Dan Kleinman

Applications are still open (until March 1) for the 2026 ERP Boot Camp at UC Davis from 6/15-6/24! It's a workshop for people with at least 1 year of experience with EEG/ERP, and ALL EXPENSES ARE PAID. I went many years ago – it was a great and very educational experience.

Those of us who were totally confused by the new NIH biosketch requirements--turns out we were all probably doing it wrong?? (or at least I was). Our admin asked the ScienCV folks and made it into the FAQs.

This still has got to win a prize for most confusing and arbitrary instructions, ever.

This guidance arrives at the perfect time: Too late to be useful for anyone who submitted a proposal last week, but early enough to maximize the amount of time they can panic. Hopefully NIH won’t bounce submissions which failed to follow these rules…!

On that we agree!

Psycholinguist here. This isn’t a question that any individual paper can answer, but a study w/670,000 participants is much more likely to reveal truth than one w/24 — this isn’t a “one study said yes, one said no” situation. No one is denying that other factors play a role, but age is a big one!

I love the solo conference dinner! I used to dine alone regularly when I was a postdoc at UIUC — I’d bring a book to my favorite spot and read at the table. (I still do that sometimes at lowkey bars when traveling; one of my favorite spots for this is actually in Philly.) Just a different vibe.

This is so good, it almost makes me want to solve some cryptic crosswords. (Almost.)

Amazing! I love finding poetry in unexpected places; I would never have thought to look for a poem *here*.

I believe in backprop for hot takes. I’ll tell you about mine when I would get a reward. I am a serious thinker.

This is good news for NIH-funded behavioral scientists and for the public; it resolves an unfortunate Catch-22 situation that inflated administrative burden and occasionally excluded basic behavioral science from funding opportunities:
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Striking a blow against the system by... taking advantage of, and then dunking on, good-faith engagement from uncompensated (and junior) academics. So brave.

Now, when I review papers, I often remember how I felt when reading that review. I try to find the good in each contribution and remember someone is on the other end. And if their results contradict my theoretical claims, my attitude is generally: Bring it on! (As long as the work is done well.)

That was in part because I had (very messily) replicated it, but more because I was very cautious and precise about my claims. At any rate, I was clear that I was building on his work, not tearing it down. He saw that, and I think he appreciated it.

Why was he so positive? Two reasons:

1st, he was able to set aside his theoretical commitments and read my paper on its own terms. That’s the kind of humility and grace we want from every scientist.

2nd, I was very careful not to say his result was wrong — only his interpretation!

To this day, his was the most effusive review I have ever received. It was positively GLOWING. In addition to the praise, he wrote that he was comfortable with my interpretation.

Reader, I pinned that review to the wall next to my desk.

My paper was more of a “Yes, but…”. I proposed an alternate interpretation which reconciled their result with existing theory, then presented two experiments to support my interpretation.

The first reviewer of my paper was the lead author on the original paper — I know because he signed his review.

There were several attempts to replicate this experiment, which didn’t pan out — not for ominous reasons, but likely because there were important differences relative to the original (including the language used). They concluded the original result wasn’t robust enough to overturn decades of theory.

At the time, a group of psycholinguists had recently published a surprising experiment which had led them to conclude that the field had misunderstood one of its major tasks (picture-word interference) for many years. The experiment was sound and the results were clear but head-scratching.

A nice thread on the importance of humility (and quantifying uncertainty) in research.

I’m reminded of own experience in publishing my first paper, which changed the way I review manuscripts.

Chirp! :)

Tell your friend she can get a passable California burrito at Electric Burrito in the East Village. (Having lived in San Diego for 9 years before moving to NY, I‘m familiar with this very specific craving.)

I think of this sometimes when trying to show RAs how to put an EEG cap on a participant:

Me: “Put your hands in the cap like this”
RA, following along: “Okay!”
Me: “Now stretch it like this as you bring it down”
RA: “Okay…”
Me: “Now do this [very complicated hand motion], and ta-da!”
RA: “…”

…Didn’t everyone?

“This shirt is ‘dry-clean only’. Which means… it’s dirty.” –Mitch Hedberg

Thrilled to see universal dyslexia screeners rolled out for CA kids in grades K-2. Early identification is so important.

A notification on MacOS: "zoom.us" Is Accessing Your Screen. "zoom.us" has accessed your screen and system audio 4417 times in the past 90 days

Me: It's nice not having a lot of meetings these days!
Zoom: You were saying...?

Saw this for the first time last year (in the theater!) and had the same thought. As a psycholinguist, I loved that is-he-or-isn’t-he aspect to the hallucinatory speech restoration — same with the ever-changing emphasis on the word “us” in the key sentence. Talk about shades of meaning!

I’m working with an RA now on a research project in which she characterizes the errors made by students with dyslexia during a phonological processing task. Lots of granular detail and discussions about “What processes could have produced this?” Just delightful stuff (if somewhat painstaking).

Nice! I find there’s something clarifying about trying to describe (or reading others describe) behavior(/speech) closely, especially in less structured situations. Paradigms usually allow us to take those things for granted! Always feels to me like a return to the roots of the field.

Reminds me of that paper listing all the ways people describe effects with p-values north of .05.