Brónagh McCoy
AuDHDer researcher @ IoPPN, King's College London. Cognitive neuroscience, computational psychiatry, data science. Attention, learning, autism research. Scientist by day, luddite by night.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThe publisher estimates the Bayesian Workflow book will ship in June www.routledge.com/Bayesian-Wor...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyDo goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThe Iowa Gambling Task is an extreme example of Jingle Fallacy and schmeasurement. In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99. At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyIt's good to hear that the English government is investing in SEND training for teachers, but it matters enormously *what* they're being taught, and *who by*... and have they considered ensuring that kids learn about this stuff, too? Here's one of my talks about this stuff: youtu.be/kDVBkGEmvFw?...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyI started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy"The rewards to 'discovering' a spectacular scientific finding [in psychology] are large; the rewards to debunking frauds or deflating exaggerated claims are small if not non-existent. If these are the rules of the game, we should not be surprised at the way the game is played."
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy“You cannot change a reality that you cannot name.” —Kimberlé Crenshaw Name the systems of power. stimpunks.org/pathways/sys...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyAnthropomorphizing language conceals the limitations of AI, promoting misplaced trust. @emilymbender.bsky.social & @nannainie.bsky.social suggest focusing on a system’s functionalities: instead of saying a model is “good at” something, say what it is “good for." www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-t...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyFeel like this fresh year needs some serious culture change? We got you covered! With @clarekelly.bsky.social @eikofried.bsky.social Anna van 't Veer 📝 rdcu.be/eXja4
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyGavin Monks, 48, is vaguely aware that before this morning he had hobbies, interests, and possessions, but has no idea what those could be, and even less idea where such possessions could ever be found.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyHere, have a #painting. "Savage Rowan" came out of a challenge from an artist friend of mine where we both painted the same scene. This was mine and it eventually went to a good home in Galway. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtYear
- Where are the engineers, materials scientists, physicists who care about artificial lighting and noise reduction or dampening in different environments? Is anything being explored in terms of friendlier solutions that are sustainable and inexpensive? (1/2)
- This should benefit everyone, particularly neurodivergent people who seem to be most impacted by it (due to e.g. weak central coherence, monotropism, intense world theory). Happy to chat more as experimental psychology researcher with small amount of physics and maths literacy from a previous life.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNew podcast. An investigation of the emotion of shame as it applies over the festive period open.spotify.com/episode/0rW5...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyClosing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyPassionate about women's mental health? Interested in brain stimulation? Excited by cutting edge neurotech? Come do a PhD with me! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (thread)
- Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2) www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...
- We're looking for somebody to lead on the qualitative interview side of things, and help with a prospective cohort study already open across multiple NHS-sites. Chief investigators are Rory Sheehan and Afia Ali. Feel free to contact me if you're interested and want to know anything else (2/2)
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyA #painting from a series I did of a bay in the west of Ireland. "Bertraghboy Bay 5" came out of a day cycling in Connemara where I was on a high from the incessant beauty of it all as every bay and mountain came into view. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtAdventCalendar
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyTeach like a Luddite! In which I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to argue for a Luddite praxis in education grounded in three elements: embracing strategic playfulness; developing localized tactics; and building networks of resistance. Read the article at Kappan:
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyAn excellent letter from @cjcrompton.bsky.social on the profound challenge that the double empathy problem poses to how autism is described and researched.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyDo you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThis is also a #neuro-affirming & integrative approach that suits autistic and other neurodivergent YP. @thewoodbug.bsky.social is fab on this topic! www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1... #monotropism
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNew editorial with @sarah595.bsky.social and @heasutherland.com We use our experiences working in UK special education and social care settings to explore some of the challenges of including autistic people with complex support needs in research. With recommendations!
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyOn the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNew today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThere is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyA complete and utter cockwomble has reportedly appointed themselves as an expert in your personal circumstances, deciding in their infinite wisdom that your autism is “only mild”.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyDonders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠 Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇 www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNew paper with @statsepi.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social in which we show there's really no evidence for a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyFirst up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNow out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThis work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉 Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6 Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social
- I'm looking to create an advisory group for a project on Monotropism, an attention-based theory of autism and potentially ADHD. If you or anybody you know is interested, please fill out the form below. Thank you! forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyParents of neurodivergent children in West Yorkshire seek support “They gave us a couple of sessions after the diagnosis, then some leaflets, then we were dropped from that service. It makes you feel unwanted." www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy"It’s essential that autistic people, regardless of age, have a way to communicate. Spoken words should not be valued above other methods, & AAC should never be taken away by parents, teachers, or caregivers. For many autistic people, using alternatives to speech is not a choice – it’s a lifeline."
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy@garymarcus.bsky.social argues for developing different, specialized AI tools for different domains, rather than hoping that one general artificial intelligence will be able to do everything. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/o... #AI
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNew paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ammar I. Marvi, Nancy G. Kanwisher, et al: An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyhappy to share this new article on reporting standards in autism intervention science: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41070555/ Autistic people deserve the highest standards of evidence based practice and reporting practices in this field fall woefully short. We offer recommendations to improve that.
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.” collectivefutures.blog/the-infrastr...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyA #painting from Ireland's south coast. "Ardmore" is an exalted place for me, not because of the Round Tower, but because when I was small I stayed in a caravan and every day you'd jump over the dunes to the beach after first eating a bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice. #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #TidesOutTuesday
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy“It could be because autistic people tend to have big, beautiful eyes, an air of mystique and a fathomless, unknowable heart… Oh. Oh, God. Er, excuse me for a minute.”
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyNEWS! Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyA #painting from the southwest of Ireland "Bandon II" came out of times I spent cycling in West Cork, the town being one I've always enjoyed visiting. And I'm very much overdue another visit. Maybe this is what happens when you get older. I wonder if it's still orange? #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #scape
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyThe myth of optimality in human movement science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoy. @olivia.science and I had the honour to speak with Kent Anderson and Joy Moore on @disruptedscience.bsky.social 🧪 💫 🎬 🍿 Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9w0... 🎶👂 Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/082h... 1/🧵
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyFinally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyWe are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:
- Reposted by Brónagh McCoyJust one of two big @nature.com papers from @intlbrainlab.bsky.social out today. This companion article illustrates the value of large-scale brain-wide recordings from mice performing a standardized task, giving new insights at cellular resolution into neural representations of prior information. 🧠🧪
