Xenia Schmalz

We're seeking the next Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics! Lead cutting-edge research in language & cognition. Nominations (incl. self) due 19 Dec 2025.
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/nominations-and-self-nominations-sought-position-director-max

Welcome to join our upcoming Journal Club meetings in Oct & Nov! Happy to have @cyhsieh.bsky.social & Dr. Cosimo Iaia as our guest speakers!

Register to get the Zoom link or sign up as our next guest speaker:
forms.gle/TY6Cuxut87Ej...

More exciting talks coming up. Please share & see you there!

LMU Munich invites applications for a W2 Professorship in Philosophy Education, starting in October 2026. We are looking for candidates with an outstanding research record in philosophy and a strong profile in philosophy education.
Deadline: 15 November 2025:
job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/b...

Assistant Professor — Disparities and Education Policy – Berkeley School of Education University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Were also hiring a tenure track Assistant Professor of disparities and educational policy. Due October 30th. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04211

Assistant Professor (N/T) - Using AI and the Learning Sciences to Advance STEM Teaching and Learning: K12-Higher Education - Berkeley School of Education University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

We’re hiring! The Berkeley School of Education is hiring a tenure track Assistant Professor of AI and STEM education. Due 10/23. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05125

I'll officially start my job as acting professor at the Chair of General Psychology at @tudresden.bsky.social tomorrow! I can't complain about the view from my office window...

Call for collaborators! 🧵

The TL;DR: we seek collaborators on a #ManyLabs #RegisteredReport about what causes rapid forgetting.

In-principle accepted Stage 1: osf.io/ahjn5

Expressions of interest: cardiffunipsych.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Further details in the 🧵:

Our preprint on our translations of CRediT into 36 languages. We've come a long way with this project! osf.io/preprints/me... If you know of non-English academic journals that don't have a policy on saying who did what, get in touch - CRediT may be part of the answer.

haven't been asked to review a paper in a while so if you're an editor looking for a psycholinguist who works on discourse...👀

I am seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the ESRC-funded project 'Writing Tasks at School and University'.
The post is full-time and will run from 1st November 2025 to 31st January 2029. See below for a brief overview of the project.
jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

Title of the keynote: LLMs for DH research: The good, the bad and the ugly Thursday 11 September 2025 “LLMs for DH Research” Summer School Faculty of Arts & Humanities, University of Cologne Logos of the university of Cologne and SFB 1252 Prominence in Language. The title slide also features the poster of the film "Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo" by Sergio Leone and the fonts of the title slide echo the poster.

I've finally finalised my slides for the closing keynote of @UniKoeln's Summer School on Large Language Models for #DigitalHumanities research entitled: "LLMs for DH research: The good, the bad, and the ugly".

If you happen to be in Cologne this coming […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]

It's kind of difficult to argue about such a big topic in short social media posts, so I wrote a blogpost: Will #peerreview collapse in the coming years? xeniaschmalz.blogspot.com/2025/09/will... Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts!

Neuer Beitrag im GESIS #Blog über #Sprache als Faktor für eine verlässlichen #Wissenschaft

Warum ist Sprache so entscheidend im Kontext wissenschaftlicher #Replizierbarkeit und wie können Forschende sprachbezogenen Herausforderungen begegnen?
doi.org/10.34879/ges...

2024 habe ich mich auf 13 Professuren in D in Psychologie beworben, wobei der Begriff "Bereich" bei uns verschwommen ist. Wenn man nur meine spezifische Fachrichtung zählt, kommt ein mal in ein paar Jahren eine relevante Ausschreibung.

#IchBinHanna hat viel seltener Kinder als Vergleichsgruppen:

👨‍👦 unter 35
befristete Wissenschaftler_innen: 6,5%
andere Hochschulabsolvent_innen: 21%

👨‍👦 unter 40
befristete Wissenschaftler_innen: 36%
andere Promovierte: 46%

Gründe (v.a. für Frauen): mangelnde Vereinbarkeit, berufliche Unsicherheit!

Promotional poster for the LMU Open Science Center Summer School 2025 Public Lecture. The poster features a photo of speaker Prof. Dr. Felix Schönbrodt. The text states the lecture focuses on the replicability crisis and open research initiatives, time and date of lecture being 9:45-10:45 CEST on September 15 2025, and instructions to register online. Logos of LMU Open Science Center, LMU, and Universitätsbibliothek München are displayed at the bottom.

🔍Find out about the replicability crisis across fields & open research initiatives you can implement in your own work!
Attend the “Replicability Crisis” lecture by Prof. Dr. Felix Schönbrodt (@nicebread.bsky.social) on Mon 15 Sept, 9:45-10:45.
👉Register here: www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS...

And another interesting thought brought up by Ven: should we split up study programmes for aspiring researchers and aspiring practitioners in psychology? That would allow for much more instruction in math and computational modeling for researchers, analogous to biology vs. medical practitioners.

And a question I didn't get to ask: are computationally modeled theories really more precise than verbal theories? One can have vague mathematical models (p(recall) ~ input frequency) and precise verbal theories (well-defined concepts & relationships). Any thoughts?

Very interesting keynote at #ESCOP2025 by Ven Popov on the importance of computational modeling for theory building in psychology, with lots of questions to think about. Is #psychology really more complex than #physics? How can we lower the hurdles for psychology researchers to do formal modeling?

I have some ideas for #NLP analyses I could do as a quick and dirty way to compare different platforms. Does anyone have recommendations for #journals that publish #peerreviews and could serve as a comparison group to @pci-regreports.bsky.social?

Does anyone know if there is a list of journals that do this? Now I’m kind of curious and I have a long train trip coming up to see if I could at least get some anecdotal data.

The quality of reviews across publication formats is an empirical question 🧐. With that aim, PCI has the huge advantage that the reviews are actually available for everyone to scrutinise and analyse.

Photo of a park with hills in the background

Photo of a park with a pond in the middle and a playground to the right

Morning jog in #Sheffield, Crookes Valley Park. Does anyone at #ESCOP2025 have any other recommended routes? I tried the Five Weirs Walk, but it's rather run down with detours along big roads, unfortunately.

specialised enough? I've been thinking of starting a PCI in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, or reading research.

Interesting - I don't have any personal experience, so I can't comment. I often feel the same way about journal peer review, though. Do you think there's a systematic difference that may exacerbate the problem at @peercommunityin.bsky.social ? Maybe "psychology" is too broad, so reviewers aren't...

... With the increase of submissions, it seems the process of finding suitable reviewers for a given paper is becoming unfeasible. I can't suggest a perfect system, but I think moving towards publishing preprints and public/open peer review would be good. Something like @psych.peercommunityin.org.

I've started predicting that the peer review system, as it is, will collapse in the coming years. At least I really think it should. Probably that's partly driven by rejections I received, though most reviews have been helpful and thoughtful. Rather...

Logos of the university of Cologne and of the SFB Prominence in Language.

Ausschreibung: Journalist-in-Residence Fellowships 2025/2026

Der Sonderforschungsbereich „Prominence in Language“ (SFB 1252) der @UniKoeln bietet engagierten Journalistinnen und Journalisten mit Interesse an der Vermittlung zwischen geistes-, und […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]

Food for thought at #ESCOP2025 first keynote by Ruth Byrne: people prefer #counterfactual explanations (X wouldn't have happened if...) to #casual explanations (X happened because...).

What a surprise! The AI overview completely misinterprets the findings of the study! Word order is LESS reliable than case-marking, not more. Read the correct version at psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...