Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

some professional news in this CMU story about our laboratory school 😊 www.cmu.edu/dietrich/new...

excited to share this work at #cogsci2025, Fri at 1p!

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose. www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

I love—em-dashes.

if (like me) you’d like to remove the AI preview when doing a google search, adding “-ai” to your search should do the trick!

IU has the oldest Folklore Department in the country--no longer a major. Cognitive Science? gone! PhD programs also sacrificed. Full list here: www.in.gov/che/files/In...

Or here's a thought--maybe we could hire more actual human teachers, pay them better, make class sizes smaller, build in more paid prep time, and generally just invest in education instead of investing in AI.

“It is destabilizing, frustrating and enraging to feel like my daughter, who wasn’t even 18 months old, has done more for public health than some people who are now currently in charge of it” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

I wrote a piece for @sciam.bsky.social about why White parents should be talking to their kids about race and racism. It was so great to work with @megha.bsky.social on this piece! Please share! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

Developmental psychologists and statisticians team up to investigate the accuracy and reliability of research tools used to assess how children learn. Read more about how CMU researchers statistically evaluate spatial arrangement tasks with nontraditional data in this featured article! #research

Fellow academics, I know that it can feel like capitulation to think about focusing on your work in the face of so many attacks on us right now. Remember that knowledge is the enemy of ignorance & ignorance is the tool of tyranny. Doing our work is now a form of rebellion. Keep rebelling.

Don’t fall into the trap of normalizing any of this with this sort of language that we’ve seen from so many universities, falsely equating the current situation with other presidential transitions This is unprecedented, unconscionable, and deliberately disruptive. Have the backbone to say that.

New lab paper just dropped! Led by Roberto Vargas, we looked at how a person’s geometry of concept relations aligns to their group identity and how this is impacted by information sources. www.nature.com/articles/s44... A 🧵 1/9

We tend to think of anti-vaxxers as affluent, White, crunchy granola-type moms. But that stereotype ignores how precarity creates vulnerability to anti-vaxx messaging. Take Tara, whose daughter had a sudden shift in temperament not long after a routine vaccine. 🧵1/ open.substack.com/pub/jesscala...

so excited to share this paper where we evaluated the psychometrics of the spatial arrangement method to study children’s semantic structure! open access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

gift link: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

1/ When we partnered with 6th grade teachers to support students' executive functioning and math learning, I was struck by what the teachers wanted to know: What could be done about student procrastination? go.nature.com/3Yug81z #PsychSciSky

President Venn Diagram xkcd.com/2962

Thinking about pros and cons of collecting data from kids online? Our meta-analysis is out today. Effects from online testing were slightly but not significantly smaller than matched in-lab effects: d = −.05 [−.17, .07]. By Aaron Chuey, Veronica Boyce, and Anjie Cao. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Hey cognitive development folks - anyone tried having 5-8 year olds do online tasks with either mouse/trackpad responses or arrow key responses? Do you have an opinion on the issues with either? Trying to design tasks for kids on different platforms (inc. computer as well as tablet).

Are you an undergrad interested in post-bac programs in cognitive and brain sciences? @sparksociety.bsky.social will hold a webinar on Jan 30 at 4pm with reps from Columbia, MIT, Delaware and Pitt discussing their programs. See the flyer below for more details. Feel free to DM me with any questions.

developmental folks: can you share studies looking at psychometric properties of *cognitive tasks* with children participants — any aspect of validity or reliability? extra points for participants in the 3-8y range. thanks!

I wrote an op-ed for the NYT about what reporting on long COVID has meant to me—how I approached it, the impact it had, and how it taught me to be a better journalist. This piece is sort of a manifesto for a journalism grounded in compassion, rigor, and care. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/o...

Sharing our new paper out in SIPR: Understanding the challenges and opportunities of talking to children about race and racism in child-facing institutions Led by Leigh Wilton with Jessica Sullivan & Analia Albuja Grateful to be a part of it! spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

We created the standards against which we’re comparing these students, and are trying to maintain them as if social trauma hadn’t occurred. We can change the way we thinking about progress and schooling to be much more humane.

Job alert! I am seeking a 50%-time project manager for a new NSF-funded project on how simple card games can promote learning about biological variability--with a focus on relational language & gesture in caregiver-child interaction during play. More info: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/researc...