William Matchin

No war with Iran.

I hope academics in US, Europe and across the world stand strong against this flagrant violation of international law by the US government, Israeli government, and their supporters.

This will be an awesome event with a variety of speakers on topics related to human creativity.

sc.edu/study/colleg...

academics are some of the least funny people with some of the least awareness of that fact

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Shared governance” by faculty is essentially being reduced to: do a bunch of work, but have no authority.

"data available upon reasonable request"

Academic freedom is meaningless unless academics have the ability to explore novel ideas without constant pressure to maintain yearly publication rates, pursuit of grant funding, etc.

📢 C-STAR Lecture Reminder

Join us for the upcoming lecture by @gregoryhickok.bsky.social on Friday, February 6th at 1 pm EST: "Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language and Its Sensorimotor Foundation"

No registration needed. Access through: cstar.sc.edu/lecture-seri...

I say this as someone who tends to get very strong student evaluations: I don't think they hardly, if at all, useful as an indicator of course quality, yet they are basically used as the only major indicator of teaching success in universities.

Excellent opportunity and research environment

Excited to share our new publication “The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia”, published in JNeurosci 🧠
➡️ www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...
with @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @mvandermosten.bsky.social 🤝

Check out @stanfordbrain.bsky.social ’s summary of it ⬇️

Your Iranian colleagues are cut off from family back home & are in a state of collective grief, which has many faces. We may appear more aloof or be more impatient, may self-isolate, have more typos, may freeze or overwork to numb the pain, or find fear, memory, or hope in unexpected moments.

@gregoryhickok.bsky.social will be giving a C-STAR lecture on Friday, February 6 at 1:00 pm Eastern Time regarding his new book 'Wired for Words'. I'm sure it will be provocative in the best possible way. Please attend and prepare your most challenging questions!

cstar.sc.edu/lecture-seri...

@sc.edu it's frustrating to repeatedly fail to find parking in faculty/staff lots at the university. I would love to be able to do my job effectively but it's very hard if I can't park ANYwhere!

We have an opening for a postdoc research fellow on our NIH-funded study "Neural correlates of recovery from aphasia after stroke" in Brisbane, Australia. Ideal for anyone passionate about neuroimaging of language/brain. International applicants welcome!

uq.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/uqcare...

Agreed - this seems quite clear examining the evidence available.

The key question is: did the officer have reason to believe the driver might be attempting to ram him? I.e., spur-of-the-moment judgment, his perspective looking at the windshield rather than at the tires, etc.

What is the difference, within an academic institution, between “mentorship” and surveillance/management?

Image shows the panels of the final Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, published on December 31st 1995, drawn by comic artist Bill Watterson. It depicts Calvin (a young boy) and Hobbes (a stuffed tiger and his close companion) trekking outside in their winter clothes, across a fresh blanket of snow. Calvin: Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn't it wonderful! Hobbes: Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new! Calvin: A new year. ... A fresh clean start! Hobbes: It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! Calvin: A day full of possibilities! The two of them board their sled in anticipation. Calvin: It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy... They set off on the sled out into the snow. Calvin: ... Let's go exploring!

30 years ago today, December 31st 1995, the last ever Calvin & Hobbes comic strip was published. Even now, I still find it so poignant & moving.

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.

This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

Behavioral and Neural Effects of Proactive Control Adjustments on a Trial-by-Trial Basis

New @jocnforum.bsky.social post by Dariusz Asanowicz, replying to @bradpostle.bsky.social and Chunyue Teng: “Behavioral and Neural Effects of Proactive Control Adjustments on a Trial-by-Trial Basis”

doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

🔥🔥🔥

I think Chomsky's position on this issue is basically right - there is a novel combinatorial system primarily geared towards thought/meaning, which then is parasitic on sensory-motor systems for communication. Those recruited SM systems for language are naturally a species of lower-level SM.

Recursive combinatorial structure that is oriented around semantics, using atoms that are not determined by sensory-motor properties.

Language in the broad sense is a coalition of cognitive systems, including one which is combinatorial and primarily related to semantics, and one which is a sensory-motor control system. So it's not right to say that language is a sensory-motor control system.

My biggest complaint with the claim "language is a 'species' of sensorimotor control architecture" is that certain aspects of language have nothing whatsoever to do with sensorimotor control, and were not actually modifications of a SM system, and so this statement is, in the strict sense, false.

I don’t think the two cases are the same. It’s like saying that chimpanzees are monkeys. It’s not true, but more true than saying that chimpanzees are canines. I think I was generous in my initial response; a more loquacious answer is that language recruits and builds on sensory-motor circuits.

The “is” is doing a lot of work here. Language recycles and builds upon sensorimotor architectures but also has different, seemingly discontinuous properties.

Yes but no

Ahmadenijad was Iran’s Trump. Populist, jingoistic right winger who upset the apple cart. His reelection, that so many people could have voted for him, fried the brains of liberals so much that conspiracy theories were invented to explain it. Strong parallels with Trump 2016