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Logan James

@loganjames.bsky.social
385 followers 381 following 15 posts

Post-doc @ STRI/UT Austin/McGill with the Earth Species Project. Comparative cognition and acoustic communication across birds/frogs/bats/humans🦜🐸🦇🎶 logansjames.github.io

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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
contractor role to annotate bioacoustic datasets! (must be US based). Feel free to message if you have any questions! earthspecies.org/2026/07/29/w...
earthspecies.org
We’re Hiring! Bioacoustics Annotators
About Earth Species Project Earth Species Project (ESP) is a non-profit using frontier AI to decode animal communication. We believe the exponential progress we’re seeing in AI offers new ways of l…
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Earth Species Project (ESP) @earthspecies.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
1/5 What counts as a communicative interaction? This was a recurring question at the recent Computational and Mechanistic Analyses of Communicative Interactions symposium, where ESP's Maddie Cusimano and @loganjames.bsky.social presented their research on carrion crow and zebra finch communication.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 05/06/2026
CBC Quirks and Quarks did an extended piece on our recent Science paper about beauty in animal vocalizations. alongside the science this also featuried postdoc @loganjames.bsky.social and yours truly producing animal vocalizations ourselves (lol)
cbc.ca
June 6: Humans and animals love the same sounds… | CBC Radio
The brain rewires itself to multitask, fast animals experience time in slow motion, an archival excerpt about a Russian space mirror and what physicists might build next to shed light on the unknown u...
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Giacomo Bignardi @giacomobignardi.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Enjoyed diving into the fascinating work by @loganjames.bsky.social et al. on shared preferences between human and non-human animals Liked it so much, we wrote an eLetter, now posted in Science 😅 Our take? There's another side to acoustic preferences worth exploring: idiosyncratic taste
Screenshot of an eLetter posted in Science, on April 13, 2026, titled "Shared and unique taste in acoustic preferences.", as a reply to the James et al. (2026, Science) study, which showed humans share acoustic preferences with other animals. The eLetter reanalyses data and finds that only 30% of repeatable variance in acoustic preferences is shared across humans, while 70% is unique to the individual listener. The eLetter concludes that acoustic preferences are predominantly idiosyncratic, and call for focus also on what makes individual taste unique.
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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Thank you NPR for this great coverage of our research!! you can read the paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
npr.org
Humans and animals find the same sounds 'beautiful'
Charles Darwin theorized that a sound, smell or color that's attractive to one species can be preferred by others too. A new study finds humans and animals do share preferences for certain sounds.
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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Super excited about this new paper! and eternally grateful to the amazing coauthors, the wonderful network of colleagues who gave us stimuli, and all of the thousands of people that listened to animal sounds for us!
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Earth Species Project (ESP) @earthspecies.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
New preprint on vocal communication in zebra finches! 🐦 Earth Species Project and McGill University analyzed over 1.5 million female zebra finch calls to understand how female zebra finches modulate their vocalizations during natural exchanges.
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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
check out this fun video about my recent bat project!
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animal prattle @animal-prattle.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
Beautiful, creative work from @loganjames.bsky.social et al! doi.org/10.1101/2025... 1. Humans share sound preferences w animals (even insects!) 2. Musical experience predicts agreement w animals "...our data indicate a more expansive shared ‘taste for the beautiful’" #bioacoustics #prattle 💬
Fig. 1. Humans and other animals share acoustic preferences (A) Each dot depicts the mean 3 and 95% confidence interval for human responses to a pair of stimuli. Above is a phylogenetic tree, with color depicting the average agreement between humans and the species across all stimulus pairs (teal colors depict agreement, brown colors disagreement). Right are all data pooled with the horizontal bar and whiskers depicting the mean ± 95% confidence interval across all stimuli. (B) There is a significant relationship between the strength of the preference within the animal studies (x-axis) and the percent of humans that agreed with animals (y-axis). Each dot depicts a pair of stimuli, and the trendline is a simple linear correlation ± SE. (C) Reaction times were significantly faster for trials when the participant selected the stimulus that was preferred by animals (dots and error bars depict the mean ± SE across all trials). Note that, for analysis, we used z-transformed square root values, which were back transformed for visualization. (D) Intra-rater agreement is above chance both for stimulus pairs with significant inter-rater agreement (right) as well as for pairs at chance inter-rater agreement (left). Each dot depicts the mean intra-rater agreement for a stimulus pair. For all panels, colors depict the four larger phylogenetic groups (insects, birds, mammals, and frogs). * p < 0.05
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 27/06/2025
New preprint from a bio-psych collab many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper) @loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species we are! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Main panel of Fig 1 from paper in OP
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Christopher Olson @christopherrolson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
Here is a splendid study on how and when eavesdroppers may learn to discriminate #🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
royalsocietypublishing.org
The ontogeny of decision-making in an eavesdropping predator | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Predators use prey-emitted cues to assess and localize potential food sources. Sexual advertisement calls offer conspicuous cues for eavesdropping predators. While the ontogeny of predatory behaviour ...
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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
my most recent paper just came out! we wrote a news story about the article here:
theconversation.com
Young bats learn to be discriminating when listening for their next meal
By listening to a frog call, adult bats can tell which prey are palatable and which are poisonous. Young bats must acquire this ability over time.
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animal prattle @animal-prattle.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
New from @earthspecies.bsky.social Describes "Voxaboxen": a 1-D object detection model that improves predictions w/bidirectional output + graph matching. Bonus: zebra finch dataset Code: github.com/earthspecies... #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics cc @arikkershenbaum.bsky.social @danstowell.bsky.social
Figure 2 from paper that shows the forward-backward matching approach used to improve predicted offset timesFigure 1 of paper, example spectrogram from dataset showing overlapping female zebra finch calls
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Logan James @loganjames.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Very cool to see some of my work in collaboration with the Earth Species Project getting featured in this article!
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Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦 @michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
This is the data that has the CAQ in a fit over the "decline of French" on the island of Montreal. Note this has nothing to do with the ability to speak French, or even if you work in French.
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Montreal Gazette @mtlgazette.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante is concerned about the economic impact of the CAQ's out-of-province tuition plan montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...
A photo of a woman speaking in front of the flags of Montreal, Quebec and Canada accompanies the following quote from Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante: “It’s a hard blow ... This measure will encourage more students to go to universities in Toronto.”
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Courtney Hilton @courtneybhilton.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
New paper led by Lidya Yurdum (PI: @mehr.nz )—we studied people in 52 countries in an experiment translated into 31 languages, testing a core set of intuitions about music—for at least these intuitions, they were highly consistent! t.co/vys4n7b49o
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Jake Cob @jakobpunkt.bsky.social · 29/08/2023
Don't worry, linguists. Biologists don't know what a species is, or what life is,
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 22/08/2023
do you hear like a deer? our new gamified experiment 🧪 Calls of the Wild tests what animal you're similar to (in terms of your auditory preferences). give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc (i got 'mammals')
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Courtney Hilton @courtneybhilton.bsky.social · 24/08/2023
Check out our latest web-experiment, led by @loganjames.bsky.social. It's about cross-species listening preferences themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc
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