1/7 Academics are facing an April deadline for making our course materials accessible. One big part of this is pdfs of journal articles. Editing them individually+manually in adobe acrobat pro looked painful, so I tried automating it. github.com/laurenaulet/...

The Developmental and Brain Sciences program at UMass Boston is looking for a half-time Program Coordinator. This colleague will be working directly with me (the Director of the program). Feel free to DM me with any questions! employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us...

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo

Neuroscience undergrad abducted at 6:30am. No judicial warrant. ICE lied to gain entry into the residence. State-sanctioned kidnapping. And I’m supposed to somehow teach class this afternoon?

Breaking News: Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard as the university reviews his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned an exclusive retreat. The guests were picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman. The problem? Brockman added two women to the list, and his biggest funder — Jeffrey Epstein — wanted them out. @jkutzie.bsky.social reports

I wrote about the Epstein files and what they tell us about men in academia. In a field where climbing the career ladder is only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files show the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back. 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Good to see journalists scrutinizing “The Edge Network,” an intellectual circle of academic men who think that women are inherently inferior to men. (and great interview by @laurenaulet.bsky.social) 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)! How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science. Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

NEW reporting from @19thnews.org on the Epstein files shows how academic research funding intersected with women scientists and institutional power shaped by male influence. An important story about accountability, impact and who gets protected -- and who doesn't. 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

Very impressive visual reasoning benchmark. They found that most models still fall below the capacities of a 3-year-old unipat.ai/blog/BabyVis...

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 “Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

Again, I'm looking for a lab research coordinator to work on the developmental cognitive neuroscience of numeracy in preschoolers. Please pass on to those that might be interested publish.illinois.edu/danielchyde/...

Mindscape 343 | Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social on The Laws of Thought. Everyone knows the laws of thermodynamics, but do you know the laws of thinking? #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026...

My dept - Psychology & Education at Mount Holyoke College - is searching for a 1-yr visitor in developmental psych. 3/2 teaching load with research support mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

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

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

I was curious about the fact that there were seemingly no women scientists mentioned, even of equivalent caliber, and came across what is, seemingly, beef between Epstein and Brockman debating whether "the women are all weak" or not

I am really angry about all of the scientists who cozied up to Epstein even after it was known who he was. I am nearly as angry at how many people are justifying this as "they had to, it's how academia works" NO IT FUCKING WELL ISN'T

It's disturbing to see many of the the major figures in moral cognition all over the Epstein files He was friendly with a huge number of the leading figures in the field, including giving millions to their labs, long after he pled guilty to sexually abusing young girls www.justice.gov/epstein

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 🧵

We are pleased to announce that the first LEVANTE data release is now publicly available! To access and download the pilot data, follow instructions on researcher.levante-network.org/data. This data release accompanies the preprint linked in the thread.

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Renee Nicole Good was 37. She was murdered by an ICE agent in the street in broad daylight. What really happened to her will not be forgotten, minimized, or ignored.

Grad school me spent way too many hrs fighting matlab to generate dot arrays and extract parameters from pre-existing stimuli. So I built the thing I wish existed: an open-source, browser-based toolbox for generating AND analyzing dot arrays. No MATLAB, no installation, no inherited spaghetti code

Overriding my intuition that blogging is either too cringe or too ‘for more senior folks’ because I discovered this break that I have ~things to say about synthetic data. En route to talking about the perils of synthetic data, I take a detour through ‘Core Knowledge’, DNNs, and fast v slow science

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

This project is trying to raise science awareness by doing short videos about cancelled research — including mine.

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

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.🧵

There’s a fantastic developmental science resource called Children Helping Science, at MIT (childrenhelpingscience.com). Researchers run child studies online, Parents sign up & participate with their kids. CHS got an offer from an anonymous donor: matching gifts up to $100K through December!

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

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’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining the faculty at @umassamherst.bsky.social next year as an assistant professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences! 🥳

Judy DeLoache passed away yesterday. She was a brilliant scientist and giant in the field of developmental psychology. She will be missed dearly.

Join us for our student workshop by the founders of Science Homecoming at #BUCLD50! Dr. Cantlon will give the presentation “Writing to Defend American Science” at the student workshop on Thursday, November 6th, 2025, 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM. #ScienceHomecoming #BostonUniversity #LanguageDevelopment

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]👇

Dense longitudinal neuroimaging reveals individual brain change trajectories: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has written another tour de force, showing how efficient coding reshapes numerosity representations in parietal cortex.

I’m starting a suicide prevention research lab at UMass Amherst! I’ll be reviewing applications for our clinical psychology PhD program. Come to our virtual open house to learn more about the program and speak with faculty accepting students. www.umass.edu/psychologica...

Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.22.677834v1

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...