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Adam Tierney

@adamtierney.bsky.social

1K followers 1.7K following 49 posts

I am a professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London. Cognitive science, neuroscience, music, speech. He/him.

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 8

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

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Reposted by Adam Tierney

Ashley Symons @ashleysymons.bsky.social · 27d

📄 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

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

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Reposted by Adam Tierney

Psyche Loui @psycheloui.bsky.social · Aug 25

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

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Reposted by Adam Tierney

Ayelet Landau @ayeletlandau.bsky.social · May 15

📣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 [email protected]! ...

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · May 5

The kid has started calling me “cool dad” whenever he wants something. This is startlingly effective emotional manipulation

Reposted by Adam Tierney

Emma Holmes @emmaholmes90.bsky.social · Mar 31

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Apr 7

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Apr 3

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Mar 18

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...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Mar 18

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...

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Mar 18

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...

Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Mar 11

...with @ashleysymons.bsky.social and Fred Dick

Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Mar 11

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...

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Reposted by Adam Tierney

Auditory Neuroscience Lab @audioneurolab.bsky.social · Feb 12

⏰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!

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Feb 7

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

osf.io

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Feb 6

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...

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Feb 6

So if I'm understanding you correctly, the best way to prepare for the upcoming challenges is to integrate myself into a community of naked mole-rats

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Reposted by Adam Tierney

Catherine Sheard @sheardcat.bsky.social · Jan 29

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...

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Jan 6

Blackout dates would be an ideal solution! I wonder if any journal's implemented this?

Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Jan 5

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 24

Good point, but now I just wonder where that m came from

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 24

That could explain the “r”, I guess, but the “m”? They can’t all be snare rolls!

Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 23

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

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 19

Exclamation points are a naturalistic way to convey that a finding is particularly important or notable. The scientific writing custom for this is something like "Strikingly, " or "Remarkably, X was true" which sounds so awkward and clunky

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 19

"This effect was, as you can see in Figure 1, truly whopping."

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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · Dec 19

Puns in text: absolutely not. Puns in title: allowed for some reason

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