@niallw.bsky.social pointed out an error in a preprint of ours that contained a fabricated citation. The cause: we used Claude to fix an arxiv upload / compile error. It decided the best way to do that was to remove an actual citation and replace it with a fabricated one. bsky.app/profile/ben....

I beat the rush, as it were, by moving in 2022, but the headline quote pretty much captures my feelings on the subject. Austria has done a good job of making me feel welcome, and my science has flourished here. It was a good move on a variety of levels. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Commentary with 1000-word limit. Two hours of editing down. This will be funny in retrospect.

DeLauro was my rep for the seven years I spent in New Haven and she was normally good. Strong on issues that directly affected her constituents lives. This is a surprising and deeply disappointing failure of moral insight and political will.

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.

If anybody out there is like, “kids so young would never do this without adult prompting!“ 1) you really don’t know kids 2) when Reagan met with Gorbachev, I was in 5th grade & still managed to get my class to sign an anti-nuke petition Don’t underestimate how much the kids are paying attention

ICE should not exist in the Overton window. The debate should be, at most, about how many former agents should face prosecution after its abolition.

Our lab is back from #BCCCD26 in Budapest 🧠👶 We really enjoyed the conference (and party!) and had a great time sharing our work, meeting old friends and making new ones! 🌟

Excellent analysis! Including e.g. Trump's own crude take, "You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms… they’ll find a reason to impeach me."

An incredible saga

In Budapest for #BCCCD26 and in a new hotel (to accommodate bringing a baby along) with a spectacular view of downtown Budapest

Applications still open until February 4! Important note for US applicants: We do consider applicants with only a bachelor's degree and some research experience! You don't need a masters. #CogSci #PsychSciSky

once again being driven insane by ML conference submissions

Another pointless forever war for oil company profits. My baby just made a spectacularly messy sound in his diaper that I think fully expresses my opinion on the topic. And gives me something to do, so that's nice.

Happy New year. In 2025 I became a dad and it has been an amazing experience. Also why I am posting this at 4:45 instead of midnight or, you know, an hour when people without small infants would normally be awake.

It is testament to how good the academic environment in the US was that it could do well on that market while at best tolerating foreign talent. I moved from the US to Austria and they practically rolled out the red(-white-red🇦🇹) carpet for me immigration-wise. Feeling valued is a draw, it turns out!

If A Christmas Carol were Jewish, how would it be different? Would it even be possible to adapt?

Tis the season

No. Oh no...

Hanukkah is a festival of defiant survival, but two mass shooting in a matter of hours, one that affects my friends and colleagues at Brown, and one targeting the Jewish community of Sydney, does not make for a festive mood. My heart is with everyone affected.

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

Finally someone actually asked the right question to the right people.

Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU! cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students! #PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych

Now that Word has an un-removable copilot button I am contemplating using scrivener for more of my professional writing. Only problem is I'd need to get all my co-authors to use it too...

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

I got a request in a recent review to insert a large number of wholly irrelevant citations. I complained to the editor immediately, and that review was simply removed. Blocking this kind of nonsense is an editor's responsibility, make them do it. (And I'm saying that as an editor myself!)

BlueSky is automatically hiding posts with cuss words in them. You may want to adjust your settings:

i set these all to "warn" because i was wondering what it was catching (and I actually don't like to see language wishing violence, as people who have tried it in my mentions have found out) ....and immediately saw warnings on posts with phrases like "give a shit"

German train life I hope my connecting train is delayed at about the same rate as my current train so that I can dash between platforms 😐

I recently asked a class of undergrads what they actually use Siri/voice assistants for. The list had one item: Setting timers, usually for cooking because their hands were dirty. That was *it* This whole branch of tech seems to be a dead end.

eh, It wasn't that high up... and 4-year-olds can take it. 😜 But if you're looking for other good moments in the paper... I also recommend reading the acknowledgments closely.

Exciting news: My lab has published our first paper! Here, we review the literature on early social evaluation, and we make recommendations about how to best study social evaluation in infants and toddlers. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Notably this problem is also solved 100% without any AI and instead, at zero cost, by journals adopting format-agnostic initial submissions (as many journals have already done)

If you're wondering whether or not to get a flu shot, I didn't get one in time, and I just had a fever dream where I was in the Drew Carey Show because several days ago I was on the Wikipedia page for the Drew Carey Show. You don't have to do this to yourself.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I noted that there are some disconnects between the causal perception literature and the core cognition literature on causality in a recent paper onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Help! Do you know some great resources for teaching (grad or UG thesis) students how to manage their projects?

Whether it’s Joe Biden attending weekly mass or Donald Trump’s ICE agents shooting a priest in the face with a pepper ball, presidents of both sides have directly engaged with the Catholic faith.

When the Yankees get eliminated

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

A wild exchange with Gemini Pro 2.5. In preparing some examples for my seminar (cogsci-llms.netlify.app) I remembered @randomwalker.bsky.social old tweet about playing Rock paper scissors with LLMs. Decided to see what it's like now ....

kids these days just don’t understand their computer’s filesystem. gotta organise your files into folders, not just rely on cloud and search!

Nothing. I use it for nothing at all because AI is good at zero of the tasks I do regularly Honestly I don't even know what its web address is, is it like a 2000s style ChatGPT.com or something funkier like chat.g.pt

Reposting for the morning crowd (and with proper tags this time): My Ph.D. student's first paper, on how causal coherence affects our episodic memory. #CogSci #PsychSciSky

Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)

I didn't announce it here, but our first child was born just over three weeks ago. Sleepy as I am, watching his development from day to day has been amazing. It’s humbling to see how *rich* human development actually is, and how little we as scientists can actually capture of it.

I had an illuminating interaction with a colleague who said that they try to find time to do a few paper reviews per year. It made me realize that different researchers have widely varying expectations about reviewing, probably because there are no public norms.

Our new paper explores an analogy between representations of objects and representations of events, finding that similar illusions arise for both! Check it out 👇

You’ll never guess the way this thread ends (at least I didn’t) but it’s incredible

The sheer joy is fun to watch

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)