Zhenghan Qi

Thanks to our anonymous reviewers for all your insightful comments! Special thanks to @ryskin.bsky.social for inspiration and stimuli!

Using remote eye-tracking (WebGazer + Gorilla Experiment Builder), we showed 1) prediction grows with learning; 2) learning comes from mismatch between the present and the prior; and 3) linguistic prediction in comprehension links to learning.

Learning through prediction: a case of verb bias learning Linguistic prediction, which emerges from experience, is a pervasive process in language comprehension. However, how prediction develops as learning unfolds and how it drives the learning process r...

📣 Check out how verb-specific knowledge updates incrementally as distributional learning takes place: our first paper on prediction and learning (with Amanda Owen Van Horne @telllab.bsky.social and Yi-Lun Weng) is out!

I am co-editing a special issue on the "Neural Bases of Language Processing in the Wild" together with @swathikiran.bsky.social on Brain and Language (zero embargo period). If you are interested, I am happy to chat more (currently at my favorite #snl2025). www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

NSF slashes number of ‘rotators’ and well-paid managers as part of restructuring Smaller future budgets will require fewer people, NSF official tells staff

1. After getting some further insight into changes at NSF (thanks to those who reached out), I deleted a previous post where I tried to make sense of Cheatham's memo as reported in the Science story below.

A question sort of related: Is it appropriate to say “oh biscuits” in the US? (Bluey’s dad taught us that)

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants.

"This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

Welcome to Save The U.S. National Science Foundation A Girl Looking at a Physics Model TAKE ACTION Save NSF is a coalition of concerned scientists and allies who are working to save funding for scientific grants through the U.S. National Science Foundation. Our mission is to support and advocate for the continuation of vital research and innovation in various scientific fields. NSF funding is critical to this work. Join us in our endeavor to ensure a sustainable future for scientific exploration and discovery.

I am so heartened to this seriously AWESOME #SaveNSF website go up today!!!!

Has a take action toolkit with:

1. Press outreach templates
2. Social media toolkit
3. Elected official outreach
4. Talking points

Check it out and share widely!!!! Likely more to come.

www.savensf.com

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

🔔BREAKING🔔

The NSF has frozen all research grant awards—cutting off life-saving science midstream and demanding ideological screenings for future funding.

This is censorship disguised as oversight.

Here’s how you can help us spread the word ➡️🧵(1/3):
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Opinion | Higher Ed Is Adrift While colleges duck and cover, their employees feel angry and abandoned.

My latest. It’s feelings-forward and was hard to write.

“It’s an isolating experience when your industry, the source of your livelihood, is being uniquely targeted by your own government, and many Americans are either completely unaware or cheering on its demise.”
www.chronicle.com/article/high...

Black and gray graphic with red ampersand followed by a white line and "AAC&U Public Statement" in all-caps white text.

More than 150 leaders of America's colleges, universities, and scholarly societies issued "A Call for Constructive Engagement" in response to the ongoing government intrusion into #highered. Read the full statement: www.aacu.org/newsroom/a-c...

A post from Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren ) on X reads: "I won’t share RFK Jr.’s lies about autism. It’s disgusting and dangerous. If he had a shred of decency, he would apologize and resign. Autistic people contribute every day to our nation’s greatness. To every kid with autism, I’m in this fight all the way for you."

What RFK Jr. said was reprehensible. He should be ashamed of himself and step down.

On the Old North church tonight

If you work at a university, make sure to demand that staff do a routine check if SEVIS twice a day. It’s the only way to know if your student is being targeted for disappearances. Also make safety plans for anybody with even minor citations like parking tickets.

Bronze statues of a duck and her ducklings. They each have a little white sign

Adorable. The Boston ducks have protest signs #handsoff

Now THAT’S some #GoodTrouble. #HandsOff

The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.

Excellent excellent excellent from Princeton president and constitutional/ political theorist Chris Eisgruber. There's been far too little of this kind of thing; here's hoping others follow his good example.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

“Liberty is a practical and priceless way of living”. A powerful piece that reminds us why America was an oasis in the last century and how fragile liberty can be.

🧵Yesterday, I received notice that my #NIH grant, on the social environment, lifecourse, epigenetics & #birthoutcomes in Black families, was terminated. This grant represented a critical effort to address the ⬆️ rates of maternal & infant mortality in the US, particularly among Black mothers & babies

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.


I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

A Vaccine For Pancreatic Cancer Continues To Show Promise In a small trial, nearly half of pancreatic cancer patients who received an mRNA vaccine for the disease had no relapse three years later.

90% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer die from the disease. That's why the medical community is excited about the results of a small trial in which nearly half of the pancreatic cancer patients who received an mRNA vaccine for the disease remained relapse-free three years later.

Contribution of vaccination to improved survival and health: modelling 50 years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization Since 1974 substantial gains in childhood survival have occurred in every global region. We estimate that EPI has provided the single greatest contribution to improved infant survival over the past 50...

Nothing will kill more children than the ongoing decimation of CDC, NIH, and USAID work to lift vaccine uptake in the US and world.

Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

» Federal Education Funding Data Dashboard

Update to @fordschool.bsky.social tool that lets you figure out how much federal funding public schools in your congressional district may lose

Now includes that info by state legislative district as well.

poverty.umich.edu/federal-educ...

I'm writing today with a big request during a difficult time for all of us. Together, we've grown Children Helping Science into a cornerstone for online developmental research. Researchers from roughly 150 institutions have conducted remote studies with over 15,000 families since 2020, with many of those families returning to participate in multiple studies across labs. The CHS team and infrastructure is currently supported almost entirely by the United States government (NSF and NIH). Like many US researchers, we're facing substantial uncertainty about what this means for our financial stability over the coming months and years, and we are hard at work pursuing every angle to keep this platform available to the community. This includes exploring new funding strategies we have previously not considered, like possibly allowing some carefully vetted companies to display ads to families. Researchers will continue to be able to use the CHS platform for free, but your support right now is critical. At the same time, we know that many of you, especially those of you in the United States, are facing the same instability to present and future funding as we are. Today, we are asking for three FREE actions from all of you to support our immediate fundraising efforts:

**Send us your citations.** If you have publications that collected data or advertised studies through CHS or Lookit, please share those references. These citations are essential for demonstrating CHS’s impact to funders. A list of all the citations we're aware of is linked here, in case you're not sure whether we have your recent articles. **Send us publicly shareable materials and press coverage.** If you have cute study designs, engaging visuals, or images of adorable kids (with the necessary permissions) we’d love to use them in presentations to potential funders. Similarly, if your research has been covered in any public media (university publications, podcasts, news articles), please send these to us. **Share your funding applications and ideas.** If you are preparing a grant proposal (to any funding source), please reach out to discuss how you can include a budget line to support CHS. If you have ideas for joint projects, or even of funders you think we should reach out to - we're all ears! And if you have ever received funding to conduct studies using CHS/Lookit, please also make sure we know about it.

You can do all of these things right now at this link (https://forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZizMK8). Please also feel free to email us (best address: mekline@mit.edu) with any other questions or ideas. We are committed to keeping CHS running and serving this community, and we will do everything in our power to keep the lights on. Thank you for helping to make CHS such a wonderful community resource and for helping us in whatever ways you can! With appreciation, Melissa Kline Struhl Executive Director Laura Schulz Scientific Director

The platform I run, Children Helping Science, is supported almost entirely by US government science funding, both directly and in collaboration with CHS researchers.

Here's the note we sent to users today - we need help gathering your stories and citations! Submit here: forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZ...

How Science Can Adapt to a New Normal Opinion | In the wake of attacks on the research enterprise, scientists need to focus on protecting its fragile infrastructure.

"No one is coming out of the sky to give you your grant money. Your citation portfolio won’t survive this market crash. Your credentials mean nothing. Everything is going to change."

New for @undark.org

undark.org/2025/03/06/o...

Compelling pushback from @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social and the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH) regarding termination of tenure-track investigators driven by DOGE.

1/2

Why Official English is a terrible idea for the United States, from @lingsocam.bsky.social. Like and share! www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...