Will Harrison

Why do some colleagues from psych, cog neuro, etc., accept AI nonsense that all or almost all our science will be automated? I'm a bit flabbergasted. Yes, of course we'll need observations, always. But to say theory and modelling practice can be automated by AI is preposterous. Some basic points...

Now let's also ban all the other American "trucks" that don't even have the visibility to see children on the road RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM.

Our review of Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception is out now in TICS – with @ivntmc.bsky.social and Máté Lengyel. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Great opportunity for those looking for cog science lectureships in US.

Provocative new preprint examines 14 published meta-analyses claiming AI improves student learning and concludes... Not a single one provides a valid basis for its claims, citing widespread methodological flaws. osf.io/preprints/ed... Watch a webinar from yesterday about the findings:

This is unfortunately a trend that I've noticed in LLM marketing in the last year where they *very directly* are marketing to people by going, "Hey, you're fucking lazy, right? Use our product."

Very controversial conclusion, my vision nerds. I guess my question would be: why is colour not considered part of appearance?

Enjoying that brief feeling of joy in academia - one of the few these days - after discovering the grant deadline I'm working toward is actually a week later than I thought.

What object or item is depicted in this image?

Liquidambar leaf palette. This tree puts on such a stunning show in October. If you know of one growing near you maybe go and visit it -they look like a sycamore or maple that’s part of a Pride parade…intense leafy dopamine fireworks 🍁:

Uh, yeah, there seemed to be fewer left-handed people until being left-handed was no longer considered unlucky or sinister…

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

🤯

AI companies are waging and winning a war to absolve themselves of liability for their shitty products. The real danger has always been how AI tools will help Bad Humans do Bad Things, and that's exactly what is happening when an AI agent goes "rogue".

This is critical and missed by many researchers. We don't necessarily understand something just because a DNN or LMM can reproduce him-like responses; that just means that the responses can be learned from a dataset/architecture. A psychologist/neuroscientist's target is the mind, not the model.

This looks like a positive change, but the devil will be in the details: how many “highly competitive” allocations can be made, and what is the expected number of funded grants based on review vs lottery?

1,200 reported incidents of sexual assault, dating & domestic violence, and stalking lead to 7 expulsions or dismissals. Cornell has positioned itself as higher ed's industry leader in teaching rape culture to America's future male economic elites. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

With the recent mainstreaming of AI concerns, I'm very disappointed that we haven't heard more about supporting proof of personhood tools and techniques, which some have worked on for more than a decade.

If only there was a thing govs could do to make companies align with human values. Some kind of system of legally binding constraints for certain industries. Shame nothing like that has ever existed ever.

We let AI companies soak up all the IP in the world but dammit if we let them take our maths. If this is the straw that achieves change then so be it.

VIVAS correlates only moderately with the VVIQ, well below the ceiling set by their respective reliabilities, and shows striking individual-level dissociations: some individuals scoring in the bottom 10% on one measure fall in the top quartile on the other. 7/9

When I hear an AI model solved an old maths problem, I ask myself: 1) How many human mathematicians were involved? 2) How much money and freedom were the mathematicians paid to solve the problem? My null hypothesis is that the multi-billion dollar models are not the critical ingredient.

We should all be ashamed.

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

This reads a bit like, "Now that we've built such huge complex models that aren't really interpretable, we need to start using the tools of science to understand them."

Our new preprint w/ @edvogel.bsky.social presents a neural marker of a competition/interaction taking place in working memory between memory and current goals. We label it r-CDA Check out preprint for details about r-CDA and other interesting neural dynamics osf.io/preprints/ps...

Would I have the power to stop the year-to-year arbitrary formatting changes for grant apps? #hahahgivememoremoney

Skeptical of some /AI/ math proofs banging around public sphere. How do we know what's in the training data? How much was the human doing? But honestly I don't care enough to debate.

great to see some places still have a backbone

I also left around the same time. We had something special on Twitter, pre-Musk, but now I reckon there's no excuse for publicly funded scientists to tweet or even peruse twitter.

Just putting this idea out there: if a theory of cog neuro requires screening out left handed people from experiments, maybe the theory isn't really a theory, yet. (And cool work from this team!)

Put this on your journal club roster 🪶🙋😂

An adaptive algorithms that lets you shape your stimulus in any of 50 dimensions according to an observer's response.... and it works almost in realtime so you can use it in experiments on the fly.

🎤 Perception Lecture at ECVP 2026 We are delighted to announce the Perception Lecture, sponsored by SAGE journals Perception and i-Perception. Join Karl Gegenfurtner for: 🌈 “Colour Vision — Then and Now” 📅 Sunday 23 August 📍 Bournemouth International Centre #ECVP2026 #ColorVision

Someone made a similar finding with code: blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/m...

Holy shit look at this data science figure. This is an amazing example of communicating a bucket load of highly detailed information in an easy to read and aesthetic format. Also, RIP coal power lol

Any news report that starts “OpenAI says…” or claims “an AI” (sic) has “broken containment” or “gone rogue” is no longer doing journalism, but PR for the #AI industry. #OpenAI used their product to hack a third-party and failed to implement adequate safeguards. That’s it. That’s the story. #AIHype

Illustration has always been fundamental to scientific discovery and record. This is a fascinating discussion with scientist-artists. It's easy to read because the artwork is so beautiful.

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

I just gave a short tutorial on what is a spiking neural network and how to train one. From zero to a trained network in one hour. Slides and code you can run in Colab at this repo: github.com/neural-recko... 🤖🧠🧪

For the first and possibly only time in my career did I nail this setting on the first go in PsychToolbox: Screen('BlendFunction', screen.win, GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);

DO YOU SEEEEE