Michael Pleyer

New publication, and first one as a first author for me! 🥳

Have you heard of the brutal chimpanzee and "hippie" bonobo dichotomy? ☠️🕊️

Today, we report similar aggression magnitudes in 22 captive chimpanzees and bonobos groups - be it all aggression or restricted to contact.

Orang-utans and chimpanzees cooperate strategically based on the partner’s incentives Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, are often regarded as a model species for the evolution of human cooperation. However, whether chimpanzees' decision-mak…

Cool new paper from @christophvoelter.bsky.social et al.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Scientific paper published in PubMed. Heading: Object personification in autism: This paper will be very sad if you don't read it. Authors: Rebekah C White et all. Autism, 2018 May. For those curious, here's the original paper: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10053878/1/Personification%20in%20autism_final%20accepted.pdf

Nobel Prize For Titles. Right away.

I think this doesn't seem too bad if you just check the context. I just checked and this post seems to be from 12 years ago and the OP was just curious to know what it looks like, knowing full-well that the green-tint was on purpose

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

“Even though a large proportion of modern day human communication is vocal, the key underlying brain infrastructure operates in a flexible amodal way ... language is flexible because its neural basis is.” Great e-letter by @ybecker.bsky.social & Trettenbrein, responding to our @science.org article.🧪

Really looking forward to this online workshop on Thursday on "Large Language METAPHORS: New Trends in Computational Approaches to Metaphorical Expressions"
www.neplab.it/large_langua...

as @andrameneganzin.bsky.social & Currie point out,

Behavioural modernity, investigative disintegration & Rubicon expectation - Synthese ‘Behavioural modernity’ isn’t what it used to be. Once conceived as an integrated package of traits demarcated by a clear archaeological signal in a specific time and place, it is now disparate, archa...

Our re-evaluation ties into a deeper problem with list or approaches because they can lead people to just look for boxes to tick instead of deeper conceptualisations. This issue has also been identified in investigations of the evolution of "behavioural modernity" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Bender's remarks are reminiscent of a comment made many years ago by a psychologist whose identity I have unfortunately forgotten. The earlier critic lamented my itemization of design features because he felt it could keep people from looking for others, which might well be more important. Of course, no frame of reference should forestall any investigator's inquiry, but when that happens, as it sometimes does, one must allow for the possibility that part of the fault lies with the investigator.

With these comments he also defended himself against M. Lionel Bender's criticism that the features led people to look for "crucial property" of lg. And also basically said it's not his fault people took his list as definitive:

Hockett took issue with how he was often understood: "There is nothing in any of[...] my publications to suggest
that there is some single essential feature that differentiates language from all other communicative systems; if anything, [...] just the opposite."
www.jstor.org/stable/30028...

For Hockett, it was mostly the combination of the features together that distinguish human language from other communication systems. But some properties he saw as more important or "crucial" and potentially unique, eg "No animal system known to the writer shows a significant duality." (Hockett 1963)

The End of Language As We Know It? Scientists Challenge 60 Years of Linguistic Research An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

SciTechDaily has reported on our paper "The ‘design features’ of language revisited" in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. One short correction to the reporting is that Hockett didn't claim that there is "a set of uniquely human design features" (and we don't claim he did) 1/ #language #linguistics

🚨 New Paper: How can AI help us understand child lang dev? If we train models on children’s environment, they can tell us if this environment support learning.
E.g., models tested child linguistic input (Huebner et al.) and visual input (Vong et al.).

What about Social Interaction? (a thread 🧵)

Come work with us! Tallinn Uni is hiring a second lecturer in DH&AI. Estonian proficiency not required, foreign applicants welcome, required phd can be in progress (expected to be completed), competitive salary+benefits, nice working environment close to the sea
candidate.recrur.com/public/jobad...

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Science has now published our eLetter responding to Rajendran et al., titled, “Data show that macaques do not synchronize to a beat”

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

TIL that in Polish the equivalent of calling a dog your "furbaby" is "psiecko" (pies + dziecko = dog + child), which I think is very cute #language #linguistics

Amazing! Congratulations! Just ordered it!

Promotional image for Speaking in Pictures by Neil Cohn

Happy Book Day! My graphic novel Speaking in Pictures is finally out in the world! I planned this book for over 20 years and spent 7 years writing and drawing it, so I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as I did creating it 🥳 www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

This new paper in Science is also accompanied by a cool perspective piece by @mperlman.bsky.social & @bodowinter.bsky.social! #language #linguistics www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper out! 😀 Wir untersuchten die Bedeutung von Sprachpausen in interkulturellen Interaktionen - diesmal eine Publikation auf Deutsch, im Interkulturellen Forum der deutsch-chinesischen Kommunikation 😊

Bedeutungsschwangere Pausen in Kognition und Interaktion: Pragmatische und psycholinguistische Perspektiven auf interkulturelle Kommunikation Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die Frage, wie pragmatische Signale, insbesondere Gesprächspausen, in der interkulturellen Kommunikation als kognitiv und sozial bedeutsame Elemente fungieren...

und Przemysław Żywiczyński im Interkulturelles Forum der deutsch-chinesischen Kommunikation).
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

The Title Page

🚨New Publication Alert 🚨
Perfektes Timing zum Chinesischen Neuen Jahr! 🐎Gerade erschienen: "Bedeutungsschwangere Pausen in Kognition und Interaktion: Pragmatische und psycholinguistische Perspektiven auf interkulturelle Kommunikation"(mit @thematzing.bsky.social, @elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social ...

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

A dynamic network approach to bilingual child data Usage-based approaches to language acquisition emphasize the central role of input–output relationships in the gradual emergence of linguistic knowledge. Recent computational work has provided empiric...

New paper with Antje Quick, Nikolas Koch & Paul Ibbotson: A dynamic network approach to bilingual child data doi.org/10.1515/cog-... - #OpenAcess in Cognitive Linguistics

Graphic announcing an award. On the left, text reads “Congratulations to Damián Blasi, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Study. Winner of the FABBS Early Career Impact Award.” The background is dark teal with light green and white text. On the right, a portrait of Damián Blasi, a man with short dark hair wearing a black polo shirt.

The CogSci Society would like to congratulate the brilliant Dr. Damián Blasi @damianblasi.bsky.social for being awarded the 2026 Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences @fabbs.org 👏👏👏

Learn more at cognitivesciencesociety.org/fabbs-early-...

History of Ideas in the Science of AI

Excited to share that our book "History of Ideas in the Science of AI" (co-authored with Luc Steels and Ann Dooms) is now freely available as #OpenAccess!
#OpenScience, #AIResearch, #HistoryOfAI
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

New on the blog: Requiem for writing town ideophone.org/requiem-for-...

On the co-working space we had for our team in corona times, what we learned about interactional affordances, why surface realism is overrated, and how we created a sense of connectedness (also ft. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social)

Studying the Evolution of Abstract Thought - NCCR Evolving Language In the new ERC-funded project, “Conceptual Diversity and the Evolution of Abstract Thought” (CONCEVO), Mansfield will lead a team of researchers to develop a method for reconstructing the evolution of...

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply
evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...

doug_hutchinson on Instagram I was born with a genetic condition such that my body does not produce its own alcohol, so I need to take supplements. Fortunately, they have bars inside most of Iceland's geothermal pools. Here's the touron photo bomb of the non #icelandairwaves portion of my trip. less

And also fun that this follows a template of "a genetic X where my body does not produce...", e.g.