Logan James
LightNews LightNews
loganjames.bsky.social
Logan James
@loganjames.bsky.social
310 followers 350 following 6 posts
Post-doc @ STRI/UT Austin/McGill and collaboration with the Earth Species Project. Comparative cognition and acoustic communication across birds/frogs/bats/humans🦜🐸🦇🎶
Posts Replies Media Videos
loganjames.bsky.social
check out this fun video about my recent bat project!
us.theconversation.com The Conversation U.S. @us.theconversation.com · Aug 7
🦇 Baby bats almost get themselves killed while learning to listen for the right prey to hunt. Smithsonian researcher Logan S. James and his team spent decades studying these acoustic assassins in Panama and the results were wild.
#bats #science #predators #frogs
August 7, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Logan James
animal-prattle.bsky.social
Beautiful, creative work from @loganjames.bsky.social et al! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

1. Humans share sound preferences w animals (even insects!)
2. Musical experience predicts agreement w animals

"...our data indicate a more expansive shared ‘taste for the beautiful’"

#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
Fig. 1. Humans and other animals share acoustic preferences (A) Each dot depicts the mean 3 and 95% confidence interval for human responses to a pair of stimuli. Above is a phylogenetic tree, with color depicting the average agreement between humans and the species across all stimulus pairs (teal colors depict agreement, brown colors disagreement). Right are all data pooled with the horizontal bar and whiskers depicting the mean ± 95% confidence interval across all stimuli. (B) There is a significant relationship between the strength of the preference within the animal studies (x-axis) and the percent of humans that agreed with animals (y-axis). Each dot depicts a pair of stimuli, and the trendline is a simple linear correlation ± SE. (C) Reaction times were significantly faster for trials when the participant selected the stimulus that was preferred by animals (dots and error bars depict the mean ± SE across all trials). Note that, for analysis, we used z-transformed square root values, which were back transformed for visualization. (D) Intra-rater agreement is above chance both for stimulus pairs with significant inter-rater agreement (right) as well as for pairs at chance inter-rater agreement (left). Each dot depicts the mean intra-rater agreement for a stimulus pair. For all panels, colors depict the four larger phylogenetic groups (insects, birds, mammals, and frogs). * p < 0.05
June 28, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Logan James
mehr.nz
New preprint from a bio-psych collab

many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)

@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species

we are!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Main panel of Fig 1 from paper in OP
June 27, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Logan James
christopherrolson.bsky.social
Here is a splendid study on how and when eavesdroppers may learn to discriminate #🧪

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
The ontogeny of decision-making in an eavesdropping predator | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Predators use prey-emitted cues to assess and localize potential food sources. Sexual advertisement calls offer conspicuous cues for eavesdropping predators. While the ontogeny of predatory behaviour ...
royalsocietypublishing.org
May 7, 2025 at 12:58 PM
loganjames.bsky.social
my most recent paper just came out! we wrote a news story about the article here:
Young bats learn to be discriminating when listening for their next meal
By listening to a frog call, adult bats can tell which prey are palatable and which are poisonous. Young bats must acquire this ability over time.
theconversation.com
May 1, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Logan James
animal-prattle.bsky.social
New from @earthspecies.bsky.social

Describes "Voxaboxen": a 1-D object detection model that improves predictions w/bidirectional output + graph matching.
Bonus: zebra finch dataset

Code: github.com/earthspecies...

#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics

cc @arikkershenbaum.bsky.social @danstowell.bsky.social
Figure 2 from paper that shows the forward-backward matching approach used to improve predicted offset times Figure 1 of paper, example spectrogram from dataset showing overlapping female zebra finch calls
March 11, 2025 at 3:01 AM
loganjames.bsky.social
Very cool to see some of my work in collaboration with the Earth Species Project getting featured in this article!
January 16, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by Logan James
michaelhendricks.bsky.social
This is the data that has the CAQ in a fit over the "decline of French" on the island of Montreal. Note this has nothing to do with the ability to speak French, or even if you work in French.
October 18, 2023 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Logan James
mtlgazette.bsky.social
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante is concerned about the economic impact of the CAQ's out-of-province tuition plan montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...
A photo of a woman speaking in front of the flags of Montreal, Quebec and Canada accompanies the following quote from Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante: “It’s a hard blow ... This measure will encourage more students to go to universities in Toronto.”
October 18, 2023 at 4:32 PM
Reposted by Logan James
courtneybhilton.bsky.social
New paper led by Lidya Yurdum (PI: @mehr.nz )—we studied people in 52 countries in an experiment translated into 31 languages, testing a core set of intuitions about music—for at least these intuitions, they were highly consistent!

t.co/vys4n7b49o
September 7, 2023 at 10:27 PM
Reposted by Logan James
jakobpunkt.bsky.social
Don't worry, linguists. Biologists don't know what a species is, or what life is,
gretchenmcc.bsky.social Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcc.bsky.social · Aug 28
Definitely not what a word is either, we don't know that one

(Source: I'm a linguist)
August 29, 2023 at 1:29 AM
Reposted by Logan James
mehr.nz
do you hear like a deer? our new gamified experiment 🧪 Calls of the Wild tests what animal you're similar to (in terms of your auditory preferences).

give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc

(i got 'mammals')
August 22, 2023 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Logan James
courtneybhilton.bsky.social
Check out our latest web-experiment, led by @loganjames.bsky.social. It's about cross-species listening preferences themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc
August 23, 2023 at 11:57 PM