DAG question for #CausalInference and #epitwitter tweeps: TL;DR: How do we use DAGs in typical pharmacosurveillance scenarios, when the entities of interest are unobserved? A thread 1/ We are interested in whether the administration of a drug is causing an increase in the probability of an adverse event (thus, an adverse drug reaction), vs. there not being any causal relation. 2/

Should we use findings from previous studies and meta-analyses to shape our statistical inferences (aka informed priors)? What are the advantages and issues? Strap on for a loooong thread (link to a video of the talk at the end) 1/ TL;DR - Systematic use of informed studies leads to more precise, but more biased estimates (due to non-linear information flow in the literature). Critically comparison of informed and skeptical priors can provide more nuanced and solid understanding of our findings. 2/

How do we understand each other in conversation? A thread based on my recent IACS4 plenary, covering a critical perspective on interactive linguistic alignment - the tendency to re-use each other's linguistic forms. 1/ TL;DR: by building cumulative scientific approaches & standardised automated tools we can show even basic mechanisms like priming and alignment are shaped by the short- & long-term communicative context. Plus, there's no escaping both qualitative and quantitative approaches. 2/

How do we build a more explicitly cumulative and yet self-critical scientific approach? In a just published paper (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/au…), we provide one of many possible paths.
TL;DR and a thread below 1/ TL;DR: design following systematic review, analyse with meta-analytically informed priors, critically assess and compare with skeptical priors, build and promote open science practices. (freely accessible preprint here: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…) 2/

Conversation is a dance, how do we learn? In this systematic review & meta-analysis we thoroughly explore models & evidence for how turn-taking develops and which factors are involved. Comments & suggested pub venues are very welcome. Long thread 1/ psyarxiv.com/3bak6 This was a brilliant student-led project by Vivian Nguyen & Otto Versyp from Ghent University, who spent their Fall 20 on an internship (aka regularly zooming) with me and @ChrisMMCox 2/

This thread is making me think critically about ongoing work with @AlbertoParola2 and separately with @ethanweed. After looking meta-analytically at vocal markers of psychiatric conditions, we launched projects to systematically replicate and extend them cross-linguistically 1/n

https://twitter.com/zerdeve/status/1357186736892252160

Is there a distrust? Possibly some, looking at the studies and at effect sizes of "1.89". Should there be? I'm not sure. I mean I'd really want to be able to build on these findings to better understand the underlying mechanisms. 2/n

The Puzzle of Danish: a thread on taking linguistic diversity seriously to highlight the flexibility of human cognition.

1/n TLDR: Danish has an unusual speech opacity (consonant reduction). Danish native speakers rely more strongly on context and top-down inference. They also create more redundant speech and repeat each other more: a richer context for top-down speech processing. 2/n

Are dyads better at categorizing than individuals? In this paper (psyarxiv.com/qs253, w @kristian_tylen, Smith and Arnoldi) we developed a new paradigm relying on these cute aliens. Participants (alone or chatting with another participant) have to figure out whether the aliens are dangerous or not & whether they can obtain precious resources from them or not. The categories are - unknown to the participants - based on combinations of visible features (e.g. arms up and/or big eyes) with different levels of complexity.

Read "Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian" by outstanding @byureka (@PuzzleOfDanish), testing the hypothesis that Danish's reduction of consonants makes Danes more reliant on context 1/n
psyarxiv.com/jpbtw/ The team (also involving Højen, @kristian_tylen, @MH_Christiansen and me) cleverly tweaked categorical perception paradigms to compare how native speakers of Danish and of Bokmål Norwegian (akin to Danish, but with less reduction) combine acoustic information from the phoneme 2/n

"In general, one of the most important attributes you can possess is the confidence that you can learn new skills." @psmaldino (I guess that's the spirit of CogSci!) "Your responsibility is, I hope, to produce and disseminate knowledge into the world rather to please the momentary gatekeepers of your sub-discipline".

Lessons learned while evaluating academic job applications: 1/n In the cover letter explicitly write a paragraph for each of the assessment foci (research, teaching, etc). So much easier to navigate for the assessors. Also it possibly enables you to frame/prime how that paragraph is going to be written in the assessment 2/n

Next week in my Social and Cultural Dynamics course we move to game theoretical approaches to social interactions. The goal is to compare and complement social cognition and game theoretical approaches 1/n Social cognition providing models of cognitive mechanisms for processing information, making decisions and interacting; game theory providing a decidedly interpersonal perspective, and a strong incentive-based perspective (nb. not necessarily economic incentives) 2/n

Trying to plot meaningful prior predictive checks for a hierarchical Bernoulli regression, and contrasting 2 priors (skeptical and informed). So far the best I can do is ppc_error_hist_grouped(y, y_pred_info[1:3, ], group = condition). Suggestions for improvement? @tjmahr Also, why does the same procedure for posterior pred checks give me a very different histogram (only -1,0,1 as values)?

Next week in my Social and Cultural Dynamics course we'll be scaling up social cognition to groups: how do the mechanisms for social information processing and integration work when more than one person is involved? 1/n starring work by @DanBang_ @bahadorbahrami @cdfrith @Scott_E_Page, Mirta Galesic and the @sfiscience complexity podcast.

TLDR: we applied cognitive science & cultural evolution to investigate some of the earliest human engravings (100k year old), finding that they were likely used to express implicit style and human intent. Background, pics and nerdy methodological observations in the thread. 1/n

https://twitter.com/PNASNews/status/1229858205183901696

After a long journey "The evolution of human symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens" is finally out in PNAS. The international interdisciplinary group included
@kristian_tylen, @johannsen_niels, @ARCHAEOfelix, @katheimann, @Nicolas_Fay, @SergioGdlR and Marlize Lombard. 2/n

"Voice patterns in schizophrenia: A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis" (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…) came out as I was on parental leave, w. @AlbertoParola2, Arndis Simonsen, Vibeke Bliksted. We find small differences in pitch, large differences in pause behavior, 1/n preliminary relations with clinical features. However, as for autism (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27501063), right hemisphere damage (biorxiv.org/content/10.110…) & depression (in the works) the evidence is very noisy and our key contribution is developing guidelines for better future studies 2/n

Second evening of xmas thesis grading: the first thesis cleverly explores the role of information availability in the volunteer dilemma (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer…) using an oTree online setup. 1/n The second build on @bahadorbahrami optimally interacting minds to explore gender-based decision biases: participants are brought in the lab & play a joint decision game with same and different gender participants (man/woman, to avoid collecting sensitive info, bad I know). 2/n

#CausalInferenceQuestions I observe a certain effect in schizophrenia and I want to test whether it's *specifically* related to some symptoms (e.g. Delusions) and not just to the severity of the condition (e.g. as measured by positive symptoms, SAPS). 1/n Would it make sense to model it as effect ~ Delusions + SAPS (NB model is simplified)? or better as SAPS(minusDelusions)? I'm a bit worried about the psychometric validity of the latter measure. 2/n

A couple of days ago I ran a poll on whether people (aka my academic twitter crowd) believe in all languages being learned at the same speed. The results and discussion were pretty interesting, so here is a thread: 1/n

https://twitter.com/fusaroli/status/1163739739222106112

First, opinions were pretty much evenly divided: out of about 100, half supported a "universal speed", while half "variable speed". Which surprised me, since I have been mostly reading and working in a context where linguistic/cultural differences are pretty salient 2/n

#NewPrePrintOut Acoustic Measures of Prosody in Right-Hemisphere Damage: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis biorxiv.org/content/10.110… with @ethanweed Thread below for a meta-reflection on the research (disillusionment and open science): 1/n I have been interested for a while in the descriptions practitioners give of their interaction with neuropsychiatric patients, especially of the voice. People with ASD are described as monotone, sing-songy, robotic. People with schizophrenia as sluggish, monotono. 2/n

Morning of exam grading. I'm quite impressed by what open science is allowing students to do. So far: scales of chronic fatigue overlapping (building on @EikoFried's code), mixed strategies of social learning (based on @_lrendell and Galesic/Barkoczi codes) @EikoFried @_lrendell and of course I almost overlooked how incredibly enabling #brms, @mcmc_stan tidyverse, #rstats, @rstudio, #oTree, #Python and @psychopy are. what my students are doing was basically impossible for the average students in my uni years (early 2000's)