David Luque

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El lunes no te dejan depositar

Joseph Barranco posted on social media: Go Bears! Nobel Prize in Physics goes to 3 physicists studying mesoscopic quantum phenomena... Work was done in the 1980s in UC Berkeley Professor John Clarke's lab with his graduate student John Martinis and postdoctoral fellow Michel Devoret... all 3 share the Nobel Prize. Must also point out that both Clarke and Devoret are immigrants from the UK and France, respectively. All 3 are pioneers in the race to build the most powerful quantum supercomputers. California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen.

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

That's one reason why I like preregistration so much

Am slowly making my way through this paper. And it is an impressive body of work by a collection of great researchers.

However, I have a couple of problems with it...

1/n

It was an excellent representation of current approaches to habit research

And I talked about how habits persist over time

Marta Miquel about habits, cocaine and the cerebellum

Pilar Flores talked about electrophysiological markers for flexibility

Paula Banca presented work about habits, automaticity and their relationship with OCD

The symposium on habits at the International Spanish Comparative Psychology Society has been fantastic. Thanks to the organisers, the audience and of course the speakers. Here it follows what each talk was about:

The authors could have been saved a lot of time and effort just asking Gonzalo @gurcelay.bsky.social 🤣

In which 94 benchmark phenomena are identified.

16 are domain- and species-general and should be explained by any theory claiming generality.

30 are species- and/or domain-specific but highly robust across procedures

Dorsomedial striatal neuroinflammation causes excessive goal-directed action control by disrupting astrocyte function Neuropsychopharmacology - Dorsomedial striatal neuroinflammation causes excessive goal-directed action control by disrupting astrocyte function

rdcu.be/eIyQB

Now published in Neuropsychopharmacology, here we mimicked the striatal neuroinflammation seen in the brains of individuals with compulsive disorders and found that this facilitated goal-directed action, whereas activating the Gi pathway in astrocytes prevented it

Academics with standard R&T contracts, how many journal article reviews do you do in a typical year, and how long do you spend on the average review?

From 10 to 20. One morning each. It is hard to write in a foreign language

Call for papers on conflict adaptation across single- and multi-tasking paradigms in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition

The deadline for initial submissions is 1 October 2026.

1/At Macquarie Uni we are losing 50% of our units in my faculty. This is on top of cuts in 2020. We estimate by next year my faculty will be teaching 80% fewer subjects than pre Covid. Disciplines being cut do not have declining enrolments. @jennaprice.bsky.social @michaelwestbiz.bsky.social

I often see papers using GPower for power analysis in repeated measures factorial ANOVA designs. I don’t know what it’s doing, but it’s definitely giving wrong answers: substantially underestimates required sample size. MorePower seems like a much better alternative github.com/LewisPeacock...

Does facilitation by irrelevant distractors reflect suppression or controlled attentional capture? By reanalyzing prior work using the perceptual load paradigm, we find evidence for the latter!

If you are interested, check out the latest version of our preprint 👇

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

While measuring habits in humans experimentally is hard, on Bluesky it’s much easier: just count your “save omission errors” (the number of times you forget you can now save posts).

Full professor complaining to an assistant professor on how hard it is to get funding nowadays

Postdoctoral job offer:

Do you want to join us to conduct research on the psychology of dis(mis)information in Granada, Spain? You will also have the opportunity to participate in popularization activities.

📆Apply before Sept 26th!

#socialpsyc
#cogpsyc
#PsychSciSky
#polipsy

Extinction of outcome-specific Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT), instrumental outcome devaluation, and reward-related attentional capture are predicted by affect-driven impulsivity Learning & Behavior - In two online experiments, we aimed to study the relationship between emotion dysregulation and persistence of incentive salience attributed to reward cues....

New research paper #PsynomLB 'Extinction of outcome-specific Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT), instrumental outcome devaluation, and reward-related attentional capture are predicted by affect-driven impulsivity' https://bit.ly/43Rc3FL @Psychonomic_Soc @CanalUGR #Pavlov

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

We are fine. Too hot even for summer. I hope winter is treating you well! :-)

This is fantastic Steve!

YouTube video by Steve Most Change How You Study: Secrets from Cognitive Science

For those of you starting up school again -- or with kids who are -- here's my under-10-minute introduction to science-backed study tips. Let me know if you find them helpful, and feel free to share!

🌱Don’t miss out on the Habit highlights at the EHPS conference in Groningen!🌱

From habit decay strategies and AI-driven interventions to fresh insights into measurement and automatic influences on behaviour, this year’s program features inspiring research and networking opportunities.