Adam Tierney
@adamtierney.bsky.social
I am a professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London. Cognitive science, neuroscience, music, speech. He/him.
Pinned
Adam Tierney
@adamtierney.bsky.social
· Dec 8
Science!
tierney.science
I'm very grateful to my wife for helping me set up tierney.science, which I think really encapsulates my scientific philosophy
New preprint by Mika Nash and others on how selective attention affects neural tracking of prediction during ecologically valid music listening: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Neural tracking of melodic prediction is pre-attentive
Music’s ability to modulate arousal and manipulate emotions relies upon formation and violation of predictions. Music is often used to modulate arousal and mood while individuals focus on other tasks,...
www.biorxiv.org
November 4, 2025 at 4:09 PM
New preprint by Mika Nash and others on how selective attention affects neural tracking of prediction during ecologically valid music listening: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Adam Tierney
📄 New paper out!
It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw
@rhulpsychology.bsky.social
It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw
@rhulpsychology.bsky.social
Speech perception strategies shift instantly
To perceive speech listeners must decide how to prioritize information from multiple acoustic dimensions. Over the course of language learning, indivi…
tinyurl.com
September 12, 2025 at 2:31 PM
📄 New paper out!
It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw
@rhulpsychology.bsky.social
It’s long been known that listeners reweight acoustic cues in speech when cue reliability changes. Here @adamtierney.bsky.social, Kyle Jasmin, and I show that this can happen instantly after a single exposure to 'accented' speech. tinyurl.com/mwt6usdw
@rhulpsychology.bsky.social
Reposted by Adam Tierney
New paper 🚨! Our class project on Illusions of the Mind: Laurel vs. Yanny and Sometimes Behave So Strangely #speech2songillusion now out www.nature.com/articles/s41... with 3 undergrad, 2 postgrad, & 1 postdoc, & 3 PI authors #musicscience
Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Laurel–Yanny percept affects the speech-to-song illusion, but musical anhedonia does not
www.nature.com
August 25, 2025 at 5:01 PM
New paper 🚨! Our class project on Illusions of the Mind: Laurel vs. Yanny and Sometimes Behave So Strangely #speech2songillusion now out www.nature.com/articles/s41... with 3 undergrad, 2 postgrad, & 1 postdoc, & 3 PI authors #musicscience
Reposted by Adam Tierney
📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based team@ucl.ac.uk! ...
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
www.ucl.ac.uk
May 15, 2025 at 4:07 PM
📣cog neuro postdoc opportunity! Interested in studying attention & exploration w/ cutting edge M/EEG? 🧠care about making vision science a bit more naturalistic? 🌱LandauLab is hiring! We seek resourceful, curious and creative researchers who can join the newly forming London-based team@ucl.ac.uk! ...
The kid has started calling me “cool dad” whenever he wants something. This is startlingly effective emotional manipulation
May 5, 2025 at 12:23 PM
The kid has started calling me “cool dad” whenever he wants something. This is startlingly effective emotional manipulation
Reposted by Adam Tierney
New *Funded PhD opportunity* for UK students to work with me at UCL (London), researching auditory training interventions to improve speech understanding in noisy environments. Deadline 28th April. Full details and job description: bit.ly/4ccbbzj @uclpals.bsky.social [please share]
Divisional Vacancies
Job Vacancies in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences
bit.ly
March 31, 2025 at 12:49 PM
New *Funded PhD opportunity* for UK students to work with me at UCL (London), researching auditory training interventions to improve speech understanding in noisy environments. Deadline 28th April. Full details and job description: bit.ly/4ccbbzj @uclpals.bsky.social [please share]
There's a PhD studentship opportunity available at the Birkbeck School of Psychological Sciences! 4 years, funded by working as a graduate teaching assistant. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMD691/p...
PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant at Birkbeck, University of London
Apply now for the PhD Studentship & Graduate Teaching Assistant role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.
www.jobs.ac.uk
April 7, 2025 at 8:11 AM
There's a PhD studentship opportunity available at the Birkbeck School of Psychological Sciences! 4 years, funded by working as a graduate teaching assistant. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMD691/p...
Having a kid really drives home how we're all linguistically complacent, settling for mediocrity when we should be innovating to realize the full potential of language. Anyway he called baby ducks "ducklets" this morning and I'd like to request that we all switch to that from now on
April 3, 2025 at 9:54 AM
Having a kid really drives home how we're all linguistically complacent, settling for mediocrity when we should be innovating to realize the full potential of language. Anyway he called baby ducks "ducklets" this morning and I'd like to request that we all switch to that from now on
New preprint! Musical aptitude and experience, pitch discrimination, and neural encoding of speech harmonics are linked to the ability to perceive prosody in Mandarin-accented speech. Led by Amir Hossein Ghooch Kanloo (his MSc dissertation!) osf.io/preprints/ps...
March 18, 2025 at 10:36 AM
New preprint! Musical aptitude and experience, pitch discrimination, and neural encoding of speech harmonics are linked to the ability to perceive prosody in Mandarin-accented speech. Led by Amir Hossein Ghooch Kanloo (his MSc dissertation!) osf.io/preprints/ps...
New preprint! Do individuals with musical anhedonia perceive illusory speech in song? Sort of! They rate all speech stimuli as less musical than controls, but hear increased musicality with repetition. And they don't like hearing speech, whether or not it transforms into song. osf.io/preprints/ps...
March 18, 2025 at 10:30 AM
New preprint! Do individuals with musical anhedonia perceive illusory speech in song? Sort of! They rate all speech stimuli as less musical than controls, but hear increased musicality with repetition. And they don't like hearing speech, whether or not it transforms into song. osf.io/preprints/ps...
New preprint! Listeners adjust their speech perception strategies after a single "accented" speech trial. However, these shifts in strategy vanish as quickly as they appear, lasting a single trial before returning to baseline. With @ashleysymons.bsky.social and Kyle Jasmin. osf.io/preprints/ps...
March 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
New preprint! Listeners adjust their speech perception strategies after a single "accented" speech trial. However, these shifts in strategy vanish as quickly as they appear, lasting a single trial before returning to baseline. With @ashleysymons.bsky.social and Kyle Jasmin. osf.io/preprints/ps...
New preprint! When listeners’ predictions about upcoming speech sounds fail, the subjective passage of time slows down. This suggests that people make linguistic predictions even when ignoring speech and prediction errors capture attention. osf.io/preprints/ps...
March 11, 2025 at 1:00 PM
New preprint! When listeners’ predictions about upcoming speech sounds fail, the subjective passage of time slows down. This suggests that people make linguistic predictions even when ignoring speech and prediction errors capture attention. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Reposted by Adam Tierney
⏰CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS⏰ We're looking for London-based #participants who would like to take part in an fMRI study and gain insight into how our brains process second language speech 🧠🧠🧠 #auditory #neuroscience @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social Contact @mkachlicka.bsky.social for details. Please share!
February 12, 2025 at 10:10 AM
⏰CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS⏰ We're looking for London-based #participants who would like to take part in an fMRI study and gain insight into how our brains process second language speech 🧠🧠🧠 #auditory #neuroscience @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social Contact @mkachlicka.bsky.social for details. Please share!
New preprint! This paper shows that the perceptual boundary between speech and song can shift due to the surrounding context. Specifically, speech/song categorization is affected by contrastive adaptation: perceptual movement away from the previous stimulus.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
February 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM
New preprint! This paper shows that the perceptual boundary between speech and song can shift due to the surrounding context. Specifically, speech/song categorization is affected by contrastive adaptation: perceptual movement away from the previous stimulus.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
New preprint! We find grid-like coding in entorhinal cortex when participants complete a task requiring mental manipulation of the frequency and duration of sounds. This suggests that people use spatial circuits when thinking about sound.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Spatial coding supports auditory conceptual navigation
Grid cells in human entorhinal cortex encode spatial layouts for real-world navigation, yet their role in conceptual navigation remains unclear. Here we show that mentally transforming tones within a ...
www.biorxiv.org
February 6, 2025 at 10:48 AM
New preprint! We find grid-like coding in entorhinal cortex when participants complete a task requiring mental manipulation of the frequency and duration of sounds. This suggests that people use spatial circuits when thinking about sound.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Adam Tierney
If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!)
royalsociety.org/grants/newto...
royalsociety.org/grants/newto...
Newton International Fellowships | Royal Society
This fellowship is for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK.
royalsociety.org
January 29, 2025 at 5:27 PM
If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!)
royalsociety.org/grants/newto...
royalsociety.org/grants/newto...
In trying to fix scientific publishing, maybe we could start with the small things? Like, say, counting work days instead of seven days a week when calculating review deadlines? I'm really sick of being told a review is due on Christmas, or on a Sunday
January 5, 2025 at 4:48 PM
In trying to fix scientific publishing, maybe we could start with the small things? Like, say, counting work days instead of seven days a week when calculating review deadlines? I'm really sick of being told a review is due on Christmas, or on a Sunday
No drum in existence makes a sound that even remotely resembles “pa rum pa pum pum”. What drum can produce a nasal consonant? Drums do not have a nasal cavity. What kind of horribly cursed drum are we talking about here and why is it tormenting that baby
December 23, 2024 at 9:27 PM
No drum in existence makes a sound that even remotely resembles “pa rum pa pum pum”. What drum can produce a nasal consonant? Drums do not have a nasal cavity. What kind of horribly cursed drum are we talking about here and why is it tormenting that baby
It's odd how strong the taboo is against certain stylistic elements in scientific writing. For example, I don't think I've ever read a scientific paper that contained an exclamation point! Or ellipses... What if I dared include them? Would an exclamation point doom an otherwise publishable paper???
December 19, 2024 at 11:57 AM
It's odd how strong the taboo is against certain stylistic elements in scientific writing. For example, I don't think I've ever read a scientific paper that contained an exclamation point! Or ellipses... What if I dared include them? Would an exclamation point doom an otherwise publishable paper???
Reposted by Adam Tierney
Excited to inaugurate my bluesky presence with this exciting preprint! Lead by the one and only Maya Inbar and together w Eitan Grossman we investigated temporal structure of prosodic units in over forty languages. Check out what we found!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low frequency rhythms and balance cross-linguistic syllable rate variability
Intonation units (IUs) are a universal building-block of human speech. They are found cross-linguistically and are tied to important language functions such as the pacing of information in discourse a...
www.biorxiv.org
December 4, 2024 at 6:50 PM
Excited to inaugurate my bluesky presence with this exciting preprint! Lead by the one and only Maya Inbar and together w Eitan Grossman we investigated temporal structure of prosodic units in over forty languages. Check out what we found!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
I'm very grateful to my wife for helping me set up tierney.science, which I think really encapsulates my scientific philosophy
Science!
tierney.science
December 8, 2024 at 9:07 PM
I'm very grateful to my wife for helping me set up tierney.science, which I think really encapsulates my scientific philosophy
New preprint by @mkachlicka.bsky.social et al.! Perceptual strategies set by one's first language can make learning a second language difficult. Can short-term training change participants' strategies, potentially facilitating second language learning? The answer is sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
December 4, 2024 at 2:23 PM
New preprint by @mkachlicka.bsky.social et al.! Perceptual strategies set by one's first language can make learning a second language difficult. Can short-term training change participants' strategies, potentially facilitating second language learning? The answer is sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...
As someone who’s shy about dancing, it’s basically my worst nightmare that our toddler makes us dance for hours every night. “Dance, daddy! DANCE.”
December 4, 2024 at 9:22 AM
As someone who’s shy about dancing, it’s basically my worst nightmare that our toddler makes us dance for hours every night. “Dance, daddy! DANCE.”
Am I the last person on earth who writes out references by hand? By which I mean type them out, but if I'm going to be that much of a neo-Luddite, maybe I should go Full Quill Pen
December 2, 2024 at 1:47 PM
Am I the last person on earth who writes out references by hand? By which I mean type them out, but if I'm going to be that much of a neo-Luddite, maybe I should go Full Quill Pen
My number one writing tip is very simple: read your entire paper/grant proposal out loud just before you submit. Every time I do this I initially feel silly but then catch a dozen embarrassing errors. Writing is captured speech, so if you stumble over a passage when reading, something's wrong.
December 2, 2024 at 10:33 AM
My number one writing tip is very simple: read your entire paper/grant proposal out loud just before you submit. Every time I do this I initially feel silly but then catch a dozen embarrassing errors. Writing is captured speech, so if you stumble over a passage when reading, something's wrong.