Shannon Burns, PhD
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shannon47burns.bsky.social
Shannon Burns, PhD
@shannon47burns.bsky.social
970 followers 160 following 38 posts
Assistant Professor of Psychological Science & Neuroscience at Pomona College in Claremont, CA
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Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
joshmccrain.bsky.social
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
sfiscience.bsky.social
For undergraduates curious about complex systems research, applications are now open for the 2026 Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) program — a fully funded, 10-week summer research experience at the Santa Fe Institute.

Apply by Jan. 14, 2026: santafe.edu/ucr
November 17, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
mehr.nz
periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision

I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides
Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - Braille Institute
Read easier with Atkinson Hyperlegible Font, crafted for low-vision readers. Download for free and enjoy clear letters and numbers on your computer!
www.brailleinstitute.org
November 17, 2025 at 4:19 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
wimpouw.bsky.social
Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success.

www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...
A busy figure showing how reduction of different types of multimodal signals reduces over experimental rounds (with a comparison of how a non-linear signal following a power law can be transformed to a linear slope using a log-transformation).
November 11, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
emilydolson.bsky.social
Remembering the time in grad school when a Black PhD student at the next desk over was doing computer vision research. He was testing out a facial recognition tool using his own face as a reference, but it wasn't working. So he asked a (white) colleague to try it, and of course it worked for her.
josephcox.bsky.social Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 20d
New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...
Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
October 29, 2025 at 10:33 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
matti.vuorre.com
🎉 @rpsychologist.com 's PowerLMM.js is the online statistics application of the year 2025 🎉

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

- Calculate power (etc) for multilevel models
- Examine effects of dropout and other important parameters
- Fast! (Instant results)
Screenshot of https://powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com/
October 28, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
biologicalpsych.bsky.social
Sookud and colleagues found that individuals with higher compulsivity and intrusive thoughts develop a less certain internal understanding of the external world, and this mediates the link between symptoms and goal-directed behaviors.
Impaired goal-directed planning in transdiagnostic compulsivity is explained by uncertainty about learned task structure
Diminished use of goal-directed (“model-based”) decision-making is a hallmark of transdiagnostic compulsivity, promoting an over-reliance on inflexible and habitual behaviours. However, the origin of ...
www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org
October 27, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
jamielarsh.bsky.social
Fundamental features of social environments determine rate of social affiliation www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
October 18, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
mpi-nl.bsky.social
Gestural and verbal evidence of conceptual representation differences in blind and sighted individuals. New publication by @ezgimamus.bsky.social & al. with @asliozyurek.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1111/cogs....
Gestural and Verbal Evidence of Conceptual Representation Differences in Blind and Sighted Individuals
This preregistered study examined whether visual experience influences conceptual representations by examining both gestural expression and feature listing. Gestures—mostly driven by analog mappings ....
doi.org
October 15, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
jamiecummins.bsky.social
These results are also worth reiterating the title of @ianhussey.mmmdata.io's recent blog post: if researchers find Cohen's d = 8, no they didn't

mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...
October 15, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
micahgallen.com
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
beargoldstein.bsky.social
Excited to share our new paper out in PNAS: “Neural predictors of hidden, persistent psychological states at work.” Full paper at bit.ly/47oaGRR

We brought portable fNIRS into the field to predict the subjective work-related “lenses” of business leaders. Check out the thread below for more! 1/8
October 14, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
protzko.bsky.social
In between-Ss experiments: without a reference point, people say playing a prank is bad but give the same ‘bad’ rating to committing a war crime.

Not in within-Ss experiments or when giving reference points for judgments.

From @vladchituc.bsky.social

www.crockettlab.org/s/1-s20-S001...

#psych
October 14, 2025 at 2:10 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
ycleong.bsky.social
One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab!

We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!
jadynpark.bsky.social Jadyn Park @jadynpark.bsky.social · Oct 13
Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw
October 13, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
raziasahi.bsky.social
Managing emotions is not easy - we often get by with a little help. In the NEW Social Interaction and Emotion Lab at Rutgers-Newark, we’ll study how social interactions regulate emotion using experiments, naturalistic data, and multi-modal approaches. ✨ Now recruiting! ✨🙌 Learn more: raziasahi.com
October 8, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
tobikube.bsky.social
Excited to share this new article of my PhD student Edith Rapo on the association between depression and seeking feedback from others about oneself, depending on the anticipated feedback's valence and congruence with the self-perception. Open Acces in BRAT 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Better to keep a negative self-perception than ask for feedback? - How depressive symptoms are associated with the desire for social feedback
We investigated whether depressive symptom severity is associated with incongruence between how people perceive themselves (self-perception) and how t…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 1, 2025 at 5:10 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
kjha02.bsky.social
Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")?

Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior!

shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...
October 3, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
erichehman.bsky.social
Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
October 3, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
richlucas.bsky.social
Interested in models used to estimate lagged effects in panel data? We (@rebiweidmann.bsky.social, Hyewon Yang) have a new paper looking at patterns of stability and their implications for bias and model choice: osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/x]
OSF
osf.io
September 19, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
jojolab.bsky.social
I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8)

rdcu.be/el19t
Prefrontal encoding of an internal model for emotional inference
Nature - Neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking directly experienced and inferred associations with aversive experiences.
rdcu.be
May 14, 2025 at 11:35 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
samnastase.bsky.social
I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.
October 1, 2025 at 10:39 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
steverathje.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵
Abstract and results summary
October 1, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
dvsmith.bsky.social
New work led by @mattmattoni.bsky.social

“Overall, results suggest that BOLD activation to reward tasks, and likely other fMRI tasks, is more appropriate for within-person study than between-person study, highlighting a need for intensive longitudinal neuroimaging designs.”
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Sep 28
Precision Imaging for Intraindividual Investigation of the Reward Response https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.26.678878v1
September 30, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Shannon Burns, PhD
eikofried.bsky.social
Intervening on a central node in a network likely does little given that its connected neighbors will "flip it back" immediately. Happy to see this position supported now.

"Change is most likely [..] if it spreads first among relatively poorly connected nodes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Transformation starts at the periphery of networks where pushback is less - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Transformation starts at the periphery of networks where pushback is less
www.nature.com
September 29, 2025 at 9:16 AM