Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

“You will be haunted by three spirits”

When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

and lexical semanticists will tell you there are categorial restrictions on composition

It has been so so fun to think with some of my favorite scientists about what it means to understand!

So, is "When Prophesy Fails"—the foundation of cognitive dissonance theory—debunked? Unclear. The article making this claim is... odd. It describes Festinger and Schachter as leftwing radicals, critiques the political slant of their funding, generally refers to their work as failed... 1/n

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

#philsci #cogsky #CognitiveNeuroscience @phaueis.bsky.social and I have had our paper, “Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling,” accepted as a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The power of surprisal stems from the fact that (lexical) surprisal can —and will— parametrically reflect variation stemming from any domain or representational level of language. Why? Because words form patterns for many reasons! Semantics, syntax, frequency... Surprisal does not distinguish.

something i noticed in preparing a class

nice, will check it out! here's the link to save others the search ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/7...

Delightful detail from the Roman “unswept floor” mosaic by Heraclitus, showing a mouse nibbling a walnut. Superb use of darker tiles for subtle shadow effect! 2nd century AD. Vatican Museums www.museivaticani.va/content/muse... #MosaicMonday #Archaeology

can we all agree on a short designator to the paragraph "LLMs have proven surprisingly useful at (X), but are still not great at (Y), and we don't uite understand what's going on" and just move to using that? Feels like it would save time/space for many papers to both Reader and Writer.

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence 1/

The so-called debunking of “cult psychology” from the recent paper on When Prophecy Fails is misleading. Check out the comments on this thread, where philosophers point out where the key premises of the book replicate in the vast majority of similar cults & a huge replication of dissonance theory.

Good to see that some people are still reading the full paper and not only the abstract. I think Science would thank you if it can. :)

oh you think i'm irrationally defending cognitive dissonance theory? almost like i'm... responding to counterevidence by rationalizing it away to hold on to my prior belief...?

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

I think some people have overcorrected in their scepticism towards psychology. There is plenty of dodgy stuff out there, but I too often see people willing to burn down entire fields after reading a tweet about another non-replication. Seems obvious cognitive dissonance is a real phenom.

This is all p misleading IMO. I just saw this link so haven't read it yet (but will, though I also think lots of the retweets of this haven't read it as well, given its provenance). I don't see how this counters (eg) Dawson 1999 which goes through 13 millennial cults and finds 12 show the effect 1/n

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Looks great!! Love to see more scholarship on the Fodorian question of ‘How many games in town are there?’!

British Philosophy of Mind: “Appearing-as as an Efficient Cause of Seeing-that” American Philosophy of Mind: “New evidence for hierarchical structure in visual working memory”

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

functionalism always wins

Seriously though it's insanely depressing for current PhD students, and is driving everyone to think they need to dump LLMs into their papers just to get a job. That's not what we want here.

New preprint written with the wonderful philosopher William Ramsey: Mental Representation Without Neural Representation: Understanding The Evidence osf.io/preprints/ps...

Kevin Durant booing the OKC fans booing him

Pretty sure real science is actually reading the papers, thinking very deeply, and more, before writing, not generating literature review-like objects with no authorial intent or legwork

brains are so gross

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans? New paper on this from my group: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125 🧵 1/10

super clear and helpful commentary by ned, highly recommend

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

While this looks like it could have been painted yesterday, it’s actually a 1,700 year old (!) portrait from a Fayum mummy in modern day Egypt. This is one of ~900 of these portraits from the era, which broke from a more stylized tradition, and represented the subject more naturally.

nyc baby, greatest city in the world

First shot across the bow from ongoing project with Jake.

New publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article. We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

August 31st/September 1st on leave

When reading AI reasoning text (aka CoT), we (humans) form a narrative about the underlying computation process, which we take as a transparent explanation of model behavior. But what if our narratives are wrong? We measure that and find it usually is. Now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.16599

imagine a world without LLMs. what would be the point of living

I love jargon, i think it's often both very useful and very beautiful language, and i have a crazy working theory that if you just stop having the reaction of a whiny baby when confronted with something you don't immediately understand then you will learn to love and enjoy jargon too

We’re hiring—one year post in Ethics—urgent—deadline this time next week www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/122985-...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved