The Dialectics of Multi-Level Selection in Evolutionary Biology - Dialectical Systems Introduction Dialectical thinking in biology has famously been put forward by the eponymous book of Levins and Lewontin (1985). Much of the book was dedicated to the interpenetration between organisms...

The dialectical underpinnings of multilevel selection

Evolution isn’t flat: new levels arise through conflict and then reshape the very dynamics that brought them into being

Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity - Behavior Research Methods Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a well-known algorithm used to assess the similarity between signals of varying lengths. Initially developed for automatic speech recognition, DTW has found applications in psycholinguistics, particularly in analyzing gesture form similarity. An open question in this domain is how effectively DTW captures gesture form similarity. Here, we validate DTW against human annotations of gesture form similarity across two multimodal interaction corpora and explore its utility as an automatic, continuous measure of gesture form similarity. Our findings reveal weak to moderate correlations between DTW distance and the number of similar gesture features – such as handshape, movement, orientation, and position – suggesting that DTW serves as a useful proxy for gesture form similarity. Additionally, we highlight the importance of qualitative analysis of raw data and DTW predictions in enhancing DTW’s predictive accuracy. Our study offers a rigorous validation of DTW as a measure of gesture form similarity and presents a detailed framework for preprocessing motion tracking data and calculating DTW distance. While none of the methods is perfect, the combination of automatic and manual measures provides a comprehensive approach to understanding and measuring gesture form similarity.

Validating dynamic time warping as a measure of gesture form similarity. New paper by @shoakamine.bsky.social , @dingemansemark.bsky.social & @asliozyurek.bsky.social
doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-02975-5

Happy to report that our survey study on the diversity with which people seem to experience their mental imagery is now published in RSOS :) doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
I posted a longer thread summarising the findings some months ago when we first put out the preprint: bsky.app/profile/samp...

🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Information transfer between the brain's hemispheres is not passive process. It is an active process under top-down influence.
Interhemispheric transfer of sensory and working memory information is dictated by behavioral strategy
doi.org/10.64898/202...
#neuroscience

Our new review paper ‘Multimodal encoding of motion events in speech, gesture and cognition’ is out 🎉 (w. Aslı Özyürek & Ezgi Mamus) doi.org/10.1017/lang...

Social Class Discrimination and Academic Success: A Person‐Centered Approach Among Adolescents Disadvantaged in Social Class Introduction Prior research indicates that social class is strongly associated with academic outcomes such as GPA. However, little work explores the role that social discrimination plays in this rel...

New work with @zenamello.bsky.social -- using the person-centered approach, we found that social class discrimination, particularly discrimination that occurs in school negatively relates to academic outcomes. Classism from teachers was most common onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Nonlinear phenomena are acoustic irregularities widespread in animal & human vocal repertoires, as well as music. This #PhilTransB issue brings together studies introducing new ideas and exploring future directions for this growing field of study: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Gestalt contributions to relational and interactional neuroscience. Reply to authors: Understanding and explaining differences across minds in social interaction: insights from social neuroscience and... This commentary responds to Kamp et al. (Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 275:2199-2201, 2025) editorial on understanding differences across minds in social interaction. It fully supports their relat...

Insightful commentary by Antonio Narzisi on the deep resonances between Gestalt theory and recent advances of social neuroscience

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

📢 New preprint from the lab🧠
▶️doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.12.710517

What does fMRI connectivity actually reflect at the neural level?
The natural intuition is: more neural activity = more connectivity! Using cortical perturbations we show this is not necessarily the case: sometimes less is more!

👇🧵

Interoceptive ability is uncorrelated across respiratory and cardiac axes in a large scale psychophysical study - Communications Psychology Bayesian psychophysical modelling of cardiac and respiratory interoception (N=241) showed no cross-domain associations in sensitivity, precision, or metacognition, indicating that interoceptive perfor...

Bayesian psychophysical modelling of cardiac & respiratory interoception (N=241) showed no cross-domain associations in sensitivity, precision, or metacognition, indicating that interoceptive performance is organ-specific.
@leahbanellis.bsky.social
@micahgallen.com
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Loneliness modulates social threat detection in daily life - Communications Psychology Using ecological momentary assessment and multilevel time-series models, we quantify loneliness inertia and its links to perceived social threat and social behavior, identifying dynamic patterns that ...

Using ecological momentary assessment and multilevel timeseries models, this study quantifies loneliness inertia and its links to perceived social threat and social behavior, identifying dynamic patterns that help explain persistence of chronic loneliness.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

great point!

it could be one of the consequences

Has Broadening the Autism Spectrum Led to Overdiagnosis? An autism expert sparks fierce debate over whether the spectrum has grown too broad, leading to misdiagnosis in children and adults in cases that are milder or unclear.

Has Broadening the Autism Spectrum Led to Overdiagnosis? | Psychology Today www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ment...

9/9
Very grateful to Abeba Birhane, Thomas Pollak, and Leonhard Schilbach for this wonderful collaboration.

Would be glad to hear thoughts.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

8/9
This work grows out of our broader research on how social interaction shapes cognition, selfhood, and mental health, and extends those questions into human–AI interaction.

7/9
More broadly, we ask what kinds of interaction we want AI to support, and which contexts place especially weighty demands on judgment, vulnerability, and human responsibility.

6/9
It also traces three pathways through which these dynamics may reshape human cognition, giving rise to what we call interactive passivity.

5/9
Further, this paper develops a geometry of social coordination that distinguishes among constructive, divergent, and convergent misattunement as different interactional trajectories.

4/9
A key idea in the paper is that these effects emerge through the movement of the interaction itself, for it is only in the movement of the interaction that hyperalignment reveals what it really is.

3/9
We call this interactional style hyperalignment.

Across time, it can draw the exchange toward convergent misattunement, an increasingly asymmetrical trajectory in which coherence accumulates and opportunities for mismatch salience begin to fade.

2/9
When conversational AI is optimized for smooth engagement, the exchange can increasingly feel like shared understanding even as the conditions for genuine understanding quietly erode.

1/9
I’m excited to share our new pre-print!

𝐈𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: 𝐇𝐲𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧–𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

with @abeba.bsky.social, Thomas Pollak, and @leoschilbach.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

"I interact therefore I am"

How do we deal with rich, multilevel, and multimodal data? In a new preprint, @rachaelkee.bsky.social and I sketch an answer! For all the details, and the preprint link, see Rachael’s thread. Be sure to give her a follow, especially if you’re interested in neuroscience, sleep, and media!

The complex and emerging landscape of autism - Nature Mental Health Autism research is entering a new and pivotal phase, as growing recognition of its biological and clinical heterogeneity presents challenges to previous paradigms and the adequacy of a single diagnost...

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Poster for this semester's reading group. We meet every first Wednesday at 4:15pm (CET) at Ruhr University Bochum (room NDEF04/346). If you need more information (abstract of the book, topics of the individual dates, information about the moodle course etc.), please e-mail me! vera.straetmanns[at]rub.de

This semester, we will be reading selected chapters from "Everything flows", edited by @djnicholson.bsky.social and John Dupré in our Reading Group. All interested are welcome to join us at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de (room NDEF04/346). If needed, we can also arrange hybrid meetings.
#HPBio #PhDSky

Loneliness modulates social threat detection in daily life - Communications Psychology Using ecological momentary assessment and multilevel time-series models, we quantify loneliness inertia and its links to perceived social threat and social behavior, identifying dynamic patterns that ...

New paper led by SJ Shao in @commspsychol.nature.com. Across 20 days of EMA (5x daily), momentary loneliness prospectively predicted heightened social threat perception and social withdrawal. Trait loneliness amplified loneliness–rejection coupling and social disengagement @emoriebeck.bsky.social

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling
(PLZ RT)

What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD!
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social
@mpi-nl.bsky.social