Fernanda Ferreira

Hey! New faculty! Your annual reminder to keep track of *everything* you do in some way or another. I just dump stuff into a Google doc, nothing fancy, but saves a ton of time when working on promotion & tenure docs.

(Ask me what I'm working on right now...!) 🧪

We’re defying basic number theory at this point—riding roughshod over the intrinsic properties of integers.

Anyone here going to Interspeech and wants to do a student a big favor? He was accepted & paid, but ultimately cannot leave the U.S. due to ongoing fascism (he’s on a visa). They will pull his paper if he can’t find anyone to present it for him. DM if you’re attending & may be able to help!

I thought I recognized it! Ladas were sold in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s so I used to see them driving around Winnipeg. I quite liked them-I’ve always had a thing for those boxy-style cars. But apparently they were duds for driving and repairs.

I do not care that you are not “surprised.” Please. You have no idea how tiresome it is when you post that something horrible, fascist, authoritarian is “not surprising.” Nothing is “surprising” anymore. But a lot of it is horrible and frightening. Let’s deal with it together.

What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19 year old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York Times have been wrong about every single American war.

Nora S. Newcombe and Robert Glushko stand together smiling on stage at CogSci 2025. Nora wears the Rumelhart Prize medal around her neck

Huge congratulations to the brilliant Nora Newcombe, recipient of the 2025 David E. Rumelhart Prize! 🏅#CogSci2025

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

So many institutions have failed us, but probably the most disappointing (at least to me) are our universities. Thirty years ago I would have naively predicted they'd be the center of resistance. Instead, we're seeing absolutely shameless capitulation in exchange for power and money.

A class called History of Capitalism in which we read books like EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution. I’m a cognitive scientist and psycholinguist so I landed very far from this field, but it’s that class that taught me how to think and write.

A headline about Lauren Boebert’s son Tyler that says “Tyler’s son was born in 2023 when he was 17 years old…”

I laughed out loud at the idea of a 17-year old newborn. Occasionally prescriptive rules of grammar are worth following.

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share!
mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

The cats Bouba (on the left) and Kiki (on the right) on a hardwood floor. Bouba has his left paw on Kiki’s right shoulder and Kiki has her right paw on Bouba’s left shoulder.

“Best friends forever.”

Often amounts to “my girl colleagues will take care of this”

💯 And often rooted in sexism.

Two photos of the area around the University of Winnipeg. The one above shows the area in 1957. There’s an old, beautiful building, the original university (then called United College), and at street level is a string of small businesses that can be accessed by foot. The photo below shows a modern building towering over a lower modern building. All the cute shops are gone.

Came across this pair of photos showing the University of Winnipeg in 1957 and today. Used to be standard to have all kinds of shops at street level, accessible by foot. The 15-minute city used to be how we lived.

(Photo credit: Darryl Resch, Daily Then & Now)

Psychonomic Society logo on a blue background highlighting the September 1 deadline to apply for the Fall Class of Fellows.

The Fellows program honors members for their outstanding research and emerging global reputation in the psychological sciences. Learn more and apply by September 1: bit.ly/3IFMBw0

Fortunately we senior people can help out a wee bit - in our tenure/promotion letters we can prominently highlight the changed landscape and the extraordinary challenges junior folks have to deal with, and the consequent need to revise expectations.

Plus there are far too many papers chasing too few reviewers. More papers means more reviewers are needed, but everyone’s too busy to review because they’re … writing papers.

This. Not just the summer, but also the year(s) ahead. I've been having conversations with fellow academics about the push to do the same or more with less (as funding cuts set it). It's not sustainable. At some point we will just have to do less.

We need to decide what is essential, and what's not

After years of resisting audiobooks I’ve discovered I love them for nonfiction. What are your recommendations for nonfiction audiobooks that are as engaging as a podcast and DO NOT use an AI voice? Any topic is fine - I have pretty eclectic interests!

I sometimes wonder if the combination of an unusual sequence of US presidents - Trump, then, Biden, now Trump again - together with the pandemic has caused people to be confused about what happened when - like when the pandemic started, who was in charge when Epstein died, etc.

Adding one thing to this great thread, I like to highlight impediments or challenges the candidate faced, especially those created by the dept or institution. It took a year to find the candidate some proper lab space? that goes in the letter with a comment on the candidate's amazing resilience.

Bouba the cat in the foreground guarding his green froggie toy and his and Kiki's latest acquisition, my soft Canada slippers, which they retrieved somehow from the closet of my study.

My Canada slippers are now cat toys and the cats will not be considering any counterarguments.

When I told my mother about the Our Bodies Ourselves argument that western medicine is unnecessary and dangerous bec "women have been doing this forever", she replied that in rural Portugal, where she'd grown up without medical care, every time a woman went into labor they prepared for her death.

Language Evolution

Happy to contribute an article on #LanguageEvolution to the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science @oecs-bot.bsky.social

Everything you ever wanted to know about language evolution in ~1K words—well just scratching the surface 😉 dig into the references for more info

oecs.mit.edu/pub/18miikqb...

I'd recommend Pickering and Garrod's psycholinguistic work on alignment in dialogue. Here's one very readable key paper: Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2009). Joint action, interactive alignment, and dialog. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 292-304.

... As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by @escholarship.bsky.social of the University of California, copyedited by our Editorial Assistant Sandy Chung, copyedited and typeset by Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

The processing of subject-verb agreement with postverbal subjects in Italian Author(s): Listanti, Andrea; Lago, Sol; Torregrossa, Jacopo | Abstract: The processing of subject-verb number agreement has been extensively studied when the subject precedes the verb; by contrast, ag...

We're delighted to announce another article in Glossa Psycholinguistics!

'The processing of subject-verb agreement with postverbal subjects in Italian' by Listsanti, Lago and Torregrossa

escholarship.org/uc/item/76s6...

The view that heating is a necessity and air conditioning is a luxury is nothing but Northern European chauvinism.