"basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientists—a tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

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Just out in Cognitive Psychology Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty By @tadegquillien.bsky.social , me & Chris Lucas www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We find people's 'best guesses' sneakily encode distribution information that guesser & others can reconstruct later

We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? 🧵👇 ⭐️ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, @neilbramley.bsky.social, Chris Lucas, @natvelali.bsky.social & @cocoscilab.bsky.social

I'm very excited to share notes on Probabilistic AI that I have been writing with @arkrause.bsky.social 🥳 arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05244 These notes aim to give a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic ML + sequential decision-making. I'm super glad to be able to share them with all of you now!

New book "Explanation in Biology" with Cambridge University Press is out & open access! Covers (1) causal explanation & (2) non-causal/mathematical explanation in life sciences--bio, neuro, etc 🌿🧬🧠 Introduction to philosophical work on scientific explanation! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

New paper in #ProcB with @alexmesoudi.com, @jfbonnefon.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social and Rob Boyd. We investigate how social learning shapes the way we explore and show that it can even preserve useless theories! 🧵👇

Our paper on if you can incentivize rule induction in humans with money is finally out (answer is: it appears to be a very weak/0-ish effect in contrast to the huge effect of financial incentives on rote, repetitive tasks). credit to pamop, ben newell & dan bartels psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

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...

We're on the lookout for passionate minds to join us as reviewers for #CogSci2025. This is your chance to be among the first to check out groundbreaking research while playing a crucial role in shaping the future of #CogSci Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/ and fill out the form!

CogSci2025 poster has landed, in both “wow the future looks bright for CogSci” mode, and also “our theories will make you think and possibly write poetry mode”. @neilbramley.bsky.social @carenwalker.bsky.social @cogscisociety.bsky.social

"Local search and the evolution of world models" (psyarxiv.com/e9p8k/). New paper forthcoming in TopiCS with Bonan Zhao, Tadeg Quillien & Chris Lucas