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.

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

Outstanding presentation of the devastating cuts at NSF and their impact across multiple areas of scientific research and training. Angry at the impact now and in the long-term to US research. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Word learning is usually about what a word does refer to. But can toddlers learn from what it doesn’t? Our new Cognition paper shows 20-month-olds use negative evidence to infer novel word meanings, reshaping theories of language development. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

super excited that the first paper from my PhD is now out! we develop a "philosophical toolkit" for computational cognitive modeling & use it to conceptually re-analyze a long-standing debate about evidence accumulation models of decision making 🧠📈 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions. Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though. We will persist.

'More than half of the 1500 research grants that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has terminated in the past month under orders from President Donald Trump’s administration aimed to bring groups historically underrepresented in science into the mainstream www.science.org/content/arti...

Our R01 was part of yesterday's "mass termination" at Harvard; 1 of ~1000 NIH grants in Trump's "fight". The irony of how many Jewish (& non-Jewish) researchers/scientists/physicians/patients/students will be harmed in the name of "fighting antisemitism" is sickening.deliberately cruel. #AcademicSky

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year! I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

Excited to see everyone at #VSS2025 - Come check out what my lab has been up to over this past year:

The president is recommending a 40% cut to next year’s NIH budget. This would be disastrous for our nation’s health and economy. Please contact your representatives, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them why this cannot happen. An easy option: 5calls.org

FYI “Spencer Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation and Kapor Foundation are providing quick turnaround grants of up to $25k for education scholars impacted by the abrupt NSF grant cancellations.” www.spencer.org/news/meeting...

Today's post is on @mcxfrank.bsky.social's book Experimentology, and specifically the chapter on Project Management experimentology.io/013-manageme... (full disclosure, I've collaborated on projects with Mike, specifically on ManyBabies, which gets a shout-out in this chapter)

If you are a faculty member at a US university, please consider signing this excellent petition asking our presidents, chancellors, etc to work together to defend our institutions from the direct attacks by Trump administration: sites.google.com/view/we-must...

There are days in life that shake you. I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University & academic career... 1/🧵

The dynamic version is even more disturbing...

This is deeply unsettling: "disappearing" a student because of their political stance. This is not what we (as Americans, academics, and human beings) should stand for-- whether you personally agree with this students' messaging or not. Any of us could be next. Please take a few minutes to listen.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

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...

Breaking news: Thousands of researchers and their supporters, including recently fired federal workers, have gathered across the U.S. in response to layoffs and funding cuts ordered by the Trump administration. scim.ag/41zlPv4

🚨 New Preprint!! LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

Sign up for our first ROAR@Home BETA research study! roar.stanford.edu/homesignup/

"If we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’ll never find it, no matter how sophisticated our analysis tools." Beautiful piece by Sam Gershman on how far we still are from true progress in neuroscience

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

This 3-post thread is based on a series of AOC Instagram stories she posted tonight, explaining the importance and value of calling your House Representative and Senators, EVEN/ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICANS. Please watch and share.

i just share this with my whole department and other communities i belong to. spread the word.

You study vocabulary? You need a short high quality measure? You love the CDI but your kids are too old (>3)? Meet PREVIC - our adaptive (IRT-based) parent report measure of expressive vocabulary! 💯 open source and ready to use paper: rdcu.be/eahE7 measure (🇩🇪): ccp-odc.eva.mpg.de/previc-demo/

Please remember that your stress system is not meant to be “on” all the time. I bet you’ve been stressed. What are you doing this weekend to relax? Me: Following a run (no tigers involved), I’m putting away my phone for multiple hours & sitting on the couch with a good fiction book.

Over the past few weeks, science funding in the U.S. has become shrouded in uncertainty. Ten trainees with diversity-based funding share how the changes are affecting their research and career plans. By @avaskham.bsky.social @claudia-lopez.bsky.social @callimcflurry.bsky.social bit.ly/42Wifxr

The NIH’s new imposed standard indirect cost rate threatens life-saving brain & behavior research that benefits millions of Americans. SfN, with other scientific organizations,urge reversal of this policy & implore Congress to protect critical research infrastructure. Full statement: bit.ly/4jVJnCL