andrea e. martin

Tonight I'm reading a colleague's draft that is so fun and so creative and so subversive that it offers me some measure of reassurance that we will always be able to distinguish between the work of great scientists and the incremental-at-best output that large language models might someday produce.

imagine you’re on a spaceship and then some random guy says that all the water and power on board should be used to generate fake sentences and ugly pics

We have three lectureships available at York Psychology (@yorkpsychology.bsky.social) with a broad remit for research/teaching areas. Home and overseas applications are welcome. Deadline for applications is early April - enquiries welcome. Come and join us! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

In Early Cretaceous Korea there were lizards and crocodylomorphs that could move on two legs. These trackways show that there were lizards that could run on two legs >100 million years ago, and croc relatives yet again experimented with bipedalism. #FossilFriday

To study these issues, we built a feedforward neural network with multiplicative gains. The model processes the cue, determines gains from the cue activations, and then multiples the representation of the mixture at each stage by the gains: (4/n)

Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening - Nature Human Behaviour Griffith et al. show that human-like auditory attentional strategies naturally arise from the optimization of feature gains for selective listening.

Excited to announce a new paper from our lab, by Ian Griffith @iangriffith.bsky.social with help from Preston Hess @phess2.bsky.social, introducing a model of attentional selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@mitbcs.bsky.social @mitscience.bsky.social
Here is a summary. (1/n)

Did you know? The lesser Madagascar hedgehog tenrec is more closely related to elephants than true hedgehogs! Weighing ~0.25 lb (0.2 kg), this small mammal inhabits western Madagascar. It can roll up into a spiky ball to defend itself from foes.
Photo: Nigel Voaden, CC BY 4.0, iNaturalist

Deadline April 1 (rolling): Open-rank, open-area cluster hire to support new cogsci department (!). Bocconi University, Milan www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a...

Temporally-precise sensory encoding of predicted content, entraining motor oscillations to derive time. @akalt.bsky.social's first study out @currentbiology.bsky.social, testing parts of this idea (tinyurl.com/TiCSKaltenma...). Huge thanks @leverhulme.ac.uk ac.uk @erc.europa.eu, great work Aaron!

Category error! I'm sick to the back teeth of comparisons to humans. It's so rife even colleagues do it. What's next?

> I compared a rock and a person, and challenged them to stay still the longest and the rock won! Wow!

Things thought up by the unhinged & those who wish to dehumanise for profit.

It’s #WorldHearingDay to raise awareness about hearing health and accessibility. Here’s my #SciArt #embroidery of the cochlea/inner ear—nave of vibration (2017)—which I did while researching my symptoms of hyperacusis.

This is it: this why I finally snap and become the joker

Rare find of dark green Alpine #Fuorite from the Gasteiner Tal, Hohe Tauern, Austria.

Bramberg museum specimen

#mineral #crystal #mineralogy #mineralexpert

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good? - Computational Brain & Behavior I present an ontology of criteria for evaluating theory to answer the titular question from the perspective of a scientist practitioner. Set inside a formal account of our adjudication over theories, ...

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good? doi.org/10.1007/s421...

A Metatheory of Classical and Modern Connectionism doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

relevant work from @andreaeyleen.bsky.social and myself:

How Computational Modeling Can Force Theory Building in Psychological Science doi.org/10.1177/1745...

On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks doi.org/10.1007/s421...

...

Oh, and a related talk too from last week, kindly recorded by @bcbl.bsky.social, in which I analyze ANNs when used as scientific instruments of study and when functioning as emergent arbiters of the zeitgeist in the cognitive, computational, and neural sciences.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DHg...

Haitian Creole: The Complete Beginner’s Guide An overview of the sounds, sentence structure, tenses, nouns, and basic phrases in Haitian Creole

For most people, a Creole is a broken version of another language. This couldn't be further from the truth. This is an extensive overview of the Haitian Creole language!

#language #Linguistics #Langsky #Languages #Haitiancreole

medium.com/language-lab...

How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Kindness is a radical act in a violent & selfish world.
It’s our greatest, and most underutilized, superpower.

REMINDER

trying to stay calm and do work in a fascist world is itself a radical action

a world that wants to destroy independent knowledge, universities, education, still contains people who want to gently think and teach without dehumanisation and destruction

And since n-grams are all you need, this provides some nice converging evidence that speakers probably use very local representations to pace their utterances, say by retrieving phrases. We would love comments!

Less is more: Probabilistic reduction is best explained by small-scale predictability measures The primary research questions of this paper center on defining the amount of context that is necessary and/or appropriate when investigating the relationship between language model probabilities and ...

We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659

This is a wonderful thread of quotes from Mary Everest Boole, a pioneering mathematician and (I'd argue) developmental psychologist. She beautifully describes the power of mathematics for seeing beyond appearances and, especially, for providing tools to define exactly what we do not know. 🧪

I learned algebra without ever thinking about where it came from. Algebra literally means "reunion of broken parts": using logical reasoning to discover what is unknown.

It's a tool for clarity of thought...among many other things.

Great essay by Keith Devlin at link. 🧪

maa.org/math-values/...

I'm addicted to these videos from a bakery in Uzbekistan

this bread is beautiful

More than a century before the mobile phone, a #Victorian love poem using #textspeak. See two even earlier examples here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/nineteenth-century-textspeak/

Theory What is a cognitive scientific theory?

some resources for cognitive scientists — especially for junior scholars who ask me wonderful questions and want to learn more — on theorising and metatheorising olivia.science/theory/ (not 100% finished & more to come, but all my work is freely available here: olivia.science#publications as usual)