In this new paper, we look at some different dimensions on which beliefs vary: - Is the belief deeply important to your identity? - Would you change your mind if you got evidence against it? - Is it best described in terms of credences (“pretty sure”), or is it more yes/no? 1/

This paper I have a conflict on since Mathias now works in my lab, but it is so beautiful, claiming that shape processing in humans is not done like modern neural nets, but instead uses a symbolic representation of a program to generate the shape. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

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... 🧵

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

My first PhD paper is published! 🎉 We compared how wild bonobo and chimpanzee infants (0-5.5y) become independent from their mothers. Here is the open-access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... 🧵(1/5)

“Children enter from the door on the left.” This sentence is what’s called a GENERIC… but it isn’t saying anything general about the nature of children. What then makes it generic? New theory from @kateritch.bsky.social and Ny Vasil philpapers.org/archive/RITG...

New paper with Junyi Chu, Tomer Ullman et al showing that kids think more difficulty is more fun! Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Now in press at Topics in Cognitive Science! We review children's understanding of different kinds of visual media across contexts, and argue that this work has important implications for childhood learning and assessment tools @cogscisociety.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My toddler must’ve turned on speech to text, but honestly a lot of posters do need to hear this.

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

Jetzt seid ihr mal gefragt: ein Aufruf für Münchner*innen - gerne bitte weiterleiten! Meine Kollegin sucht gerade 5- bis 11-jährige Kinder als Teilnehmende für eine neue Studie (mit Virtual Reality!), findet bei uns im Labor an der TUM statt. Mehr Infos hier auf dem Flyer:

This week I'm a guest curator over at @realscientists.de (a cool German-language science communication channel)! I'll post about my work & life, and some of the ways my kiddo suffers from having a cognitve development researcher parent 😶‍🌫️

Excited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉 David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops. 📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU! cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students! #PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych

Just published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! 👩‍💻 github.com/Naubody/prog... Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social. Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!

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...

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

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

🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238 👇

"Intuitions of mathematical curves in young children's drawings" In this new paper from the lab, Lorenzo Ciccione, Marie Lubineau, Theo Morfoisse and I show that 5 and 6 year olds already possess intuitions of linearity, curvature, period and compositionality. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

We have an open position for a PhD student or postdoc in our group (iSearch Lab with Azzurra Ruggeri at TU Munich): portal.mytum.de/jobs/wissens... Application deadline is Nov 23, start date early next year.

Recently gabe a lab talk with the kiddo next to me - thanks to @dkampis.bsky.social for having us & thanks to Bluey for making this happen 🙌

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

Exciting news: My lab has published our first paper! Here, we review the literature on early social evaluation, and we make recommendations about how to best study social evaluation in infants and toddlers. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

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]👇

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

💖This paper has been ~11 years in the making - and probably my favorite project of all time. Thrilled to see it in @pnas.org! I'm so lucky that Zach decided to do a second PhD and join my lab @psychillinois.bsky.social back in 2014 - a fabulous scientist & human being! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

Now out in Cognition, work with the great @gershbrain.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social on formalizing self-handicapping as rational signaling! 📃 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lo8f2Hx2-...

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation. We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)

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)

🚨 Call for Submissions! 🚨 The 16th annual BCCCD meeting (Budapest, Hungary, Jan 15–17, 2026) is accepting submissions for symposia, talks & posters. ⏰ Deadline: Sept 5, 2025 Share your work & be part of the conversation! #CogSci #PsychSciSky #BCCCD bcccd.org/submission.htm

🔔 New paper out on Social evaluation of skill and competence in primates @mariehirel.bsky.social, @williamohearn.bsky.social and @julxf.bsky.social made this happen www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

When an animals' groupmates go out of sight, do they also go out of mind? In a new paper in Proc B @royalsocietypublishing.org, Luz Carvajal and I show that a bonobo (Kanzi) can keep mental tabs on the whereabouts of multiple hidden social partners royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/4GI7G...

generating examples for my fall undergrad Perception students on why they should not use LLMs as study aides...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire. Our computational cognitive model explains why! Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7 News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu 🧵

Out today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

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...

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky