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merrick giles

@merrickgiles.bsky.social
250 followers 377 following 22 posts

university of melbourne phd candidate in computational cognitive science he/him. merrickgiles.neocities.org

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Reposted by merrick giles
Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I just saw a prestigious postdoc scheme that needs *three* letters of recommendation just to apply Imv this is deeply unethical. This is why PhDs don't speak out about bad practice and malfeasance from their advisors three letters = speaking out loses your career chances
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.
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Tianyuan Teng @tyteng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
You'd think people prefer the simplest explanation of an uncertain world — Occam's razor. Our data says no, across 2 modalities, 2 tasks, 8 experiments: people often perceive illusory structure that isn't there and prefer moderate complexity. Out now in Nature Comms! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Human learning of probability distributions is biased toward moderate structural complexity - Nature Communications
Humans build internal models from online observations to adapt to new environments. Here, the authors show that individuals are biased towards building models with moderate structural complexity, rega...
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Kayson Fakhar @kayson.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Allow me to bring this one-paragraph banger of a story by Jorge Luis Borges to your attention, my fellow modelers.
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Full paper here: escholarship.org/uc/item/20n8...
escholarship.org
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
When children learn addition, they follow a weird learning trajectory that is held to reflect their metacognitive rewriting system. In a new CogSci paper with Frank Mollica and @perfors.net, we show that the trajectory is explained by environmental pressures: imitation, followed by speed or accuracy
Plot from the paper of model simulations reconstructing the aforementioned trajectory: sum to shortcut to count from to min.
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Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 26/07/2026
not literally about cocaine
blog.djnavarro.net
A cocaine skeptic starts an unwise habit – Notes from a data witch
You will be shocked to learn that this is not actually a post about cocaine
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Benjamin Pitt @benjaminpitt.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
New paper finally out in @NatureComms with E. Leib, D. O’Shaughnessy, C. Gallardo, @sferrigno.bsky.social, and @spiantado.bsky.social. 📝Children across cultures discover the latent algorithms that structure what they see, even without instruction, feedback, or formal schooling.🧵 tinyurl.com/4a238m2d
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 03/06/2026
1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.
pnas.org
The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...
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Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
As a PhD student who has to both write her dissertation and grade papers, I would like to express my resentment at the addition of unprompted "Hey sis, wanna cheat?" messages from Gemini to Google docs.
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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
is a balloon more conscious than a piece of rock? i think it is. consciousness refers to the capacity to respond meaningfully & interestingly to external stimuli. a rock doesn't do much when we kick it. the balloon, however... is so 'fun' so play with. so unpredictable. it has a real personality
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Andrew Wang @andreww3-wang.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
📄 Long overdue paper announcement: Core Vocabulary in Language Representation and Processing was published late last year in Cognitive Science. The work explores novel approaches of quantifying vocabulary centrality and tests them in an empirical task. 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
i dunno, seems bad arxiv.org/pdf/2603.18161
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ScaryCatalyst 🎃 @straycatalyst.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Yay! www.npr.org/2026/04/14/n...
npr.org
Millions of people are pretending to be AI chatbots — for fun
Websites like youraislopbores.me have become playgrounds for people looking for light relief in a bot-heavy world.
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Robert Ross @robert-m-ross.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
We found that 10% of participants endorsed this statement (i.e., they selected “Definitely true” or “Probably true”) and that this was a strong predictor of endorsing six pre-existing conspiracy theories, including two that that directly contradicted each other.
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Manikya Alister @manikyaalister.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient, intelligent reasoning. In a new working paper, @perfors.net and I discuss how our ability to reason from *social* information is one way that we achieve this capacity. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Figure from the paper. How does social reasoning enable efficient intelligence? 1. Directs us to the information that is most important for learning. 2. Inferences about others' minds help us interpret information they provide (and provide better information for others). 3. Avoids some of the costs of direct learning like cognitive/physical effort, and negative outcomes. 4. Enables us to build on and refine the knowledge of others. 5. Provides cues that help us infer which agents' knowledge we should build on without needing to observe their behaviour directly.
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Minas Karamanis @minaskar.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
ergosphere.blog
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
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onion person @junlper.beer · 28/03/2026
genuinely fascinating that we’ve hit a point where the full monetization of the internet and ai bot takeover has led to a majority of people wanting tech minimalism
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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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The New Republic @newrepublic.com · 24/03/2026
NEW study found chatbots supported violence 80% of the time—providing key details & weapon advice. Here’s the rub: there is currently no legal requirement for U.S. chatbot creators to alert law enforcement when their systems flag potential violence. The result is real-world harm. trib.al/XRqylye
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Daniel Heck @danielheck.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
I always had the vague feeling that Scientific Reports and Nature Communications are mainly APC business models. A paper estimated the total APC for gold/hybrid Open Access per journal 2015–2018: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Surprise, surprise - there are 2 outliers at the top😐
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
🔥 🔥 🔥
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Andrew Perfors @perfors.net · 20/03/2026
What they want is some path out of that, and someone who is proud and unashamed of being sincere -- who in fact points out that rejection of meaning and failure to stand for anything is the coward's way out -- provides that path. We can't be apologetic. Standing proudly is its own proof of concept.
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
scenes from the MIT philosophy department
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
🖐️if only🖐️
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
👁️👄👁️
my JND is 0.0028
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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
go.unimelb.edu.au
Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special
Abstract. When speakers refer to objects in the world, they frequently overinform. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, we hypothesise that overinformativeness is an efficient means of facil...
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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?
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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.
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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?
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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! 🥳
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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.
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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?
media.tenor.com
a thinking smiley face has a hand on its chin
ALT: a thinking smiley face has a hand on its chin
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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:
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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).
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
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? 🧵
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
he’s been chilling in the basement for a minute
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Mythic 🦊 @mythicalredfox.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.
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
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steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
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.
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Eris ⌬ @eriskii.net · 28/02/2026
Bullshit
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
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.
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Lauren Aulet @laurenaulet.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
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:
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Manikya Alister @manikyaalister.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
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
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Andrew Perfors @perfors.net · 22/01/2026
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.
youtube.com
Part 1: How do LLMs work?
YouTube video by Andrew Perfors
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 16/12/2025
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.
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
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...
Abstract of paperFigure 1!
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Andrew Perfors @perfors.net · 13/11/2025
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.
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.
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Dan Feuerriegel @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
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
biorxiv.org
Tracing the neural trajectories of evidence accumulation and motor preparation processes during voluntary decisions
Voluntary decisions have previously been described by where they arise in the brain and how actions corresponding to one's choice are prepared. However, the processes by which these internally guided ...
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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
yikes.
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