Cool finding on 'parentese' from Gaye Soley's lab: when a parent speaks to each of their two children, the sound/style of their voice indicates whether they're speaking to the younger or older one (and other kids can tell!)

Preschoolers Infer Listeners from Age-Related Variation in Maternal Child-Directed Speech

Child-directed speech (CDS) varies systematically with the recipient child’s age. The present study examined whether children aged 3–6 years are sensitive to this within-register variation and use ...

tandfonline.com

New externality just dropped, don't miss it!

@casssunstein.bsky.social · last mo.

Non-User Externalities (people are talking about how sad it would be to be among the increasingly small group of people who have not read this paper). www.nber.org/papers/w3527...

I finally put my finger on why AI voice menus enrage me so much...if I'm picking up the phone at all, it's because Computer already failed me, and I need a human who can override something. The algorithmic phone menus were annoying enough, but at least there's a deterministic path to get a person.

Want to know what we learned from all those many babies? Of course you do! Short & sweet summary of outcomes but also all the different kinds of methodological and measurement issues we've been able to study!

ManyBabies@manybabies.org · 2mo ago

New ManyBabies publication! Over 10+ years and 5,000+ babies tested, we've learned a ton about how to study the developing mind. In this comment, we discuss three such lessons that are shaping the future of ManyBabies. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

Wow and also Oh No!

Solid Evidence@solidevidence.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I’m so excited. Our secret (not so secret) observational experiment is about to begin. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for wastewater surveillance. FIFA World cup. 1/ @securebio.org www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

good poll

Ed Jefferson@edjefferson.com · 2mo ago

Trying to find out what is best number edjefferson.com/bestnumber/

Funniest workshop I went to in grad school was an even split of cognitive scientists (slides), linguists (15 page 10pt handout), and philosophers (reading prepared text verbatim!!!) We were all so scandalized by each others' talk norms, it was a great ice breaker.

Andrea Howard@drandreahoward.bsky.social · 2mo ago

There was often way too much on any one slide. You have 5-15 minutes in total, and I found myself frantically scanning each slide to figure out where I was supposed to look and what I was supposed to take away. This is too much cognitive load for the audience. (3/11)

Autonomous AI agents are now built into many browsers. A naive user can take an online survey with as little as the click of a button. For behavioral research, which depends heavily on online samples, this is a real problem. (1/7)

Issue 44 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬 Including: ➡️ psychds - R Package @mekline.bsky.social ➡️ READMEBuilder @eivimeycook.bsky.social ➡️ Citations to Retracted Papers @cosig.net ➡️ Data Curation as Data Literacy Education @mikalarae.bsky.social and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

RDM Weekly - Issue 044

A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.

rdmweekly.substack.com

Today was my AHA moment. Did u know that R Markdown can cite all packages for u when you knit the document? And it only requires two lines of code. Silly me - I was citing every package manually. Thank you @mklingelhoeferj.bsky.social for teaching me so many cool things today! @improvingpsych.org

Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS)@improvingpsych.org · 3mo ago

Beyond engaging in discussion during #SIPS2026, you can also gain valuable skills! Join us for the exciting workshops taking place during #SIPS2026 Online May 6-7! Full #SIPS2026 Program 👉 pretalx.com/sips2026-onl...

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

"Too often, the costs of maintaining infrastructure for flagship data stewardship projects like this are treated as an afterthought. The UK has built something remarkable, but we need to keep investing in keeping it safe." www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

UK Biobank suspends access after massive data breach - Research Professional News

Flagship research resource promises to “severely” restrict downloads after data found for sale in China

researchprofessionalnews.com

And the award for best paper title and abstract in 2026 so far goes to @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social and their response to commentaries in Behavioral and Brain Sciences arxiv.org/pdf/2604.09501

Textiles!!! If you haven't spent at least some time sewing or a related craft, let me tell you that with some rare exceptions (quilters cotton), all textiles are basically Haunted in terms of their material properties. Textiles are a REALLY HARD PROBLEM.

Lyndall@lyndallc.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Never gonna shut up about how TEXTILES are what bring astronauts home safely from the moon.

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

My toddler's approach to question syntax in 1L acquisition: she's just 100 percent dedicated to avoiding all question forms. Everything is a sentence completion task for us - "Daddy has a...." "Mama's feeling a little..." Not sure if this is a documented strategy but she's been on it for months!

Getting ready to head to the session children's beliefs about AI & technology, I passed this alarmingly fast-moving egg delivery robot. I have to say I didn't care for it, but the junior colleague seemed highly intrigued by the little cat-face screen on the front. #CDS2026

were all trying to find the guy that did this hotdog dot gif

Jack@wakeupangry.bsky.social · 4mo ago

How are there more than one infinity pools?

Lot of recalled products down there.

The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Things are pretty busy at the world hospital

I'll join the chorus of people who are not even quite sure what to say about this absolute behemoth of a project, except for YAY! I worked full time on SCORE from 2019-2021 with the COS team, designing and implementing the system for identifying claims in the literature, developing protocols to...

Brian Nosek@briannosek.bsky.social · 4mo ago

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

windows keeps hallucinating monitors that don't exist I'm laughing so hard help

PSA to all of us with international collaborations that the Chaos Weeks start on Sunday (US/Canada goes into DST but the EU/UK don't until near the end of March). Check your meetings!

a judge is sitting at a table in a courtroom and pointing at someone .

Alt: Judge Judy angrily taps her watch then bangs on the table.

media.tenor.com

Forever mad about the barely acknowledged existence of unscented Febreze. Bizarre consequence of human perception: we get nose blind to our own stink, so the unscented stuff appears to have no effect, and people wouldn't buy it until it actively smelled like something. I hunt it on the internet.

Brendel@brendelbored.bsky.social · 5mo ago

For years we spent billions of dollars on something called Febreze, which did not eliminate odors but added an additional, unpleasant, odor to your situation

Steinbeck: What did you think of my draft of 𝘖𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘔𝘢𝘯? Publisher: It needs more characters. Steinbeck: I'll see what I can do.

A Placebo cover band also called Placebo

Have you noticed how navigation apps include walking & waiting for public transit, but excludes parking & walking for driving? After being late a few times 😅, we finally did. We got curious: what if these apps account for parking?

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Was trying to remember a Will Forte quote from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and accidentally figured out how to make Google’s AI tool shut up