Arran Reader

Nice to know that I'm in good company! I'd like to help out but also there are A LOT of questions in the survey...

“To sustain the latest iteration of the AI con, the industry relies on anthropomorphic sleight of hand – claiming that models “think,” “reason,” and “learn” to suggest cognitive abilities they demonstrably lack and may never develop.“

TMSMultiLab survey TMSMultiLab is a community of ~70 researchers using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We aim to share methods code and data, to reach consensus & encourage best practice in TMS research methods...

To find out about how #TMS #BrainStim users collect, analyse & share their data, we've made a very brief TMS survey:

forms.gle/83Abpj5F8qzd...

It should take you less than 5 minutes & does not ask for any personal information.

We'll use the answers to plan our future work.

Please share!

🙏🙏🙏

⚡

Table 1 Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations. See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧪

We're now up to 29 labs across 16 countries for our replication project! There is still room for more labs to join us. We are particularly seeking labs capable of testing native English speakers, though all labs are welcome to participate. For more information: rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-mis...

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

Ooh interesting - different methods of assessing TMS responses give quite different answers. Relevant for @tmsmultilab.bsky.social!

Different ways of ‘getting a grip’ Researchers uncover new evidence of how ancient human relatives in South Africa used their hands, revealing varying levels of dexterity and climbing ability

Different ways of ‘getting a grip’. How ancient human relatives in South Africa used their #hands reveals varying levels of dexterity & climbing ability. New study by a team led by Samar Syeda & @tracykivell.bsky.social. #hominins #evolution @amnh.org tinyurl.com/mwk5eb63 & doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Amazing opportunity alert!

At Reviewer Zero, we're passionate about helping early career researchers navigate the challenges of the peer review system. If you're an early career researcher in psych & neuro and feel stuck & need advice for a manuscript, check out this opportunity!

Informal poll: if you're testing emotion recognition in your lab using faces, do you think it necessary to also believe in 1:1 mapping of emotion & expression? Or do you think that's not a thing, but you're happy to test recognition as correct or not, nonetheless? #affectsci #neuroskyence

"Your AI can’t see gorillas!"
A few years ago we found that students are more likely to see the gorilla in their data if they are not also asked to test a specific hypothesis. In his blog Chiraag Gohel now shows that Chat-GPT can’t help you to find it either.
chiraaggohel.com/posts/llms-e...

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

Debunking the Myth of Excitatory and Inhibitory Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in Cognitive Neuroscience Research Abstract. Repetitive TMS (rTMS) is a powerful neuroscientific tool with the potential to noninvasively identify brain–behavior relationships in humans. Early work suggested that certain rTMS protocols...

Happy Theta Burst Day, everyone!

20 years old today 🥳 #TMS #BrainStim

a colleague sent this present for you all:

doi.org/10.1162/jocn...

Come and work with us and do a PhD with on a very exciting project #neurojobs

Thank you!

Brilliant! Please could you add me?

Cold hands, altered ownership? We link disturbed body ownership in stroke patients to reduced hand temperature and impaired thermoception. The right Insula & Parietal hubs are key players. We are excited to share our new findings
@naturecomms.bsky.social
▶️ rdcu.be/d5SDU

1/n Some time ago my colleague, excellent cook, and friend Ivan told me: "Cacio e pepe is the recipe that I screw up more often. Let's make a project studying systematically the physics of that sauce".

Prepare to get cheesy, I'm glad to share the Cacio e paper preprint:

arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536

📣It is an exciting day at the CNU, several of our team have been working on a NIBS data repository and have now officially launched 'Big NIBS data'-an open-access platform and repository for non-invasive brain stimulation data! See here: bignibsdata.com.
(also see preprint: osf.io/preprints/os...)

Yes

There’s an interesting narrative on cultural evolution emerging here.

Naive (Western) individuals intuitively suck at knots. As shown by this cool new experimental work—but also something I’ve noticed as an outdoors hobbyist.

Evoking stable and precise tactile sensations via multi-electrode intracortical microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex - Nature Biomedical Engineering An analysis of the localization and intensity of intracortical microstimulation in three participants with cervical spinal cord injury shows that overlapping projected fields from multiple electrodes ...

Our group has a new paper out now in Nature BME, led by Charles Greenspon. It covers a number of updates on how we can restore tactile sensation from the hand using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS).

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

Older women participating to a race at the Senior Games 2023.

⚠️ New preprint !
« Social determinants of cognitive aging trajectories across 39 countries »
Some people in their 80s have cognitive abilities similar to many 30-year-olds, others are severely diminished. 
How comes?

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A short 🧵👇 1/7

Body and self: a dialogue between philosophy and neuroscience Join us for the next BRNet seminar with Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and Adrian Alsmith.

🚨 Save the Date! 🚨

Join the next #BRNet Seminar:
💭 Body and Self: A Dialogue Between Philosophy and Neuroscience with @anatajadura.bsky.social & Adrian Alsmith.
📅 Jan 17, 2025
📍 Online
🎟️ Reserve your spot today: shorturl.at/nl3Ur
#Body #Philosophy #Neuroscience #Research

new pre-print led by @vittrebicky.bsky.social in which we highlight the importance of methods reporting for photographic stimuli.
👇see 🧵

Input device matters for measures of behaviour in online experiments - Psychological Research Studies of perception, cognition, and action increasingly rely on measures derived from the movements of a cursor to investigate how psychological processes unfold over time. This method is one of the...

Now published: doi.org/10.1007/s004...

We demonstrate that cursor movements differ depending on the input device used in online experiments. Given that cursor movements are increasingly used to investigate ongoing perceptual, cognitive, and motoric processes, it is an important variable to consider

When you are using matlab and you want to get the square root of the result of the most recent command line operation.

Apply Now for PhD Studentships 2025 We are recruiting 2-4 PhD studentships, fully funded by the University of Stirling, which will aim to advance knowledge of the dynamic relations between place and memory at multiple timescales…

Apply now for fully funded #PhD studentships at the University of Stirling (Scotland, UK) #PsychSciSky #cogpscy #PhDSky #memory #neuroskyence #Psychology placememory.net/apply-now-fo...