Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

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!

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

🚨New preprint with my stellar student Junsong A Small-World Mind Theory of social cognition doi.org/10.31234/osf... Big network, close connection🤯 It explains why low-dimensional findings dominate & high-dimensional evidence emerges Naturalistic designs matter to understanding the complex mind

Can self supervised learning help understand how the brain learns to see the world? Our latest study, led by Josephine Raugel (FAIR, ENS), is now out: 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18226 🧵 thread below

❗New Paper Alert ❗ We found some (but overall weak) evidence for greater differential responses in brain networks underlying theory of mind inferences than those involved in empathic responses in autism. #neuroskyence #autism #openaccess @hilaryrichardson.bsky.social rdcu.be/eBZwE

Two new preprints from our lab! @sabinemuzellec.bsky.social leads work on reverse(Brain➡ ANN) predictivity showing gaps in forward(ANN ➡ Brain) metrics shorturl.at/bnoFl @marenwehrheim.bsky.social leads work on facial expression emerging from shared not segregated neural subspaces. shorturl.at/QAIl4

Job alert: I'm hiring a postdoc for my lab at CU Boulder starting Fall 2026! We study person perception, stereotyping & prejudice, and intervention science using behavioral & neuroimaging methods. Link: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta... Review starts Nov 1 and continues until filled.

So cool to see our project, spearheaded by Igor Bascandziev, featured in Harvard's 'Usable Knowledge'!

New preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

Lazarus et al. (2025): A simple act with a lasting impact: Holding babies skin-to-skin in the NICU helped support their development and reduced differences linked to family income. Early touch can be a powerful way to promote equity from the very start #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

next preprint is out - ever wonder why findings about VWFA differ so much? @jyeatman.bsky.social @mayayablonski.bsky.social , Mia Fuentes-Jimenez, Hannah Stone, and I might have the answer... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

Excited to share that our paper is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social (dlvr.it/TM9zJ8). Our perception isn't a perfect mirror of the world. It's often biased by our expectations and beliefs. How do these biases unfold over time, and what shapes their trajectory? A summary thread. (1/13)

We tried very hard to study language and communication during strategic games like prisoner's dilemma. Veronica Boyce did many experiments chasing what could have been an interesting result but in the end wasn't very strong. Now she's written a nice postmortem: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New paper! We know models learn distinct in-context learning strategies, but *why*? Why generalize instead of memorize to lower loss? And why is generalization transient? Our work explains this & *predicts Transformer behavior throughout training* without its weights! 🧵 1/

So excited to see this paper with @ckaicher.bsky.social and @cantlonlab.bsky.social finally out!

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

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

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

1/ New Preprint (also my first time posting on BlueSky haha)!!! How do individual differences in habituation shape dishabituation magnitude? Work with Qiong Cao, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am excited to share our recent preprint and the last paper of my PhD! Here, @imelizabeth.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, Mick Bonner, and I investigate the spatiotemporal hierarchy of social interactions in the lateral visual stream using EEG-fMRI. osf.io/preprints/ps... #CogSci #EEG

my first time joining @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social as a co-host! It was super cool to talk with Kendrick. Go listen to it 🤩

Elif Batuman profiles Sayaka Murata, the best-selling author of “Convenience Store Woman,” who has gained a cult following by seeing the ordinary world as science fiction.

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How do infant brains develop to recognize faces, words & objects? New research by Emily Kubota @emilykubota.bsky.social & Kalanit Grill-Spector @stanfordvpnl.bsky.social reveals key brain pathways are present from birth but also evolve with experience. 🔗 neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/bridgin...

The latest paper from my PhD is now out in Nature Human Behavior! rdcu.be/edRwQ

Check out Nicolas Weiler’s article for Stanford Neurosciences on how our work is bridging nature and nurture!

My new piece in @theguardian.com Techno-optimism is human pessimism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Please share Dick Aslin's excellent blog on indirect costs: dickaslin.substack.com/p/are-we-pay...

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠 sciencehomecoming.com

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us! careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc... and careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz... looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠

We're launching Devstart, a website to help anyone getting started with developmental science methods and programming. Here's the website with the first tutorials: tommasoghilardi.github.io/DevStart/ Please share widely! 1/4

Our review exploring the development of visual object recognition is officially out in Nature Reviews Psych! Here we draw on cognitive, computational, and neuroscience literatures to examine how humans develop robust object recognition abilities starting in infancy

GOOD MORNING BLUESKY! Very excited about this new paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300671120 Key Q: what predicts how much young kids (👶)talk? How much 🗣 kids heard predicted how much 👶talked, but other factors, e.g. mom’s education, didn’t. #PsychSci #DevPsy 🗣💬 INCOMING SUMMARY🧵ALERT 1/14

I am super excited to share our preprint "Early neural development of social perception: evidence from voxel-wise encoding in young children and adults" with Angira Shirahatti and @lisik.bsky.social !! osf.io/preprints/ps...