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

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our paper on the logic of guesses is now out! We provide a new information-theoretic perspective on many phenomena (old and new) in judgment under uncertainty. 🧵

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

I wrote a short blog post about our experimental work on the logic of guesses: xphi.net/2025/06/03/e...

"Rethinking Ostensive Communication in an Evolutionary, Comparative, and Developmental Perspective" now published in Psychological Review psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

unions: they get the job done

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨 We're looking for a postdoc to work on EEG and fNIRS projects with 3-18-month-old infants, looking at whether/how/when infants represent affordances: careers.ceu.edu/job-invite/8... Part of the @simonsfoundation.org SCENE project: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

"How infants learn and explore: From behavior to computations" 👶⚙️ This review outlines my take on early development, mostly driven by frustration that infancy research focuses on what infants can do, not how. Still a Preprint! Missing-literature suggestions welcome :) osf.io/preprints/ps...

oh wow wow wow. Wow. It's officially out, after many years: "Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning" authors.elsevier.com/c/1k~vV_Ebvv... Read on for a brief summary, but I encourage you to read the thing itself.

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science: How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Bonobo societies are famous for being “female dominant.” But females are weaker than males, so how can this be? Study by Barbara Fruth and Martin Surbeck on wild bonobos explains how. Hint: it has to do with female solidarity. Paper ▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s42... www.ab.mpg.de/673281/news_...

Out today! @jephpp.bsky.social

3. The authors asked crows to distinguish the odd-shape-out from a set of options. Especially for the toughest challenges, like the one I led with, I found this task quite difficult, especially before practicing a bit. Maybe that's no surprise. Baboons can't do it either. Crows can.

By the way, the Co-Collectors iPad game that we developed for this project is freely available to use: cdc.ceu.edu/cocollectors It is modular & can be flexibly configured, and I think there are many more cool research questions it could be used for. More info: www.psycharchives.org/en/item/4b0f...

Do kids prefer to play with helpers? Our paper on children's trait attribution and partner choice is out! doi.org/10.1111/cdev... We wanted to know if kids, after observing other agents' behaviors, spontaneously (!) interpret them in terms of traits and choose cooperation partners accordingly. 🧵...