Mara Breen

On Chandler Simpson’s Catch blogs.fangraphs.com/on-chandler-...

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

My lab’s first team science paper is out! Led by Karli Nave, 13 labs largely fail to replicate Nozaradan et al.’s 2011 finding of increased activity at imagery-related frequencies during listening to isochronous beats

If you've noticed a distinct dialect emerging in frontier AI models and struggled to understand what they're talking about, you're not crazy! We turned to psycholinguistics to investigate what makes the writing style so weird, and why this might be happening 🚨New preprint! 🧵

1/9 Birds make ultrafast decisions In this study, carrion crows were able to make decisions twice as fast as primates, including humans. Let me briefly explain the findings and share my thoughts. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

PSA for the American (North, Middle, and South, I presume) collaborators: Europe just did the whole clock changing thing. Prepare for some meeting time confusion if you meet at fixed times

Winner winner arxiv.org/pdf/2610.27918 "AI disclosure. During the writing of this paper, we had several conversations with Claude, 55, owner of the neighborhood bar in Strasbourg. Unfortunately, none of them was of relevance to the topics of the paper."

Hiring a postdoc in quantitative methods for a study examining predictors of treatment response in childhood apraxia of speech. You get use R! and Bayes! and IRT! Boston (hybrid) or remote. massgeneralbrigham.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/MGBExternal/...

We are excited to be hosting the 40th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (aka HSP 2027) at Purdue, May 20-22, 2027! Abstract submissions are due on January 15. Call for papers is linked here. hsp2027.github.io/submission/

We are looking for adult research participants who grew up hearing with migrant Deaf parents. Can you help us by sharing the recruitment ad? Research participation is fun and easy and mostly involves online interviews with @empacheco.bsky.social languageonthemove.com/hearing-chil...

UT Linguistics'll have 4 (!) computational linguists! Consider applying! I'm looking for students and also potentially postdocs. For postdocs, particularly interested in philosophically rich issues around AI cognition: Can AI introspect? How can we study if they have preferences?

Faculty opportunity in computational neuroscience at U of Maryland, College Park-Department of Biology, welcoming applications at both Assistant & Associate Professor levels. Best consideration date: Dec 31, 2026 umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j...

Excellent intro to circular statistics! This would have saved me hours when I started doing timing synchrony research

I’m hiring a postdoc in my lab at the University of Amsterdam! Interested in mathematical psychology, evidence-accumulation models & Bayesian hierarchical modeling? Join us to develop new models of cognitive fluctuations across multiple timescales. Please share! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

The Department of Neurobiology at USC has launched a new PhD program and is recruiting our first cohort. Explore our labs: dornsife.usc.edu/neurobiology... Applications due December 1, 2026. GRE optional. Fee waivers available for demonstrated need. Apply here: dornsife.usc.edu/neurobiology...

AI models are excellent at producing the average result. In science, it can bring your coding up to average. It can bring your understanding up to average (if you read & understand the outputs). Average, by definition, is not field-leading; nor necessarily up to the task... Expertise is important.

The MindCORE Fellows Application is open! We seek applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline for our 3-yr postdoc. MindCORE is Penn's interdisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence & behavior. mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

Useful package to delete drive and compute-hogging AI features you probably don't use futurism.com/artificial-i...

I've always felt that I learn best by playing around with things (and breaking them 😅). So I’ve put together a few interactive tools to help NeuroCog bachelor/master students grasp some basic neuroscience concepts. 🔗 www.lindedomingo.com/teaching Thanks @ortiztudela.bsky.social for the idea!

Vanderbilt sub-report on Music Studies is out. TLDR: it is utter garbage. The long-awaited evidence of our “deterioration in scholarly standards” is...: "the shift from...central areas of music scholarship [Western art music] to the more peripheral areas". www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/s...

Psychology department at Toronto Metropolitan University is hiring at the assistant rank, several possible areas of expertise, see ad here: hr.cf.torontomu.ca/ams/faculty/...

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

🎓 We‘re searching for a Full Professor of Computational Social Science - very much looking forward to your applications 🤩 Feel free to reach out to me for any questions! jobs.rptu.de/jobposting/0...

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

I am number 58, where do genuinely new concepts come from? (Central question for AI) on this fascinating list www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/s...

ChatGPT is adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists to its AI-generated images. So far, I've found the signatures of more than 15 contributors. "It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me." www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

Nominations are open for the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize! The prize honors mid-career cognitive scientists whose work shows scientific excellence and a real commitment to community building. Deadline: Nov 18 🗓️ Details and how to nominate: cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/ #CogSci #Award

If you missed today's @rinpharma.bsky.social workshop, here are a few of my favourite "quick fixes" for some common #ggplot2 issues 📊 1. Use {ggview} to preview plots at the same size and resolution as you want to save them with ggsave() to avoid the annoying resizing #RStats #DataViz

Deadline Oct 16: Assoc or full (tenured) prof, Artificial Intelligence, Entertainment, and Human Communication, Communication Studies, Northwestern Uni. communication.northwestern.edu/docs/soc-sen...

New PhD-opportunity at Aarhus University with a project investigating the cognitive correlates of having no inner speech. Supervised by Johanne Nedergaard and yours truly. Deadline 11 November. Starting date 1 February 2027. Get in touch if you want to know more. phd.arts.au.dk/applicants/o...

Hey you guys, Weizenbaum called and he said: "how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgment deserving of credibility. A certain danger lurks there."

FYI to everyone submitting this October NIH cycle You need to re-certify your ScienCV AFTER Sept 26 (tomorrow) for your application or it may not be accepted. Great timing!

To make sense of speech, listeners must segment sound streams into pieces. Across languages, people do so based more on consonants than vowels. A new @science.org study investigates the phenomenon via EEG recording in humans & dogs, finding that dogs also show consonant bias in word segmentation.🗣️🐶🧪

My department is looking to hire 3 new faculty members! Please share widely. Assistant Professor - Cognitive: apply.interfolio.com/193975 Assistant Professor - Social Psychology: apply.interfolio.com/193979 Associate/Full Professor - Mental Health: apply.interfolio.com/193984

Open Postdoc (80%) in our Lab @uzh-ch.bsky.social (PI: Klaus Oberauer) Topics are: Working memory, long-term memory, attention; experiments, individual differences, computational modeling. Start Dec 2026 to Feb 2027, until June 2030. Apply by Oct 15; Questions to: k.oberauer@psychologie.uzh.ch

📢 Assistant Professor of Psychology (Tenure-Track) – Cognitive Psychology Hamilton College Particularly someone studying language &/or memory. 💰 $94,500–$100,360 📅 Review begins: Sept 15, 2026; open til filled 🔗 buff.ly/2BZdFal 📧 Tara McKee (tmckee@hamilton.edu)

Sorry I am no longer an active user but just post this job alert: With Peter Dayan and Michiko Sakaki, we are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who could work on cognitive computational modeling wth digital education data. Come to Tübingen!!: uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

Do you ever read a series of words

When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.

I'm burnt out of discussing "AI". I don't care for the press releases from big companies. I hate having to comment immediately. I dislike "hot takes". I'm worried we, as scientists, are losing touch with scientific values. We've become customers, salivating at ads marketed to investors. 1/15

Our new paper may be one of coolest studies I've ever done. We show that the structures of visual storytelling in comics aligns with the word order of the languages of the comic authors. Here's what we did... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

👀 JOB: Chair in Psychology @ University of Liverpool https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSU859/chair-in-psychology-grade-10 Deadline: 30th Sept, full time, permanent "We are particularly seeking an individual with research expertise in neuroscience"

🚨 PhD position in human, nonhuman primate, and/or dog cognition! I am thrilled to be reviewing applicants this year for a new PhD student to join the Social & Cognitive Origins Group in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins @jhu.edu @jhuartssciences.bsky.social 1/

Making progress! It’s different than my usual but I’m very happy with it. #SciArt #NeuroArt #FiberArt #Kinusaiga I’m gonna take a break before I tackle the background 😉

UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646