Riccardo Fusaroli

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Help to test new progress bar in CmdStanR by @josswright.bsky.social, see more at discourse.mc-stan.org/t/help-us-te...

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Cognitive primitives of the insect brain Understanding the mechanistic basis of human cognition is likely to benefit from investigating how it emerged through evolution. We propose that identifying and investigating fundamental brain functio...

Little smart critters..🪰🐝🐜
Cognitive primitives of the insect brain: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🚨 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 🧵)

Humanity's oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggs At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo...

While everyone is excited by early European precursors of 'writing', let's not forget the African geometrics, here Howiesons Poort oes, but also Blombos haematite, almost twice as old

phys.org/news/2026-02...

and here a few attempts at better understanding how these patterns might or not have been shaped by different cognitive/cultural constraints:
- www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

this signal detection based missing data estimation model (early stage) is brought to you by mu-ko the happy cow I'll have to work around for the next six month or so (or until my kids come around again and draw the next nuis... err masterpiece)

Also 4 ways to fail an exam -3 , 00, used attempt and failed 🤷🏽

Short for half way towards 5 (from4) times 20!

discrete categories are useful for experiments and setting up competing hypotheses, so I totally get it. Yet, reality is complex and ancient semiotic behavior was likely a complex mix of different practices as well . So we need to take this plurality into account.

their relative weight is largely due to the practices of use and interpretation around the signs (the reason a sign in Peirce is triadic and not just expression and content as in saussure, as it's always co-defined in its conceivable interpretations). It's a subtle point, and 2/

A pet peeve of mine is that lots of people referring to C.S. Peirce stated that he divided signs into icons (resemblance), indices (reference) and symbols (convention). Yet lots of his work was in showing how any sign has iconic, indexical and symbolic components, and 1/

prepping my teaching for tomorrow and introducing pathfinder (a bayesian approximation model fitting technique) to the students: we can use it to quickly prototype, and SMARTLY to set init values for your MCMC, it'll be so much faster!
reality: FALSE (for simple models)

We might never learn what signs produced by ancient humans meant. But we are on a good track to at least understand which kinds of semiotic/cognitive practices they might have supported :-)

A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the development of turn taking in adult–child vocal interactions Abstract. Fluent conversation requires temporal organization between conversational exchanges. By performing a systematic review and Bayesian multi-level m

I once had belgian interns who ended up publishing their work (academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...), I was asked to grade them, so I gave top grade (20, I think). I got a very puzzled call from their uni admin in belgium...

Very speculatively, I could imagine this sign system having decorative functions, and acting as a mnemonic support, with some initial conventionalization. cool stuff!

But all in all, an important step in better understanding aurignacian sign systems. As the authors write: this points to aurignacians having "information capacity to create a sign system comparable to protocuneiform” (rather than having done so). 9/

Causal Inference Tools for Pharmacovigilance: Using Causal Graphs to Identify and Address Biases in Disproportionality Analysis - PubMed Using DAGs to map and mitigate biases requires caution and does not allow to obtain definitive answers to causal questions. Still, it results in more reliable and knowledge-based safety signals, reducing and mapping the gap between what we find (association) and what we look for (causation). Additio …

This would allow to better qualify a theoretically solid analysis model and be more aware of possible confounds (e.g. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41381798/) 8/

mapping how e.g. date might affect preservation and medium, and medium can affect preservation, and how sequence length is involved in all this, and how these things can affect data missingness, etc. 7/

Another thing that stands out to me is that the study could have strongly benefitted by a more explicit and thorough reflection on the data generating process. Currently the authors throw a bunch of predictors into a (stepwise) regression, rather than carefully 6/

This might suggest that the sign system was not as abstractly conceived as protocuneiform (albeit one could make the claim that it was rather used in a very sophisticated way, like poetry vs name tags, tho unlikely). 5/

and this is where the key finding of the paper for me lies: the aurignacians sign compositions have average formal properties (sequence length and predictability) similar to protocuneiform. Yet the properties vary substantially across artifact types (say figurine vs personal ornament) 4/

What I particularly liked was the caution in the language (tho not the title!) and the attempt at looking at the formal properties of the sign compositions, including the context in which these compositions appear. 3/

Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect In many scientific fields, sparseness and indirectness of empirical evidence pose fundamental challenges to theory development. Theories of the evolution of human cognition provide a guiding example, where the targets of study are evolutionary ...

First, this is an important step in the epistemic iterations on the topic. Evidence is sparse and indirect (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...) and we need multiple angles and perspectives to make any progress. 2/

A new paper dropped out on "Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Understanding the evolution of human semiotic behavior is a crucial (basic) scientific enterprise & really difficult, so kudos!
I have thoughts: 1/

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

yet v indistinct (colorless) that were boiling over under the surface (furiously) and not yet ready to be formulated clearly (sleeping). only me?

listening to the pretty neat "the laws of thought" by @cocoscilab.bsky.social (recommended) &I finally got the "colorless green ideas..." point. I was introduced to it as grammatical but non-sensical, and that never made sense to me. As an undergrad it perfectly describe my immature (green) ideas 1/

Poster for the call. All relevant information is in thread

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Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" !

📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex

Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

Talk by Dr. Luke Rendell: Are we really about to talk to whales? Organised by Elena Miu

📢 Talk announcement!

10th March with Dr. Luke Rendell: "Are we really about to talk to whales?"
All are welcome, for details see:
interactingminds.au.dk/events/singl...