Courtney Hilton
studies how minds, music, and culture interact and evolve
ARC DECRA Fellow @unimelb.bsky.social • @psychunimelb.bsky.social • Complex Human Data Hub
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonThis paper is a great for teaching phylogenetic trees. "Ancient DNA reveals elephant birds and kiwi are sister taxa and clarifies ratite bird evolution" Clearly written. It discusses hypotheses of relatedness among species via continental drift vs genetic data. 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonVery interesting research paper that shows that using AI with programming can significantly reduce mastery over topics. Perhaps unsurprising, but the lack of significant speed gains in this exercise are remarkable www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonI decided to give one of my most well liked project a bit of a make over, and I wrote about it too! See how I updated the visuals of r-color-palettes emilhvitfeldt.com/post/r-color... #rstats
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonIf you're looking for a PhD and you're interested in the cerebellum, predictions, language, and MEG, please apply by 1st March! We have two open positions. More details here: benediktzoefel.wixsite.com/home/phd
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- Have been searching for a particular estimate of something these past few days, and failing that, trying to indirectly calculate it... finally, I stumble across a promising osf.io link buried in the supplementary materials of a paper... but of course, OSF is down for maintenance today 😑
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonNew postdoc position with the LEVANTE project! We're looking for someone with language development / reading knowledge to help work on our international adaptations of language assessments. Please forward to interested candidates
- Deadline for submitting a symposium coming up on 31st Jan Students submitting a talk before 27th Feb may be eligible for one of 40 $500 (AUD) student travel awards
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonPerennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers “We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” (Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonWith 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.
- ❤️ paperbarks
- New research reveals that paperbarks, among other trees, host abundant, specialized, and metabolically active bark-dwelling microbial communities that modulate climatically relevant gases, including methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide. Learn more this week in Science: scim.ag/4bp9hgl
- Reposted by Courtney Hiltona project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?
- thought provoking idea from @edhagen.net : make social media accounts for your papers
- 1. My new preprint has its own bluesky account. Why? The problems facing social media & scientific publishing are similar: both are dominated by powerful oligopolies. The @atproto.com tech underlying bluesky that aims to solve the social media prob might also help solve the scientific pub prob 🧪 🧵
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonI'm working on some figures for a book to illustrate the foundation of quantitative genetics (as confirmed by GWAS a century later). Mendel showed discrete inheritance in peas (left figure, 1860s). Fisher showed that many such Mendelian effects yield continuous traits (right figure, 1918).
- Sad to hear that Emma Johnston (@unimelb.bsky.social vice-chancellor) has unexpectedly passed away. I don't have much experience with her, but this quote shared from Kristen Pammer (our Head of School) describes a sustainable "leading from the edges" leadership we need more of at our universities.
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonHave you got a PhD in Statistics (or related field) and experience in Statistical Consulting? A continuing position at the Australian National University is now open 🇦🇺🦘🐨. Would love to get an #rstats person if possible ☺️ Apply by 18 Jan 👉 jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/course-... #statssky #statsky
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonVery excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonA new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonMichael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.
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- Come to Auckland in July 2026 for the joint meeting of the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference and the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision!! STUDENTS: there will be 40 travel support awards of $500 to help you attend, so don't let the distance stop you from attending.
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonA study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...
- Reposted by Courtney Hilton📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonAre humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonSo proud to see our new paper out in PNAS spearheaded by @emilypigott.bsky.social She found a tiny 46,000 yr old Neanderthal bone at Starosele (Crimea). DNA work revealed long-distance connections across Eurasia, supported by stone tool evidence @heasvienna.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- At least working in the office late looks pretty 🌄
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonTLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonI'm starting to explore {simDAG}, a nifty #rstats package that has a nice API for specifying DAGs and then simulating data from them: robindenz1.github.io/simDAG/
- Yay Australia, come here it's great—we have beaches, kangaroos, and democracy! 🦘 (I don't want to know what the increase is in people I am competing against for faculty positions in Australia now 😬)
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonToday my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE
- In the ~3 months it takes to ship our things from Auckland to Melbourne (a 4 hour flight), of course, the earliest possible delivery date is the day after we fly out of town for 1.5 weeks 🤦
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonThrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonMacron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."
- President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up! We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.” defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonJane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.
- Reposted by Courtney Hilton1. Bluesky doesn’t downrank links 2. You can choose your own algorithm from among thousands 3. The whole app is open source This keeps it a free and open platform by design, leading to better click-throughs and traffic to your site. We 💙 the open web.
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- Hilarious and beautiful (free) film on Youtube. Pokes fun at extreme birdwatching (listing) but is actually more deeply about the joys of birding and being connected to nature ❤ www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-w...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonAt @ishe-society.bsky.social, we are looking for someone to review @mgurven.bsky.social new book, "Seven decades" for Human Ethology. It looks terribly interesting! DM/email for details (and to get a hard copy 😊) @princetonupress.bsky.social press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonHello 👋 We're the official #UniMelb account! Follow us for news, updates and information about UniMelb. For now, enjoy the blue skies over our Parkville campus 💙
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonNew work with @samcheyette.bsky.social & Susan Carey testing the memory architecture used when learning/producing center-embedded sequences. Adults don't use Push-Down Stacks as is often assumed, instead they rely on a Queue-like memory architecture onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonOxford Biology is growing 📢 We’re appointing 3 Associate Professors in: 🌱 Plant Sciences 🦉 Animal Behaviour 🔬 Molecular Cell Biology 3 fields. 3 opportunities. One new home for Oxford Biology. Learn more 👉 bit.ly/41S2Tc7 Apply now 👉 bit.ly/488CNW3
- Reposted by Courtney Hilton💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonI am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
- Reposted by Courtney Hilton@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...
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- Reposted by Courtney HiltonUCDavis Psych is hiring an Assistant Professor in Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠✨ Come join a vibrant, collaborative dept and live in a fun college town near Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and Lake Tahoe. Applications due Oct.21. Please share widely! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonThe psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonEver wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Courtney HiltonEver stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...
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