Mikołaj Hernik

PhD fellow in Child Development (294946) | UiT The Arctic University of Norway Job title: PhD fellow in Child Development (294946), Employer: UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Deadline: Friday, March 13, 2026

My colleague Monika Abels (not on bsky) is recruiting a PhD student to work on her cross-cultural project.
Details and contacts in the add.
Please share widely with candidates interested in living in the Norwegian arctic & doing research with small-scale societies.
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

YouTube video by Ragnhild Hemsing - Topic Peer Gynt, Op. 23: In the Hall of the Mountain King (Arr. for Hardanger Fiddle & String...

And this banger too, of course.
youtu.be/JBshYOOdLiQ?...

YouTube video by Ragnhild Hemsing - Topic Peer Gynt, Op. 23: Morning Mood (Arr. for Hardanger Fiddle & String Orchestra by Tormod Tvete Vik)

Some weeks ago Ragnhild Hemsing was performing Peer Gynt on Hardanger fiddle in Tromsø with Arktisk Filharmoni and I just can't get enough of this sound since then.
youtu.be/M_st6_6Xvhk?...

Don't be mislead by the title:
🎞️How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
is actually a very touching and rather good (if a bit predictable) movie. On Netflix.

Cow Tools!

We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them

It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS

Here I describe our study

(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social

Book cover of the handbook Frank Keil "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior"

My colleagues & I have only now learned that our go-to handbook: Frank Keil's "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior" is out of print with no reprints planned.
We are urgently looking for a new handbook at BA level, ideally with similar balance of topics.

Suggestions are welcome

Thor Bjørklund - Wikipedia

Ostehøvel - cheese slicer also works great for that. And it happens to be abundant in Norway, where - I am told by Norwegians - it was invented.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Bj...

But I complained only AFTER publication. We just could not risk further unfair delays for an ECR co-author. So the paper includes unnecessary references forced upon us. Cited in a way that makes it clear that we consider them beyond the scope and that they were brought up by the reviewer.

Happened to me: anonymous reviewer requested (the only comment!) some not-directly-relevant refs co-authored by ... the editor. The same was visible in several *publicly available* anonymous reviews under the same editor. After raising this with the publisher's ethics team the editor lost the gig.

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today.

Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Child Development (285169) | UiT The Arctic University of Norway Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Child Development (285169), Employer: UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Deadline: Sunday, September 28, 2025

My colleague at UiT Monika Abels (not on Bsky) recruits a postdoc. Details and contact in the link.
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

The self-reference memory bias is preceded by an other-reference bias in infancy - Nature Communications A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions Nature Communications - Abilities to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial actions are crucial for sustaining cooperative systems. Here, the authors show that human newborns with just 5 days...

New paper! Here (in Nature Communications) we (Ale Geraci, Luca Surian, Lucia Gabriella Tina, & I; work led/run by Ale) show that 5-day-old newborns selectively attend to two distinct forms of prosocial over antisocial action: approaching versus avoiding and helping versus hindering.
rdcu.be/evorW

Common cuckoo calling from a tree top

Common cuckoo. Heard them a thousand times, saw only twice. And first time I got to take a pic. Good day #birding at Håkøya, Tromsø yesterday.

Thank you for sharing this personal account, Thom.
-With best wishes.

Happy In Theory This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.

New Substack post

It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work

As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending

thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

Snow goose in flight.

Psyched to see today this snow goose (a north-american species) in Tromsø, Northern Norway. #birding

I've just discovered that Proceedings B stopped hosting the movie stimuli from supplementary materials of my paper published in 2014. There is no sign that they were ever there, except for references to them in text.
Did anyone else experience this?

Bar-tailed godwit resting today evening in Tromsø, Norway, on the way further north-east. #birding

Adult white-tailed eagle in flight.

Easter Sunday #birding: adult white-tailed eagle, Rakkfjord, Kvaløya. Not uncommon in Troms, but always a highlight.

Today I learned how I am going to loose my hearing. It will be by playing with feedback on E560 Deflector shield

📌

I'm looking for a PhD Student at the intersection of Machine Learning and Developmental Psychology.

We study everyday experiences in children from 🇰🇪🇩🇪🇹🇷 and use ML models to quantify interactions.

4 years, fully funded, great team, beautiful location. Please share and apply!

tinyurl.com/2mafdyh4

Male Steller's eider.

It's been 6 years today since I moved to the Arctic. On Sunday I finally saw Steller's eider - a rare bird in Tromsø. If I saw that, will I see the end of data collection(s), I wonder.

According to the director, it was relatively easy to get the money because the backers could assume that if things go wrong he is able to finish it all by himself. In Blender, BTW - a freeware!

Flow is a very beautiful movie.

It is snowing.

Re-upping this summer school: Cognitive & evolutionary foundations of politics, with a great faculty list!

Deadline is at the end of next week: 14th February

Any questions, feel free to get in touch!

Psychological stimulus sets and datasets

Directory of free, open psychological datasets

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...