Matthew Mak

@warwickpsych.bsky.social

With @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social

#AI #ChatGPT #GenAI

Key finding #4
AI policy requiring students to provide a voluntary AI declaration doesn't seem to work, despite clear guidelines and regular communication. We need alternatives!

Key finding #3
Student writings are becoming more positive in tone. How does this affect critical engagement?

Key finding #2
Writing style is increasingly formal and becoming GPT-like

Key finding #1
ChatGPT-associated stylistic markers (e.g., delve, underscore) surged in prevalence shortly after ChatGPT's launch, but in 2025, we saw a rather consistent decline

Killing 'delve': We analysed 4,800+ student-authored reports across a decade to uncover how ChatGPT is shaping undergrad writing—style, sentiment, and quality. 📉📈
GenAI isn't just a tool. It's a co-author.
📝 #Preprint: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Looking for a departmental seminar speaker for the coming academic year? Look no further! Am available to give a talk on how GenAI is shaping undergraduate writing — we analysed 4800+ authentic submissions from the last 10 years!

Going to @exppsychsoc.bsky.social meeting next week. Gonna be my first time in Scotland! Will give a talk on my latest work analysing >4000 authentic student-authored reports to shed light on GenAI's influence on linguistic style and quality. Can't wait to share this work with the world!

What initiatives in your department bring people together and encourage collaboration? Looking for fresh ideas to connect people! #AcademicChatter

Adult vs. children in word learning: Our latest study suggests that the effect of prior knowledge and consolidation may differ between adults and children in word learning. Noel Lam tested over 60+ kids! Impressive work.

@warwickpsych.bsky.social is hiring two 1-year teaching-focussed assistant professors/teaching fellows (open to PhD students close to submission). Open area but one of the posts will likely be in social psy. Come join us!

warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

accidentally logged into my Twitter account. Had to log out after a minute of scrolling through my thread...

Tens of thousands of psychological measures have been created, but 79% are not reused more than twice.

In a new article in NHB lead by @faridanvari.bsky.social and @ruben.the100.ci we quantify this fragmentation in psychology's measures and propose solutions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great question! In priming, seeing X-Y makes processing X-Y easier next time. But in our final experiment, after reading X-Y, participants judged X in the absence of Y—yet X and Y became closer in the participant's mind . So I would say this goes beyond priming, although definitely related.

Thank you David! More to come as we are doing some follow-up!

Thank you! So glad to hear that I'm not the only one who finds this interesting! 😊

Thank you Jamie. As a fellow word nerd, I think Exp 5 will be of particular interest to you. We used Walsh and Rissman's (2023) innovative measure to index relatedness between two words *without* showing to participants the two words together.

with @lewis-ball.bsky.social, @mggaskell.bsky.social , Catherine Walsh, and Alice O'Hagan.

@warwickpsych.bsky.social

Results suggest involvement of episodic memory in language comprehension and highlight the flexibility of the mental lexicon. Results also provide a simple mechanism to how the lexicon acquires its associative structure.

Involvement of episodic memory in language comprehension: Naturalistic comprehension pushes unrelated words closer in semantic space for at least 12 h Recent experience with a word significantly influences its subsequent interpretation. For instance, encountering bank in a river-related context biase…

Very proud of this latest paper, which shows that reading two unrelated words in a meaningful sentence will push these words closer in semantic space—an effect observed 5min, 20min, and 12 hrs after initial exposure.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

a close up of a woman crying with her hand on her face ALT: a close up of a woman crying with her hand on her face

ex-student emailed to say they won full PhD scholarships at Oxford *AND* Cambridge, then thanked me for supervision over the years. #ProudSupervisorMoment

Very happy to share our new preprint revealing no evidence for a targeted memory reactivation (TMR) effect on word-meaning priming (1/8): osf.io/preprints/ps...

Department for Education. Effectiveness of school mental health awareness interventions Universal approaches in English secondary schools February 2025

Important new evidence published today: large-scale DofE trial (N=12,166) found that two universal MH awareness interventions, in secondary schools, led to an *increase* in emotional symptoms at long term (9-12 month) follow up

tinyurl.com/4ffday8y

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Poster advertisement for 1-day seminar at Warwick University on Doing Police Research, approaches and challenges. Seminar date 29 April 2025. Open to postgrads and early career researchers conducting police-related research.

On Tues 29 Apr, Warwick Uni's COPR is hosting a free 1-day seminar for postgrads/ECRs conducting police research. Build networks & present to a friendly multidisciplinary audience. Travel bursaries available. Abstract deadline: 7 Mar
warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa...

@mgsesrcdtp.bsky.social

PhD scholarship announcement 📣 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLI727/p... Come and join my lab at U of Warwick. DM me for details and to discuss project ideas. Please RT!

@warwickpsych.bsky.social

@thomhills.bsky.social looking chuffed with his baby: Behavioural Network Science: Language, Mind, Society. Go ask your library to stock this masterpiece!

Yes, I was about to mention Kate's lexical legacy, which basically argues that experiencing words in more diverse contexts may enrich lexical quality. Empirical evidence is mixed, although there are huge methodological differences.