The visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇

New PhD and post-doc job openings! Join me and Prof. Nina Kazanina @ Uni Geneva, Switzerland, to take part in an exciting project on relations and binding in language and vision, explored with cutting-edge neurophysiology (#iEEG and MEG). Full details in the job offer below.

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain. 🔗 buff.ly/4UsILev

bars

how many google docs can one man have open at one time? my research explores this topic in ecologically valid settings

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

the distinction between psychology and neuroscience

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

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?’!

Is this something YOU ever ask yourself? "Man, Brett Karlan (aka Old Jerry Fodor) claims to love Fodor, but has never published anything defending anything remotely Fodorian. What's up with that?" This was a puzzle that long perplexed the scholars... until now! philpapers.org/rec/KARAET-4

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.