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...

Emory University just closed all our DEI offices and programs. This is egregious.

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system. In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

BREAKING: A divided Supreme Court ALLOWS the National Institutes of Health to withhold $783 million in funding for research related to "gender ideology," DEI & other disfavored topics with complicated reasoning. Roberts & liberals dissent. #SCOTUS www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

Authoritarian madness.

I'm accepting a phd student for this upcoming cycle! Happy to chat with anyone interested in numerical cognition, spatial cognition, mental rotation, intuitive physics, etc. Behavior and/or fMRI. You can find my contact info and more info about the lab at www.auletlab.com

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 New postdoc alert with @dchyde.bsky.social! Come join us at the Brain and Cognitive Development lab to work on a fantastic project! @mclstrainee.bsky.social

Our position paper is now out: "Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE): A Global Framework for Measuring Children's Learning Variability Through Collaborative Data Sharing". srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) What is LEVANTE? 🧵

Excited to be at my first @cogscisociety.bsky.social meeting! Come check out my talk tomorrow morning on the organization of the human visual system at birth in @noranewcombe.bsky.social Rumelhart award symposium #CogSci2025

I'm recruiting a lab manager for my soon-to-be-launched lab at Ohio State! If you know of any recent grads who may be interested both in helping to build the lab and in developing skills in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, please share! osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

it's a great thing that trans people exist. they make the world a better place for everyone. attacks on trans people are attacks on everyone, and on the concept of human dignity and possibility.

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months https://go.nature.com/4kAk1Kz

wooo || Out now in JEP: General || wooo "Resource Bounds on Mental Simulations: Evidence From a Liquid-Reasoning Task" 🫗 (by Wang and me) paper: doi.org/10.1037/xge0... preprint: bit.ly/liquidSim25

So excited to see this paper with @ckaicher.bsky.social and @cantlonlab.bsky.social finally out!

Amid all the other news, it's easy to become inured to the basic facts here. Öztürk: -Is not accused of committing any crime -Is nonviolent -Was in this country legally -Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to -Has been locked up for six weeks

So thrilled to announce that we've released another "A conversation with a luminary" episode. In this long episode, we chat with luminary Professor Susan Carey! She talks about her career, the evolution of developmental cognitive science, iconic representations, and more! itsinnate.fireside.fm/26

For the last 3 yrs, I was the director for the Science of Science program at the NSF. We funded projects on science communication - science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, citizens engagement & participation in science. 🧵

They're doing Max Eden's playbook step-by-step. The next (and last) one is to create a fully alternative higher education system that only teaches officially approved curriculum that puts traditional universities out of business. www.aei.org/op-eds/a-com...

Science Homecoming is in the news today, talking about our mission and results 🧪🏠 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The idea that she is a “danger to the community” is patently absurd and dangerously racist. Free her now. Arrest her kidnappers. www.boston25news.com/news/local/t...

Terrifying. Supporting (“operating”) any program that is (perceived as) promoting DEI can get your NIH funding pulled now apparently

Unfortunately, the NSF grant that supports our work has been terminated. This is a setback, but our mission has not changed. We will continue to work hard on making cognitive science a more inclusive field. Stay tuned for upcoming events.

A sad/bad day for US Science. NSF is terminating awards that don't fit with their new "mission". www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

Faculty senates at Rutgers University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the University of Indiana at Bloomington, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have passed resolutions calling for the creation of a mutual-defense compact. chroni.cl/4cBFrnu

"I will no longer be able to continue teaching." Hyeongseon Jeon, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, said he had his foreign visa unexpectedly terminated and now must return to Korea immediately. www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

In defiance of the Supreme Court & without any evidence, the White House claims that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a “terrorist,” who was “sent to the right place.” This is a blatant LIE. He is innocent. He cannot be allowed to rot in an El Salvadorian jail. He must be brought home.

How do we flexibly categorize objects under changing task requirements? Our new paper in Nature Communications (@serences.bsky.social & @nuttidanuttida.bsky.social) examines this: www.nature.com/articles/s41... see 🧵👇

And they all fucking laugh when Bukele says he has enough space. I can’t put into words how angry I am at these monsters.

Yay Harvard!!!!!!! Well done! Other universities should do the same. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/u...

Heartbreaking story from @documentedny.bsky.social about the father of a 19-year-old Venezuelan man who was randomly picked up by ICE in NYC and sent to El Salvador's mega-prison for no reason at all: documentedny.com/2025/04/14/i...

Sam Clarke and I have been writing a lot about adaptation -- what it is, what it isn't, what it reveals about perception. We've just released a preprint that pushes the boundaries of adaptation even further. We document spatially selective adaptation to arbitrary *value*. philpapers.org/rec/CLACWS

A crow's math skills include geometry www.npr.org/2025/04/12/n...

Rümeysa Öztürk hasn’t been given her asthma medication and has had three asthma attacks, putting her life in danger and possibly violating disability civil rights. New from me with @hurwitz.bsky.social for @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

🚨UPDATE: Rümeysa Öztürk has now suffered three separate asthma attacks while in DHS custody. She has not received her required asthma medications—a violation of her fundamental right to medical care. This is cruelty, it is neglect, and it is a damning moral and legal failure.

The Massachusetts governor, the city, and the university needs to drop everything to locate and free this girl and make sure this doesn't happen again. This is DEFCON-1. If they do this to someone who wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper, they will do this to anyone they don't like.

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

Rumeysa Ozturk, aTufts human development PhD student, was kidnapped by ICE in broad daylight on the streets of Somerville today, presumably because of pro-Palestinian activism. No info has been shared with her attorney about her whereabouts or alleged charges. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...

New story about grant terminations in Pittsburgh www.post-gazette.com/business/hea... 1/2

NIH grant cancellations have now expanded from National Institute on Aging to National Institute of Mental Health. A colleagues grant studying suicide risk among LGBT teens has now been cancelled. The current administration is pro-teen suicide 😫

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Trump, Musk, Vance, Vought, etc are systematically destroying: 1. Scientific research in the United States. 2. The talent pipeline for this research. 3. The university system itself. 4. The careers of thousands of people like Dr. Minor For what? Politics? Resentment? Thiel? Putin? Thread:

🚨New paper alert!🚨 The Oomplet Dataset Toolkit (ODT) – an open‐source system developed in collaboration with Mike Tarr's lab – generates millions of unique, cartoon-like humanoid images with 10 configurable attributes, for use as stimuli to study perceptual learning in humans, animals, & AI. 1/6

This isn't going to get the attention of Columbia, but it's at least as bad: the University of Maine is having its funding cut off because the governor of Maine dared to challenge Trump.

We call for the immediate release of former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Kahlil, a legal permanent resident of the US. His abduction is an assault not only on basic immigration law but on our 1st Amendment protections of freedom of speech & assembly. www.aaup.org/news/aaup-co...

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

The situation at Columbia... www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t... 1/n

The Ed. Department's Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 additional institutions "warning them of potential enforcement actions" for "violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination" including Harvard, Brown, Stanford, Princeton, UNC, and several UC's