This study was an amazing collaborative experience. I'm really really grateful to all the wonderful people who contributed and made this happen. It's the closest I have ever come to finding something like a "universal" in human cognition.

Very excited that this paper is out! www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

Great apes may use playful teasing to learn about their social relationships. In a new paper, Erica Cartmill & I propose a bond-testing hypothesis for ape teasing. Out today in Phil Trans Biology: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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.

With most psychedelic drugs, you never know what you're going to get. But this mysterious mushroom from China - without fail - causes users to hallucinate tiny people: crawling up walls, popping out from under furniture and marching under doors. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @jaeminhwang.bsky.social, David Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social), and @jessicas.bsky.social! Most studies of infants’ fairness expectations focus on resource distribution, but in everyday life, we engage in many different kinds of resource exchanges.

New paper with Marina Bedny out in eLife (elifesciences.org/articles/101...). Main takeaway: Different kinds of causal knowledge are supported by different semantic brain networks - consistent with the "intuitive theories" framework from developmental psychology. 1/

Extremely stoked to be at #bcccd26 - kicking off with a workshop on "the format of structure of thought in the developing mind"

So excited to share this new paper, out in JEP:G with the incredible @jamieamemiya.bsky.social, Gail Heyman, and @carenwalker.bsky.social! We tested how children and adults reason about disparate impact policies: formally neutral laws or rules that are indirectly discriminatory. (1/7)

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.

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/11

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

1/ Romantic kissing 👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨 is common across cultures—but NOT universal. Of note, societies with little contact seem to “reinvent” it. We argue this is b/c kissing sits in a cultural basin of attraction carved by our early‑emerging understanding of intimacy. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out our new paper on the #development of #gaze-following in wild #chimpanzees, led by @kris-sabbi.bsky.social, @zeppypearl.bsky.social, & Isabelle Monroe! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

now out in Decision! 🎉 awspntest.apa.org/manuscript/2...

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...