We have three lectureships available at York Psychology (@yorkpsychology.bsky.social) with a broad remit for research/teaching areas. Home and overseas applications are welcome. Deadline for applications is early April - enquiries welcome. Come and join us! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

I’m excited to share our new work, led by grad student Rajvi Agravat, using iEEG in 54 pediatric, adolescent, & young adult participants with deep neural network audio source separation to show how the brain prioritizes speech in audio containing both speech and music www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to announce a new paper from our lab, by Ian Griffith @iangriffith.bsky.social with help from Preston Hess @phess2.bsky.social, introducing a model of attentional selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @mitbcs.bsky.social @mitscience.bsky.social Here is a summary. (1/n)

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evidence against syntactic encapsulation in large language models onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!! cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...

What is the interplay between representations learned from (language) surface forms alone, and those learned from more grounded evidence (e.g.,vision)? Excited to share new work understanding “Cross-modal taxonomic generalization” in (V)LMs arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 1/

What if you could automatically transcribe children's speech sounds from their first babbles to full sentences? Screening for speech delays. Comparing how kids learn to talk across languages. Following how sounds evolve month by month. We're building toward this with BabAR🧵 (sound on 🔊)

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

The canvas() function from the ggview R package is very useful for previewing/tweaking a ggplot into publication-ready format: it renders a plot "as it would appear if saved to a file with the specified dimensions". cran.r-project.org/web/packages... #RStats #ggplot #ggview

Fantastic tool for teaching about neural networks!

My group is hiring a full time research coordinator to work with our collaborators in Houston on understanding speech and language development in children with epilepsy. Great for folks looking to get direct experience with clinical/translational research. Please repost! jobs.bcm.edu/job/Research...

📣 Check out how verb-specific knowledge updates incrementally as distributional learning takes place: our first paper on prediction and learning (with Amanda Owen Van Horne @telllab.bsky.social and Yi-Lun Weng) is out!

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

I always thought preschoolers were too egocentric to do well on communication tasks where they had to talk about novel referents. Old papers reported they'd say stuff like "this one looks like my uncle's hat." @vboyce.bsky.social shows that this is wrong! osf.io/preprints/ps...

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇 Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic! Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

AI agents are becoming a serious threat to research data quality. Today we’re rolling out Bot authenticity checks on @joinprolific.bsky.social, detecting agentic AI with 100% accuracy in testing. Comes with a native Qualtrics integration! More info: www.prolific.com/resources/in...

Out today! "How Does a Deep Neural Network Look at Lexical Stress in English Words?" w/ I. Allouche, I. Asael, R. Rousso, V. Dassa, A. Bradlow, S.-E. Kim & @keshet.bsky.social doi.org/10.1121/10.0... 1/

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings: "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Polite Greeting Name Relevant Personal Link Manage Expectations Keep it BRIEF.

This study was an amazing collaborative experience. I'm really really grateful to all the wonderful people who contributed and made this happen. It's the closest I have ever come to finding something like a "universal" in human cognition.

Recently published in @nature.com :the human brain stores what happened and the context in mostly separate neurons—binding them only when needed, which enables flexible memory (and hopefully avoids confusion) 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

How do diverse context structures reshape representations in LLMs? In our new work, we explore this via representational straightening. We found LLMs are like a Swiss Army knife: they select different computational mechanisms reflected in different representational structures. 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.

The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network! authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU83BtfH... 1/n 🧵👇

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

New paper with @inbalarnon.bsky.social and @simonkirby.bsky.social! Learnability pressures drive the emergence of core statistical properties of language–e.g. Zipf's laws–in an iterated sequence learning experiment, with learners’ RTs indicating sensitivity to the emerging sequence information.

Does our "semantic space" get stuck in the past as we age? New work by @ellscain.bsky.social uses historical embeddings + behavioral data to show we are truly lifelong learners. Older adults don't rely on historical meanings—they update them to match current language! 🧠✨ doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

A quick read to start off 2026…

I may be a *little* biased but this 📘 is GREAT! If you ever found language structure interesting, but were turned off by implausible and overly complicated accounts, this book is 4U: a simple and empirically grounded account of the syntax of natural lgs. A must-read for lang researchers+aficionados!

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

New preprint on prosody in the brain! tinyurl.com/2ndswjwu HeeSoKim NiharikaJhingan SaraSwords @hopekean.bsky.social @coltoncasto.bsky.social JenniferCole @evfedorenko.bsky.social Prosody areas are distinct from pitch, speech, and multiple-demand areas, and partly overlap with lang+social areas→🧵

The Press and @openmindjournal.bsky.social are pleased to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). Learn how your institution can support this initiative to continue providing the latest #cogsci research—free of charge—here: bit.ly/452nMma

The last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint! “Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇

Using a large-scale individual differences investigation (with ~800 participants each performing an ~8-hour battery of non-literal comprehension tasks), we found that pragmatic language use fractionates into 3 components: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning.

A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n

Now out in Scientific Data, OneStop: A 360-Participant English Eye Tracking Dataset with Different Reading Regimes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#NeurIPS2025 Check out EyeBench 👀, a mega-project which provides a much needed infrastructure for loading & preprocessing eye-tracking for reading datasets, and addressing super exciting modeling challenges: decoding linguistic knowledge 👩 and reading interactions 👩+📖 from gaze! eyebench.github.io

Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

for all of you using the ALIGN library (to measure lexical, syntactic and semantic alignment in conversations), Nick Duran has put together a great refactoring: ALIGN 2.0 (github.com/nickduran/al...), now integrated with Spacy and Bert

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

A whale conversation in whale vowels. Pinchy the whale and her conversant. The vowels are so clear that they can be transcribed with our human letters. aye, aye!

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

New work to appear @ TACL! Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar. Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings. How can both things be true? 🧵👇

New pre-print from our lab, by Lakshmi Govindarajan with help from Sagarika Alavilli, introducing a new type of model for studying sensory uncertainty. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here is a summary. (1/n)