🧵 New paper to appear in The Handbook of Linguistics and Multimodality: “Communicating from head to toe”, with @acwiek.bsky.social and @susfuchs.bsky.social 🥰 We review evidence that language is fundamentally physical, shaped by anatomy and biomechanics from your skull to your soles. 🗣️🦵 [1/6]

Seals have a superpower: they are the only mammals with amphibious hearing! They hear well both in-air and underwater. My collagues and I have a new study in Proceedings B on the origins and evolution of amphibious hearing in pinnipeds 🦭🔊🧪 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

The origin and evolution of amphibious hearing in pinnipeds

Abstract. Pinnipeds (true seals, eared seals and walruses) are the only mammals that can hear effectively in both air and water. How and when they achieved

doi.org

🚨 Out this week in @pnas.org 🚨 The flagship paper from my PhD @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @livingingroups.bsky.social - We show surprising statistical similarities in animal behaviour across states, individuals, and even species. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (🧵 1/10)

🚨🚀 Excited to kick off our summer school today on Multiscale Social Dynamics in Individuals and Groups at MindLabs, Tilburg University with @wimpouw.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @babajideowoyele.bsky.social and others! Full details here envisionbox.org/summerschool...

Humans use optimal eye movements to facilitate mental rotation of objects bioRxivpreprint

Humans use optimal eye movements to facilitate mental rotation of objects

The ability to mentally rotate objects is a fundamental feature of human cognition, and humans can use this ability to make choices about objects based on their geometry. However, remarkably little is known about how such choices are reached, and what sort of visual information might facilitate them. We devised an experiment where participants had to mentally simulate an object's rotation to choose which of two objects was better for a subsequent task based on its shape alone. We also tracked their gaze while they made their choice, to see which visual information they were using to facilitate this mental simulation. We found that participants were consistently able to choose the most suitable object for the task, and, remarkably, the visual information they sampled was directly linked to their choices. Put simply, participants made better choices when they looked at more informative regions of the objects, and participants who sampled regions that were better for facilitating mental simulation made better choices overall. These findings reveal a direct link between fixations, simulation, and decision-making, suggesting that to perform any fine-grained mental simulation people need to direct their gaze at specific, informative points of an object to simulate its two-dimensional proximal image displacement.

dlvr.it

#PhiMiSci published a new article: "Icons in action" by Wim Pouw argues that iconicity is neither reducible to objective resemblance nor to a purely subjective impression, but arises from a niche-constructed organism-environment system.

This example is absurd, but it's also Really Very Bad. Springer Nature apparently has bots withdrawing papers from its immense catalog, with no human oversight. They are abdicating their responsibility to preserve the historic record. (2/4)

This work was inspired by @tomerullman.bsky.social's “illusion illusion” paradigm (arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613) where VLMs mistake illusion-like images for genuine optical illusions. In both cases, models respond to what a problem looks like rather than what it actually requires.🔮

The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how some...

arxiv.org

Want a science podcast for the weekend? Check out this episode of 'Nature's unsung heroes' from BBC Science, with Tim Brown @parasitetim.bsky.social, a PhD researcher in my lab. Tim talks about why parasites matter & the emerging field of parasite conservation 🪱🧪🌍 open.spotify.com/episode/5864...

How parasites play a vital role as caretakers of Earth’s ecosystems

Instant Genius · Episode

open.spotify.com

Orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and humans all laugh with the same underlying beat — and new research shows this rhythmic structure dates back 15 million years to our last common ancestor. #Language #Linguistics #Primatology #PrimateVocalCommunication #Anthropology

The Rhythm in Ape Laughter Is 15 Million Years Old

A new comparative study finds that the timing structure of laughter has been conserved across all living great apes since before the hominid lineage began to diverge.

primatology.net

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Diversity and sensorimotor specialization of head direction cells in the mouse thalamus CurrentBiology

Diversity and sensorimotor specialization of head direction cells in the mouse thalamus

Hijazi and Jiang et al. identify distinct head direction (HD) cell subpopulations in the mouse anterodorsal thalamic nucleus, based on the combination of firing patterns, connectivity, and neurochemical profile, including calretinin immunoreactivity. Differential sensorimotor responses and projection targets suggest that HD cells integrate attention- and arousal-related information with directional signals.

dlvr.it

📄🚨New #OSF #preprint! Our visual-world study on L1 and L2 speakers shows that there are distinct prediction stages without cognitive load. Under load, this distinction disappears. We also observe different effects of cognitive load and non-nativeness on prediction. Read more: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Solid rejection of "counting" and "statistical inference" abilities in nonhuman animals, from crows to chimps & pigeons. #animalcognition "associative learning models are a powerful tool in animal cognition research, often capable of unmatched quantitative accuracy." doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Octopus bimaculoides can learn to utilize a mirror to localize a reward outside the line of sight CurrentBiology

Octopus bimaculoides can learn to utilize a mirror to localize a reward outside the line of sight

Kieseler et al. show that three Octopus bimaculoides learned to move to a reward site using a mirror. Octopuses climbing the start-chamber wall indicates integration of spatial mapping of mirror cues to tank geometry. This extends mirror-use capabilities to invertebrates and suggests convergent evolution of underlying cognitive principles.

dlvr.it

Very proud to present our paper on the spectacular “dances” of Victoria’s riflebirds! Out now in Current Biology. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Considering the whole body, including #postural stability affects acoustics of #speech, but not #fluency related measures, see new work in JASA. Thanks for this team effort with Mingtong, Eric & @suzanneaussems.bsky.social. The corpus is #OA on doi.org/10.5281/zeno... pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/art...

Perturbing postural stability affects acoustic properties but not fluency of adult speech production during face-to-face interaction

Physical constraints, particularly those that challenge postural stability and control, may measurably influence speech production. This experimental study inve

pubs.aip.org

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Do animals perceive time differently from humans? Science covers our new paper on 'timescapes of animal experience', led by Ishan Singhal @singhal.bsky.social 🦇🐈🦋🕷️🐟🐒🐍🪰🦜⏰ www.science.org/content/arti...

Do animals perceive time differently from humans?

Science chats with a researcher whose team is using “timescapes” to understand how nonhumans experience the world

science.org

Anil Seth@anilseth.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Timescapes of Animal Experience: new paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, led by @singhal.bsky.social, w/ @birchlse.bsky.social and me. Open access link: authors.elsevier.com/c/1nHo74sIRv...

Since the launch of ChatGPT monthly submissions to arXiv have almost doubled to 30k & even if the rejection rate has also doubled since 2023, academia is looking at a fundamental crisis of dealing with AI-fueled texts...

The Economist@economist.com · 2mo ago

With just one prompt, anyone can ask AI to write an article (or create a doctored image of himself as Jesus). It has fuelled concerns of “AI slop”. But is it a tidal wave or a trickle? These five charts help explain the changes

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

A new Science study shows that bumble bees can position a ball underneath a fake “flower” to reach a reward, suggesting they can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving and challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates. https://scim.ag/4vs08dC

APA no longer shows me the actual paper, authors, abstract etc when I click on a paper in a search engine. Everything gated now, including basic paper info. Screenshots: (1) search hit (2) resulting APA site. Tried for a few papers now. What on Earth.

1/4 Dolphins understand pointing as a communicative intention This has been shown in dolphins trained in “do as I do”. They observed two other dolphins doing something and had to decide which one to imitate. (paper) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Imitate that one: dolphins spontaneously interpret human pointing gesture in a novel context - Animal Cognition

Understanding whether non-human animals interpret human pointing as cooperative communication remains a central question in comparative cognition. Pointing is a foundational aspect of human…

link.springer.com

Who will you nominate for the Leo Waaijers Open Science Award? The deadline (23 June 2026, 14:00:00 CEST) is fast approaching! Anyone (whether you are a researcher or not) can be nominated for award. You can submit multiple nominations! More info: www.nwo.nl/en/leo-waaij...

Leo Waaijers Open Science Award | NWO

Open science is an approach to science in which research processes and results are made widely accessible to everyone. The aim is to promote transparency, collaboration, reproducibility and public eng...

nwo.nl

A next-generation #wearable for continuous cardiorespiratory monitoring. 🩺 A new study presents a flexible wireless patch that captures pulse waves, heart sounds, respiration, blood pressure signals, and vocal vibrations—all from a single sensor. A glimpse into the future of continuous healthcare.

This is cool and makes a lot of sense. Reminds me of the theory of neutral networks in evolutionary theory, where networks of neutral genotype changes enable populations to traverse the fitness landscape without getting stuck in local minima

Flavio Martinelli@flavioh.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NEW PAPER. Why do larger networks train better? "Because they contain more candidate *sub*networks that can learn the task" → lottery tickets This popular explanation uses an appealing but misleading metaphor🧵 We propose an intuitive alternative grounded in theory: escape dimensions

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... This paper is now open access after a year of being paywalled. It show how the human voice is directly coupled to the the (posture-related) muscle-activations during upper limb movements (i.e., those muscles that we activate for a range of hand gestures).

The human voice aligns with whole-body kinetics

Abstract. Humans often vocalize while concurrently gesturing with their hands. Fluctuations in the intensity and tone of the voice have been shown to synch

royalsocietypublishing.org

wimpouw@wimpouw.bsky.social · last yr.

Update: Our biomechanics EMG/Posture study on voice and upper limb kinetics has been accepted at Proceedings B. We show that moving the arms (while manipulating mass) recruits (postural) muscles that interact with the voice through respiratory interactions. Postprint: wimpouw.com/files/Pouwet...

The European Mathematics Society has some new scholarly publishing awareness materials ercom.org/awareness.html