Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore? Well, I wrote about it. 🧵

A new study by Zach Horne et al. combines history of science and psychology experiments to document the appeal of 'intrinsic' explanations: scientists and laypeople are drawn to explanations that appeal to an object's inherent properties. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes? I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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)

Fantastic opportunity to join the cogsci community at Edinburgh:

Imagine if all the money academics pour into OA fees at for-profit publishing corporations went instead to academic societies, which exist to support science; or to university presses, which exist to support academia

Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…

Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints: 🧵

Recent studies suggest that manipulating "growth mindset" might not improve students' academic performance This new research suggests that it has a different effect. Growth mindset makes people more inclined to *blame* students for their failures escholarship.org/content/qt4k...

Really loving this kind of engagement between the psychology and philosophy of causation. So much better than psychologists re-explaining how people are just oh so irrational and philosophers examining their intuitions about increasingly elaborate tales of rock throwing and firing squads 😉

New short paper with @kevingoneill.github.io and Paul Henne: We re-analyse data from a recent study on causal judgment, and find that a counterfactual model explains why temporal order influences people's intuitions. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interesting paper suggesting LLMs don't rely on counterfactual reasoning as much as humans do when judging responsibility.

Counterfactual models predict that normality should influence causal judgments in a different way depending on causal structure. A fascinating paper by Ozdemir and Walker finds some hints of this pattern in 5- to 7-year old children. static1.squarespace.com/static/5615d...

memo is a new probabilistic programming language for modeling social inferences quickly. Looks like a real advance over previous approaches: fast, python-based, easily integrated into data analysis. Super cool! pypi.org/project/memo... and osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper from Qi, Vul and Powell introduces a clever way to measure a participant's Welfare-Tradeoff Ratio in a single trial: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Occam's razor is sometimes invoked in statistical learning theory to motivate an inductive bias for simple hypotheses, most famously by Blumer et al (1987): cse.buffalo.edu/~hungngo/cla... Interestingly, what the theorem really requires is the hypothesis space to be restricted, not simple.

Really cool paper by Pajot et al. showing that a Language of Thought for arithmetic predicts the frequencies of numbers in natural language. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our paper on the logic of guesses is now out! We provide a new information-theoretic perspective on many phenomena (old and new) in judgment under uncertainty. 🧵

Pleased to announce my new open access paper out in Developmental Psychology: The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind” with @xphilosopher.bsky.social and @ebonawitz.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-25569-001.html #CogSci #PsychSciSki #DevSci (1/10)

⭐️ From Tiffany Doan, Stephanie Denison, & Ori Friedman: Doing things intentionally: Probability raising and control

XKCD on fire today. ”If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.” xkcd.com/3101/

I wrote a short blog post about our experimental work on the logic of guesses: xphi.net/2025/06/03/e...

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️! We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺 🔗 minds-making.github.io June – July 2024, free & open to the public (all career stages, all disciplines)

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

New CogSci paper! In "Taking others for granted: Balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection" we propose a computational model explaining why people favour self interested behaviour when they believe others to trust them. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/Vbtesh/takin...

What makes a good explanation? Our new paper, "A Communication-First Account of Explanation," with Jacqueline Harding and Thomas Icard argues that understanding explanation requires focusing on its communicative function. 🗣️💬👂 📃: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

Important paper.

Our #CogSci2025 paper led by Madeleine Horner (with Adam Moore) explores people's lay conception of empathy. Main finding: people have a robust expectation that agents who feel empathy are more likely to help, especially when helping is costly. quillienlab.github.io/Horner%20et%...

You can read Balint's paper at: arxiv.org/abs/2403.08828 Though the paper is published in a Human-Computer Interaction conference, I think it should be broadly interesting to anyone interested in the psychology of explanation.

How to predict competence judgements?? Marius Mercier uses #Bayesian models to predict particiapant judgements ➡️ finds that that competence judgments are well described by Bayesian models ➡️ predicts participant answers on new questions & integrate info @mariusmercier.bsky.social #ehbea2025

Under which conditions can we mind-read?? 🧠 📚 Using computational models, Tadeg Quillen demonstrates that high capacity observers can track across tasks (like adults 👨), but lower capacity tracking can still have accuracy under some conditions (👶, 🐒 )! @tadegquillien.bsky.social #EHBEA2025 #ToM

A year ago I linked to a paper by Deirdre Wilson and me entitled "Rethinking ostensive communication in an evolutionary, comparative, and developmental perspective." A much revised version has been accepted by Psychological Review. The preprint is available at osf.io/preprints/ps...

Summary of two trials studying payment of reviewers: www.nature.com/articles/d41... To me, the results suggest that it's not worth it. One study found a tiny effect, and the other was too small to draw a meaningful conclusion.

Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵

A plausible hypothesis: When we judge whether someone knows X, we first judge whether the person believes X, and then we check whether X is true. These new studies suggest that this is *not* how people attribute knowledge. Instead, knowledge and belief representations are independent.

New paper with Tong Liu and Arndt Broeder, just accepted in Cognition. We test novel qualitative predictions from sampling-based models of probability estimation in an event ranking task. Results provide evidence for the idea that mental sampling underlies probability judgements.

I recently found myself at a summit for academic administrators. The most striking aspect was the powerful illusion of 'doing something' which they had spun for themselves. There were hours of asinine presentations that had basically no real content.

How do children understand causal expressions? In "Cause and burn in development", we explore how children map different causal expressions like "burn" or "caused to burn" to different kinds of causes. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/davdrose/cau... 🧵

New paper published in Psych. Science on the perception of *topological relations*. In it, we explore how subtle differences in topological structure influence attention, perception, and even enumeration. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper in Psychological Review! In "Causation, Meaning, and Communication" Ari Beller (cicl.stanford.edu/member/ari_b...) develops a computational model of how people use & understand expressions like "caused", "enabled", and "affected". 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor... 🧵

Where do moralizing religions come from? Useless cognitive by-products?Cultural group selection for complex societies? Our Psych Review paper argues: neither. Let’s rethink their cognitive & evolutionary origins🧵 w/ @manvir.bsky.social @nbaumard @jbaptistandre.bsky.social doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

🚨 New working paper on people's judgments of environmental policies with @hugo_trad and @stricklandbrent 🚨 "Laypeople Have Difficulty Processing Efficiency When Assessing Environmental Policies" osf.io/preprints/os...

Wow! Exemplary research by Dorsa Amir ‪@dorsaamir.bsky.social and Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social, highly relevant to the study of cognition and culture

New preprint with @neilbramley.bsky.social and Chris Lucas: We argue that causal judgments are supported by richer mental representations than traditionally assumed, and that this hypothesis can help solve some puzzles about causation. osf.io/preprints/ps...

In a sentence like “Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out”, what explains the difference in meaning between 'Clark Kent' and 'Superman'? This paper by Michael Goodale proposes a new explanation using ideas from computational cogsci: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...