iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This was work was with Drs. Johanna Peetz and Rachel Burns. It is available Open Access here! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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A nice detail here is that the names were attached to specific foods (granola bars, salads), and their sound still had an effect. The effect of a name also appeared regardless of whether the food was itself junky or healthy.

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Across two experiments, participants (N = 601) expected the large sounding snacks to be more heavy and filling. They also reported being more likely to buy 💰 a snack for a friend, if the sound of the snack matched their friend’s preference.

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We presented participants with written prompts like “Imagine a new brand of snack cracker called Gobo. How heavy and filling would you expect it to be?” Half of the names were "small sounding" (Fipee) and half were "large sounding" (Norgo), based on previous work.

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

🚨 New paper alert! Can the sounds in a food brand name make it sound more or less filling? 🍫🍪 Think about the impression you get from “Rolo” vs “Twix”. We found that the answer is yes! Thread below 👇.

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The journal somehow made the mistake of removing our third author, Rachel J Burns, from the author list. The final version should be out soon with that corrected, and all authors listed correctly.

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I put together a writing guide for my lab. It's available here if anyone is interested! classilab.ca/resources/wr...

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

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Together these results replicate previous findings in German speakers (Aryani & Jacobs, 2018), and add to our appreciation for the effects of iconicity in language processing.

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Recall was equivocal in the lab. But, when using this approach to identify emotionally iconic words in a recall megastudy, we found better recall for iconic words.

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We also collected individual differences in the experience of emotion. The most predictive dimension was Emotionality (a personality factor from the HEXACO). This produced a three way interaction between word sound, meaning and Emotionality. I will just leave this plot here for you to look at.

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Participants were faster and more accurate to congruent vs. incongruent words. Interestingly, relative to neutral words, it seemed like there was facilitation in reaction time, and interference in accuracy.

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Then we found words whose sounds are congruent, incongruent or neutral, with respect to their level of emotional arousal. Participants responded to them on a semantic decision task (is this word exciting or calming) in two experiments.

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We start by quantifying associations between phonemes and emotional arousal using ratings of > 5000 nonwords.

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Very excited to share this new paper, along with Pragati Parajuli and @emij.bsky.social! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... In it we show that English words whose sounds match their level of emotional arousal are responded to faster, more accurately, and are better remembered!

sciencedirect.com

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Looking at code from a five year old project.

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

My latest experience with Elsevier was their journal mixing up the figures in my paper, ignoring my request to fix it during proofing, and now waiting two and a half weeks (and counting) for them to update the manuscript. Meanwhile the paper is online with the wrong figures.

Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 12/06/2026

Reposted by David Sidhu

Dave Eggers, on NPR's Wildcard with Rachel Martin: www.npr.org/2026/06/11/n...

"This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them to express themselves. But I say like you are one of one unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There's only one of you. …There's never been you in Ever, and there never will be another one of you. So to give your voice to a machine, to say 'speak for me, I'm going to be silent and I'm going to tell a machine to express myself or to tell my narrative,' is such a crime against yourself.

"It's so dystopian, beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel— and I did a lot; I never saw this coming— would be an entire generation tempted and too many of them acquiescing to the the silencing of their own voice in favor of a bland unthinking machine to voice their souls.

"But if you can tell them, 'even your roughest drafts, even your most disjointed seeming thoughts are going to be valid; and your voice is essential; the human chorus is incomplete without your voice; and I'm going to listen to whatever you say, even the rough drafts, whatever; I want those; I want to see it all," then we can make sure that that they're heard and that they feel like there are humans out there that want to hear that voice and not the machine processed voice.

"…Good lord, we're at a really scary time, you know, but every adult has to be that person. Every teacher, every parent has to be the one saying, 'Do not do this.' Your voice is the only thing that you have naturally. It's the one thing that nobody can replace. So let's hear your truth. Even if it's raw, even if it's unpolished, even if it doesn't come in the five paragraph essay or whatever. Like, let's let's have it straight from you."

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Reposted by David Sidhu

Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

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. 👇

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

@elsevierconnect.bsky.social The corrections I requested during proofing were not made and my article is now online with the incorrect figures. Customer service has been unresponsive. Can you tell me what I should do?

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Reposted by David Sidhu

Anna Hughes 🍁 @annaghughes.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I love when scientists release papers. Where were you hiding them

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Reposted by David Sidhu

Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Can strongly recommend Richard Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. A bit old, but still great insights. It is an expanded version of his famous talk You and Your Research, which is also worth watching: youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw?...

youtu.be

Hamming, "You and Your Research" (June 6, 1995)

Intro: I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and…

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Reposted by David Sidhu

Simon Hammann @simonhammann.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

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There are other interesting tidbits in here. - Other than size, measures of typicality did not contribute to iconicity ratings. - Phonological iconicity did not predict LDT times in this large dataset. It is open access, so take a look!

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Most interestingly, orthographic iconicity predicted faster responding in several mega study datasets (ELP, ECP, BLP). This was after controlling for a suite of variables including orthographic distinctiveness, concreteness and imageability.

There was also evidence that ratings genuinely quantified resemblance. Words for small things were rated as more iconic if they were shorter. Ratings of words for round vs. spiky objects depended on the roundness vs. spikiness of letters.

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Further, there were different predictors of either kind of iconicity. For example, imageability and visual strength predicted higher orthographic iconicity but not phonological iconicity.

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Orthographic iconicity ratings were collected for 3,150 words. Ratings correlated with previous ratings of phonological iconicity (r = .38; Winter et al., 2024), but the two were not redundant.

Iconicity refers to the form of a signal resembling its meaning. In spoken language this has been studied in the sounds of words (e.g., onomatopoeia like “bang”). This is the first study of iconicity in the shapes of letters in a phonographic script (i.e., where symbols code for sound).

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David Sidhu @davidmsidhu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Really excited to share this new paper. It's been a pet project of mine for almost three years. Words that LOOK like their meanings ("bed", "bubble", "look") are processed faster on lexical decision tasks. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

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What a great idea!! Excited to listen.