Brónagh McCoy

Thanks so much! Yes, that would be great if I could join the discord too, thank you!

I'm looking to create an advisory group for a project on Monotropism, an attention-based theory of autism and potentially ADHD. If you or anybody you know is interested, please fill out the form below. Thank you!

forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Parents of neurodivergent children in West Yorkshire seek support Parents in West Yorkshire say they are left with little help after their children are diagnosed.

Parents of neurodivergent children in West Yorkshire seek support “They gave us a couple of sessions after the diagnosis, then some leaflets, then we were dropped from that service. It makes you feel unwanted." www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/...

"It’s essential that autistic people, regardless of age, have a way to communicate. Spoken words should not be valued above other methods, & AAC should never be taken away by parents, teachers, or caregivers. For many autistic people, using alternatives to speech is not a choice – it’s a lifeline."

Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Investing in the Wrong A.I.

@garymarcus.bsky.social argues for developing different, specialized AI tools for different domains, rather than hoping that one general artificial intelligence will be able to do everything. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/o... #AI

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ammar I. Marvi, Nancy G. Kanwisher, et al:

An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Maximizing the Quality and Reporting Standards of Autism Intervention Science - PubMed Although there are clear international standards for intervention science and reporting in healthcare, implementation and uptake have been limited within autism intervention research. To address this ...

happy to share this new article on reporting standards in autism intervention science: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41070555/

Autistic people deserve the highest standards of evidence based practice and reporting practices in this field fall woefully short. We offer recommendations to improve that.

The infrastructure of meaninglessness Listen, there are two realities that we should be aware of. AI exists to make your job obsolete because the alternative is that AI makes managers obsolete. Let me try to break down this theory, which...

“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.”

collectivefutures.blog/the-infrastr...

Square format in acrylics on canvas. View from a height at, in the foreground, the ruined remains of an abbey and dominating the picture a stone 12th century Round Tower rendered mostly in warm tones with the right side being dark in shadow and the left side in sunlight having pale grey blue stones and some pink and red dotted among the earthen tones as it moves around to the dark brown and blue at the right side. Its pointed top reaches almost the top of the painting. Around its base are scattered headstones of a cemetery in various greys with some round green bushes. Just in front along the bottom edge is pale yellow-green grass, because the view is from across the road in a field which is higher than the graveyard. Behind the tower we see down onto the crescent-shaped strand stretching away to halfway up the painting where it bends right receiving the blues of the sea coming in from the right. Near the back of the beach is a broken line of pink, perhaps of seaweed at a tide line. Behind the beach at the left edge is a caravan park with dozens of mostly pale caravans in rows. Along the horizon, a third of the way down from the top edge and up past the beach are gentle hills of green patchwork fields, dotted with pale houses at the bottom closest to Ardmore and with a tree line along much of the distant top extending to the right over a headland which has violet and grey cliffs at the right edge. The sky is a very pale aqua blue. Signed top left, Liam Daly

A #painting from Ireland's south coast. "Ardmore" is an exalted place for me, not because of the Round Tower, but because when I was small I stayed in a caravan and every day you'd jump over the dunes to the beach after first eating a bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice. #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #TidesOutTuesday

Rising autism diagnoses confirm that we totally fuck A recent public health report has revealed that autism is more common than previously thought, confirming that autistic people are really good at sex. The government-commissioned report found a stagge...

“It could be because autistic people tend to have big, beautiful eyes, an air of mystique and a fathomless, unknowable heart… Oh. Oh, God. Er, excuse me for a minute.”

Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings The United States has once again demonstrated its unique talent for scientific deduction by confidently declaring there may be a link between pregnant women taking paracetamol and children developi…

NEWS! Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings

"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...

Landscape format, in very loosely painted acrylics on mat board, in a sketchy effect. Looking down a street of mostly three-story retail buildings, from left in the foreground to right in the distance. The right-hand side is all in dark red, almost black, shadow and throws a darker triangle of shadow onto the street which in sunlight is orange. Buildings on the left are shops, with many having awnings of green or yellow over their dark windows and doors. Upper stories are mostly oranges and yellows with some white. Several cars are parked on the left side, starting with an orange and grey car, then a white one before they become indistinguishable. Footpath on the left is grey, and the one on the right is lost in very dark shadow. Power lines arc across the street. All over there are flecked details of yellow and dark orange. Lines are in dark blue. The sky is canary yellow with chimneys protruding up into it. Photo of the painting was taken before it was signed.

A #painting from the southwest of Ireland "Bandon II" came out of times I spent cycling in West Cork, the town being one I've always enjoyed visiting. And I'm very much overdue another visit. Maybe this is what happens when you get older. I wonder if it's still orange? #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #scape

The myth of optimality in human movement science The concept of optimality dominates contemporary human movement science, with researchers across biomechanics, motor control, and neuroscience routine…

The myth of optimality in human movement science

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

YouTube video by Disrupted Science September 12, 2025 — Safeguarding Science from AI: An Interview with Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij

. @olivia.science and I had the honour to speak with Kent Anderson and Joy Moore on @disruptedscience.bsky.social 🧪 💫

🎬 🍿 Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9w0...

🎶👂 Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/082h... 1/🧵

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making - Nature Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

Just one of two big @nature.com papers from @intlbrainlab.bsky.social out today. This companion article illustrates the value of large-scale brain-wide recordings from mice performing a standardized task, giving new insights at cellular resolution into neural representations of prior information. 🧠🧪

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Extraordinary resource! "Comprehensive recordings from 621,733 neurons in 297 brain areas of 139 mice (12 labs) performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor & cognitive components: a public dataset to understand how computations distributed across & within brain areas drive behaviour."👇🧪

I just finished reading this excellent paper, highly recommended.

The Fascinating Neuroscience of Lucid Dreaming Training the mind to enter this rare state of conscious sleep may bring surprising benefits.

The Fascinating Neuroscience of Lucid Dreaming www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sen...

Around 90% of middle-aged and older autistic adults are undiagnosed in the UK, new review finds 89 to 97 per cent of autistic adults aged 40+ years are undiagnosed in the UK, according to the largest review of its kind. The review indicated that middle-aged and older autistic adults are facing h...

NEW #AUTISM RESEARCH (@gavrobstew.bsky.social + @proffrancescahappe.bsky.social): Nearly 90% of middle-aged and older #autistic adults are undiagnosed in the UK; autistic adults are facing higher rates of mental and physical health conditions as they age

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/up-to-9...

Noradrenaline drives learning across scales of time and neurobiological organisation The noradrenergic system plays a diverse role in learning, from optimising learning behaviour to modulating plasticity. Work bridging across micro- and macroscale levels is revealing how noradrenaline...

Excellent new review by @claireocallaghan.bsky.social on how noradrenaline drives learning across multiple scales of neurobiological organization - from cells to networks www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Windows Notepad, the native simple text editor, now has formatting options and a Copilot button.

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients into Clear Quantities Abstract Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear models, but is more challenging for more complex models with, for example, categorical variables, interactions, non-linearities, and hierarchical structures. Here, we introduce an alternative approach to making sense of statistical models. The central idea is to abstract away from the mechanics of estimation, and to treat models as “counterfactual prediction machines,” which are subsequently queried to estimate quantities and conduct tests that matter substantively. This workflow is model-agnostic; it can be applied in a consistent fashion to draw causal or descriptive inference from a wide range of models. We illustrate how to implement this workflow with the marginaleffects package, which supports over 100 different classes of models in R and Python, and present two worked examples. These examples show how the workflow can be applied across designs (e.g., observational study, randomized experiment) to answer different research questions (e.g., associations, causal effects, effect heterogeneity) while facing various challenges (e.g., controlling for confounders in a flexible manner, modelling ordinal outcomes, and interpreting non-linear models).

Figure illustrating model predictions. On the X-axis the predictor, annual gross income in Euro. On the Y-axis the outcome, predicted life satisfaction. A solid line marks the curve of predictions on which individual data points are marked as model-implied outcomes at incomes of interest. Comparing two such predictions gives us a comparison. We can also fit a tangent to the line of predictions, which illustrates the slope at any given point of the curve.

A figure illustrating various ways to include age as a predictor in a model. On the x-axis age (predictor), on the y-axis the outcome (model-implied importance of friends, including confidence intervals). Illustrated are 1. age as a categorical predictor, resultings in the predictions bouncing around a lot with wide confidence intervals 2. age as a linear predictor, which forces a straight line through the data points that has a very tight confidence band and 3. age splines, which lies somewhere in between as it smoothly follows the data but has more uncertainty than the straight line.

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life?

Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social)
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Four photos of little bee butts sticking out of flowers

The most viral post I've done in months is a link to a story about bees so clearly every post must now be about our little apian pals, here is a series of photos of bumble bee sploots

(taken from here: www.reddit.com/r/Eyebleach/...)

Expression of Interest in Serving as a PsyArXiv Moderator As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Video reveals cockatoos have 30 unique dance moves—including headbanging Researchers now know why the caged bird dances: a form of mentally enriching play

The scientists who convinced someone to pay them to study cockatoo dance moves are the true winners

"...it's possible the birds just didn’t like Avicii, the researchers suggest." 😂🧪

Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

🚨Pre-print alert🚨

We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭

How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵

doi.org/10.1101/2025...