❗🗓️ The deadline for abstract submission for #NeuroCog2025 is tomorrow, September 30th. Don't miss it!

Curious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., “statistical learning”) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning

Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide 🌎 💬 🌍 💬 🌏 💬:
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

📖 New on the VSC Research Showcase:
Dutch language models reveal how word predictability shapes reading.

🧪 Key findings:
➡️ Smaller models often outperform larger ones
➡️ Predictability follows a logarithmic effect
➡️ Dutch > multilingual models

👉 www.vscentrum.be/post/a-syste...

👁️ 📖 👁️
@boevesam.bsky.social
made this interactive visualisation to get a feeling for word predictability:
🔗 wordpredictabilityvisualized.vercel.app

Curious how these predictability indices were obtained? Find out in our new paper!
🔗 doi.org/10.3758/s134...

#Reading #LargeLanguageModels #MECO

3️⃣ 2️⃣ 1️⃣ Just three days left to submit your nomination for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 conference.

🔗 ugent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

🏅 💬 At the '22 edition of our conference, we launched the Early Career Talk, giving a platform to an outstanding early-career scientist. We are now seeking nominations for the Early Career Talk at the #IASL26 edition.

The deadline for nominations is August 15, 2025. Instructions in the thread.

Do we adapt when the structure of our environment changes?

Check out our new preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

📣🗓️ The 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference #IASL26 will be held June 10-12 in San Sebastián.

Our keynotes:
@jennysaffran.bsky.social with 30 years of SL work since 1996.
@noranewcombe.bsky.social on learning and spatial cognition.
@pyoudeyer.bsky.social on curiosity.

📖 👀 When people read a novel, when do they blink?

We show that blinks are more likely:
(1) around punctuation marks
(2) following fixations on lower-frequency and less predictable words.

🔗 Now out in Scientific Reports: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#CognitiveScience #Reading #EyeTracking

NEUROCOG 2025 is taking place in Brussels Nov 17–18!

The theme: AI and the Human Brain 🤖 🧠

We’re thrilled to welcome 6 amazing invited speakers:
@evfedorenko.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @jeffreybowers.bsky.social, @irisgroen.bsky.social & @mtoneva.bsky.social

Proud PI! 👏 On #TeaP2025 two lab members presented their work:

Haoyu Zhou in the symposium #StatisticalLearning and its Role in #Language and #Reading acquisition.

@boevesam.bsky.social in the symposium From Babies to Semantics: Leveraging #LanguageModels for #Psycholinguistic Research.

Our theoretical note 'Statistical Learning Subserves a Higher Purpose: Novelty Detection in an Information Foraging System' is now out in Psych Review. #StatisticalLearning

We argue that our environment (including our linguistic environment) is far from fixed: It's dynamic, and we interact with it.

💬🙇🏼‍♀️💬🙇🏼‍♀️💬🙇🏼‍♀️
The advantage of spaced studying is well documented for explicit learning, but is there such an advantage for incidental #StatisticalLearning of novel #Language?

Jasper de Waard from @jthee.bsky.social’s lab tested it! Find out what we found here : 🔗 doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Our preprint featured in The New Scientist @newscientist.bsky.social:
"Blinking may give your brain a micro break during cognitive tasks"
🔗 www.newscientist.com/article/2461...

🎄📄 #Preprint under the tree this year: @boevesam.bsky.social took us into the world of #LargeLanguageModels: "A Systematic Evaluation of Dutch Large Language Models’ Surprisal Estimates in Sentence, Paragraph, and Book Reading"
🔗 osf.io/preprints/os... #ReadingResearch

Thanks @sebraem.bsky.social, for inviting me as part of the 'Growing up in Science' series.

Sharing the often untold aspects of becoming and being a scientist (doubts, difficulties, rejections and imposter experiences) felt very meaningful.

Three years ago, I made singleton beer coasters as goodbye gifts for the Theeuweslab members @jthee.bsky.social.

A few weeks ago, I received this plant support in the brain shape of my lab logo from a PhD student.

Hard to convey how much I love nerdy gifts!

👁️ When do we blink while reading? 👁️

Xander analyzed over 30.000 blink events in the Ghent Eye Tracking Corpus to find out.

Could we replicate Hall (1945) who drew his conclusions based on just 139 blinks he counted by observing readers?

Find out in our preprint:
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

@boevesam.bsky.social & Haoyu Zhou's paper is out!

The title says it all: 'A meta analysis of 97 studies reveals that statistical learning and language ability are only weakly correlated'. For those who like exact numbers, r = 0.16.

📑 osf.io/preprints/ps...