Mary Everest Boole, a pioneering mathematician and (I'd argue) developmental psychologist. She beautifully describes the power of mathematics for seeing beyond appearances and, especially, for providing tools to define exactly what we do not know. 🧪

Cover page of a manuscript of al-Khwārizmī’s Ninth Century book Algebra. Al-Khwārizmī has been falsely claimed to have been the inventor of algebra, but the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus had written an algebra text in the Third Century, and in any case a form of algebra had been in use long before then. Moreover, in his introduction, al-Khwārizmī says clearly that the work he presents is a compilation of what was known at the time. However, his book Algebra was the first such in Arabic, it did put algebra “on the map”, and it did initiate the chain of books that leads to present day algebra. Moreover, Islamicate scholars who followed him did much of the early development of algebra. That’s quite a legacy. Images of al-Khwārizmī in circulation are all works of fiction.

I learned algebra without ever thinking about where it came from. Algebra literally means "reunion of broken parts": using logical reasoning to discover what is unknown.

It's a tool for clarity of thought...among many other things.

Great essay by Keith Devlin at link. 🧪

maa.org/math-values/...

I'm addicted to these videos from a bakery in Uzbekistan

this bread is beautiful

More than a century before the mobile phone, a #Victorian love poem using #textspeak. See two even earlier examples here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/nineteenth-century-textspeak/

Theory What is a cognitive scientific theory?

some resources for cognitive scientists — especially for junior scholars who ask me wonderful questions and want to learn more — on theorising and metatheorising olivia.science/theory/ (not 100% finished & more to come, but all my work is freely available here: olivia.science#publications as usual)

that quote reminds me of the opening quote we used @andreaeyleen.bsky.social here:

[A]ll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. (Marx, 1894, p. 592) doi.org/10.1007/s421...

so even a baby knows "correlation does not imply cognition" 🙃

a past senior colleague mocked this paper and it's so funny to me because like we cooked???

It is at the data and hypothesis levels that preregistration and similar methods attempt to constrain science to avoid QRPs (e.g., Flis, 2019; Szollosi et al., 2019). To ensure scientific quality, however, we propose that preregistration is not enough because it serves only to constrain the data and hypothesis spaces. Researchers who wish to develop their formal account of a capacity must ascend the path instead of, or in addition to, for example, preregistering analysis plans. Preregistration cannot on its own evaluate theories. We cannot coherently describe and thus cannot sensibly preregister what we do not yet (formally and computationally) understand. Indeed, theories can and should be computationally embodied and pitted against each other without gathering or analyzing any new data. To develop, evaluate, and stress-test theories, we need theory-level constraints on and discussions about our science. Figure 2 can serve as a first step in the right direction toward such an ideal.

“To develop, evaluate, and stress-test theories, we need theory-level constraints on and discussions about our science.”

By @olivia.science & @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (2021): doi.org/10.1177/1745...

once your email storage is full you should be allowed to graduate from it. no more emails for you. you’ve seen enough emails. you’re free now

🗣️ We have invited Olivia Guest (@olivia.science), assistant professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University, to speak about how we reason over artificial neural networks.

We are eager to learn more about her work!

Discover more about it here👇

www.bcbl.eu/es/noticias/...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

Just came under a MASSIVE PSYCHIC ASSAULT at the grocery store

Cleopatra lived closer in time to 'yeet' being in the dictionary than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

A Latin document displaying continuous script.

As many of you may know, the word 'intelligence' comes from the Latin 'intelligentia'. Something that is not so well known is that the word is a transformation of 'inter' (between) and 'legere' (choose, pick out, read). There were no spaces in old texts (scriptio continua);
1/2

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...