10/10
We propose that colour has been fast and accurate in the past, making it a reliable, low-cost strategy for efficient coordination. Experimentally reduce salience and discriminability all you want, speakers won’t ignore their past experience. Don't buy it? Check our work: go.unimelb.edu.au/h9s2
9/10
Even controlling for production costs like effort and word-frequency, we found that speakers still use the low-salience colour properties with high frequency, and far more than they do the salient orientation property. So ‘salience’ ain’t it. 🌈Colour🌈 is special. Why?
8/10
The ubiquitous explanation is that colour is special because it is ‘salient’: visually contrastive. In E2, we reduce colours’ salience and compare it with orientation: another salient, attention-guiding property. If salience is to blame, speakers should use orientation more than colour.
7/10
Despite our discriminability manipulations, speakers mentioned colour far more than material across conditions 🧐🤔 One might think this is due to differences in discriminability across the modalities, but we used psychophysical staircases to control for that. So why is colour special?
6/10
If the search-efficiency view works as a general, multi-modal theory of reference, both material (audio) and colour (visual) should produce precisely the same effects. This is exactly what we see. Search efficiency generalises across modalities! 🥳
5/10
Welcome to the baseball bat factory! Participants watched colored bats fall down the screen and crash, making an impact sound. Manipulating the perceptual discriminability of colour and material (wooden bat thunk vs metal bat clunk), we test if Search Efficiency generalizes across modalities.
4/10
While the Search Efficiency view explains a lot of data, the experiments often manipulate search-efficiency using colour – one of few properties privileged in visual attention. Will the account still hold for non-colour properties? Will it extend all the way to other sensory modalities?
3/10
Paula Rubio-Fernandez has long shown that referential expressions track precisely with the listeners’ visual search, as if speakers are tailoring their expressions to make the listeners search faster. This ‘search-efficiency’ view was formalised by @julianje.bsky.social and Paula in 2022:
2/10
Research on visual search and reference production dovetail remarkably well. Mentioning highly discriminable yet unnecessary attributes of a target referent (the ‘small’ circle, the ‘blue/pink’ circle) guides visual search and speeds up responses (increasingly from left-to-right).
1/10
So here's a puzzle. Efficient communication perspectives argue that speakers tailor their messages to make their listener’s visual 👁️ (and auditory?👂) search faster and more accurate. However, even when visual search is tightly controlled, people really over-use 🌈colour🌈 terms. Why? 🧵
he’s been chilling in the basement for a minute
Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist
Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.
I'm only partway through, but it's clear that this book by Chater & Lowenstein is one of the most important books to ever come out of psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics.
Bullshit
Writing is thinking
Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.
first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:
Bit of a life update: After 4 wonderful years in Melbourne, yesterday I arrived in the US to start a postdoc at UC Berkeley with @wdt.bsky.social
I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊
Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
It's a struggle, but it's gratifying once things start coming together. What I have on paper tonight is a clean expression of idea I didn't have well-formed when I began this morning.
Some people think we should hand off this painstaking form of labor to LLMs and get back to doing science.
Abstract of paper
Figure 1!
What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help?
New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Call for Abstract (AMPC 2026): Applying Mathematical and Quantitative Psychology to Real World Complex Problems Singapore, 23-25 February 2026. Abstract submission deadline 26 November 2024 Plus a bunch of other info. Go to https://ampc2026.com/ for details.
Hello fellow nerds! The upcoming Australasian Mathematical Psych Conference (AMPC) is going to be on Feb 23-25, and they've just put out the call for abstracts.
Details below. This is one of my favourite conferences and this year it's in Singapore(!!) which should be awesome.
Interested in how we make preference-driven decisions, and how this is implemented in the brain?
We report that neural correlates of evidence accumulation (CPP, Mu/Beta) are also observed during value-based decisions.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Led by @laurencf.bsky.social (Lauren Fong)
1/n
yikes.
Screenshot of a quiz question: Is the following statement True or False? 'A university building that has never had a fire or similar emergency is unlikely to have one in the near future'.
my knowledge of Hume has unexpectedly come in handy for my fire safety training test
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵
In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped
When there is a random way to do something, there is a less random way that is better but requires more thought. In this case, regression models that make no sense don't belong in a multiverse analysis. An inferential regression without a causal justification is like an opinion without reasons.
Using EEG 🧠⚡ and representational similarity analysis, we mapped how the neural representations of food attributes (e.g., taste & health) unfold over time when viewing foods🍎🍰🥗 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social
theconversation.com/our-brains-e...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ap...
The linked course is an incredibly well-written, clear explanation of how LLMs work and outlines really thoughtfully what the can, and can't, do. Recommended read for absolutely everyone out there. #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬
suppose you could back up your brain to a portable hard drive and then run it on your laptop. Would your laptop be able to think and feel just like a Sapiens?
I, too, smoked a lot of weed in my dorm room sophomore year
