New preprint! How do children’s drawing abilities develop in contexts where they have relatively fewer drawing opportunities? In a study with 120 Kisumu, Kenya children, we find that children produce more recognizable drawings with age and with drawing experience. osf.io/preprints/ps...

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

Brilliant! In part b/c it holds up happiness as an illustration of what’s what 😉. But more seriously: IF YOUR SO CALLED THEORY DOESN‘T MAKE TESTABLE PREDICTIONS IT’S A FRAMEWORK. #TheoriesAreTheGoal Excellent example of an influential framework-not-a-theory here: experimentology.io/002-theories...

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

Exciting analysis of objects in kids' everyday visual input (BabyView). Today's best categorization models still train on curated photos — not the long-tailed categories and non-canonical viewpoints kids actually see. A difference in kind, not just quantity, pointing to a fundamental algorithmic gap

So excited about this new work—check it out and go see Jane’s talk on Sunday if you’re at #VSS2026!

This is my favorite shot from Artemis II so far—absolutely stunning CREDIT:NASA

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Introducing Datapages, a new project from Mika Braginsky and me. Datapages are open-source templates for creating interactive websites that make research datasets easy to find, explore, and reuse. No coding required for the basic setup. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/data...

New paper in Child Development! When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way! academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

Beautiful use of the BabyView dataset to train a visual learning model!

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

Members of the SoCal lab are presenting their work at #CDS2026! Check out where to find us below

If you’re at CDS this weekend, stop by our posters! I’m sad to miss it this year but so proud of this fantastic group ✨

okay, so, what kind of data *d*o we learn from? at the very least: visual sequences, depth, and self-motion cues. @brialong.bsky.social, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and Linda Smith have done incredible work characterizing these experiences with head-mounted cameras (thank you Bria for the video! 🙇)

excited to share some recent work! neural networks trained on multi-view sensory data are the first to match human-level 3D shape perception we predict human accuracy, error patterns, and reaction time—all zero-shot, no training on experimental data arxiv.org/abs/2602.17650 1/🧠

We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position! If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit. Read more about our lab here! www.vislearnlab.org

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

Very 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... 🧵

This platform is so important! It allows researchers regardless of their university prestige to do research! So important for leveling the playing field for many developmental psychologist scientist from under resourced institutions. Please consider donating - donations will be matched!

This resource has been such a boon to the developmental science community broadly and to my lab specifically. One needn’t look any further than the publications that have come out of the platform to see this (lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/p...). Please consider donating!

Just out in Infancy! "Time to talk", by our great team, Janet Bang, Mónica Munévar, Arlyn Mora, and Anne Fernald used day-long recordings of English- and Spanish-speaking families in the US to explore what caregivers are doing when talking the most with their children.

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

For our last talk of the workshop, we are honored to have Prof. @brialong.bsky.social sharing with us on “The BabyView Dataset: Learning from and about young children's everyday experiences” #NeurIPS2025 📍Location: Upper Level Room 10. 🗓️ data-brain-mind.github.io

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help? New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

At #COLM2025 and would love to chat all things cogsci, LMs, & interpretability 🍁🥯 I'm also recruiting! 👉 I'm presenting at two workshops (PragLM, Visions) on Fri 👉 Also check out "Language Models Fail to Introspect About Their Knowledge of Language" (presented by @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue 11-1)

A first blogpost from the LEVANTE team, introducing our global project perspective. A good intro if you're interested in learning more about cross-cultural developmental data collection using LEVANTE. levante-network.org/global-colla...

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well? We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics. 📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

1/5 For upcoming work I lately read some articles on handling mistakes in science. They share an important consensus I think everyone should know: Mistakes are a failure of systems, not people. In a working system, making a mistake is normal, but inconsequential. 🧵

🧠How “old” is your model? Put it to the test with the KiVA Challenge: a new benchmark for abstract visual reasoning, grounded in real developmental data from children and adults. 🏆 Prizes: 🥇$1K to the top model 🥈🥉$500 📅 Deadline: 10/7/25 🔗 kiva-challenge.github.io @iccv.bsky.social

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🎈 Out now: 🎈 "The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination" (by Balaban & me) of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amazing resource that I now use myself in teaching graduate methods at UCSD! Highly recommended.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Trump’s NIH cuts aren’t just numbers. They are delayed cures, abandoned treatments, futures stolen, lives that will be lost. This is why we Stand Up For Science. #StandUpForScience #SummerFightForScience

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

I feel grateful and fortunate to have international students in my lab, as well as numerous international collaborators and colleagues. You all make my science better. It pains me to think of the anxiety this causes all of you. I hope that universities come together and fight for what is right.