Neither Nima nor I received any such feedback regarding the framing of the manuscript. We have always been happy to engage with counter-evidence, and are very receptive to further discussion.

Therefore, we see no convincing evidence showing that the original results presented in the highly cited Schrimpf et al., 2021 paper are robust.

Furthermore, given that these studies used different neural datasets and conducted different experiments than Schrimpf et al., 2021, they're not replications. For instance, participants are shown images in Shen et al. 2025, whereas Schrimpf et al., 2021 used natural language stimuli neural datasets.

Mischler et al. 2024 uses shuffled splits, and the Caucheteux et al. 2022 result is somewhat nuanced given that the correlation saturates beyond a certain point.

Regarding the other studies you cited, we acknowledge that findings are mixed in the literature, and we have further emphasized this in our updated preprint which we plan to release soon. We include the updated section below:

A paper you were senior author on, AlKhamissi et al., 2024, also claimed to fail to replicate our result, specifically that positional and word rate information explained the neural predictivity of untrained LLMs. AlKhamissi et al. also “replicated” our results incorrectly by using shuffled splits.

Please see Section 4.4 of our preprint, which we also include here:

Your reconstruction of OASM is wrong. The text above your code writes “OASM: Ordinal position, Average word length, Sentence Length, Mean Features”. We’re unsure how this acronym was generated, since OASM is a model of temporal autocorrelation, constructed by gaussian blurring an identity matrix.

We will update the preprint, and here is the link to the codebase: github.com/ebrahimfeghh.... The code to construct OASM is here: github.com/ebrahimfeghh....

Apologies for not including the link to the codebase on our new preprint. We included the link in our old preprint (Feghhi at al., 2024) which also had the OASM results, but thank you for pointing this out.

Hi Martin, thanks for the response and we appreciate the discussion.