I'm very excited about this work led by @nbalamur.bsky.social Inspired by the classic "Spot the ball ⚽" task, we develop a benchmark for visual social inference. We find that human participants perform much better than vision-language models. Try it here: v0-new-project-9b5vt6k9ugb.vercel.app

It was great to hear from Brian Leahy (brianleahy.net) in the devo lunch at Stanford today!! He presented a beautiful set of studies that suggest that many 4-year-old children have a minimal concept of possibility: they simulate only once and treat the outcome as a fact. 🎱⬅️➡️🤔💭💡

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

🚨 New preprint 🚨 How do people's mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization? We find that people spontaneously construct goal-dependent causal abstractions that compress experience to privilege relevant information. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 🔗 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

The Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford University is recruiting PhD students this cycle! We are a supportive team who happened to wear bluesky appropriate colors for the lab photo (this wasn't planned). 💙 Lab info: cicl.stanford.edu Application details: psychology.stanford.edu/admissions/p...

New preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

🚨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.

Thanks Evan Orticio (orticio.com) for sharing your fascinating work with us on how children and adults form beliefs without direct evidence. In one super cool study, he shows how children become more diligent fact checkers in less reliable environments. 📃 orticio.com/assets/Ortic...

I had a wonderful time visiting UC Irvine to give a talk in the cognitive science colloquium. Thank you @annaleshinskaya.bsky.social for being a fantastic host, and to all the other faculty, students, and postdocs I got to meet during my visit 🙏

"A signaling theory of self-handicapping" 📢New from: @yangxiang.bsky.social @gershbrain.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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...

This is an epic paper! I very much enjoyed chatting with @dyamins.bsky.social about the connections between world models and counterfactual simulation.

My lab at UCLA is hiring 1-2 PhD students this cycle! Join us to work at the intersection of cognitive science and AI applied to pressing societal challenges like climate change. More info about me: rachit-dubey.github.io My lab: ucla-cocopol.github.io Please help repost/spread the word!

*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025

Our department is seeking applicants for an Assistant Professor position with a focus on affective science. Please apply and/or pass this along to anyone who might be interested! facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

How do we predict what others will do next? 🤔 We look for patterns. But what are the limits of this ability? In our new paper at CCN 2025 (@cogcompneuro.bsky.social), we explore the computational constraints of human pattern recognition using the classic game of Rock, Paper, Scissors 🗿📄✂️

🚨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 🧵

Brilliant keynote by @laurennross.bsky.social at #cogsci2025 on cognitive science and its philosophy. Lauren pointed out the myriad ways in which cogsci and philosophy support and benefit one another, using explanation and causal reasoning as case studies. Thank you for a great talk!! 🙏

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting a 2.5-hour tutorial on "Counterfactuals in Minds and Machines" at UAI 2025 in Rio 🇧🇷, prepared together with @autreche.bsky.social and @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social. We've made all materials and references available here: learning.mpi-sws.org/counterfactu...

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

New #cogsci2025 paper! with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social In “Generics Revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children’s books and caregivers’ speech” we revisit the connection between generic use in children’s language input and psychological essentialism.

Excited to be sharing my latest work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social at #CogSci2025! Learning usually occurs when we encounter new data. But we also have the capacity to reflect on our past experiences. What can we learn from simulating past experience? 📃 cicl.stanford.edu/papers/yang2... 1/

"36 Questions That Lead To Love" was the most viewed article in NYT Modern Love. Excited to share new results investigating these and other “deep questions” with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social @judithfan.bsky.social & @rdhawkins.bsky.social Preprint: tinyurl.com/bdfx5smk Code: tinyurl.com/3v6pws4s

Can you spot the ball? Try the task online and see how well you do: v0-new-project-9b5vt6k9ugb.vercel.app And make sure to catch Neha Balamurugan present the work as a poster #cogsci2025 on Thursday: P1-B-8 ⚽ 👀

In "Cause and fault in development" (oral at #cogsci2025) David Rose (davdrose.github.io) Cici Hou and team ask how children’s causal language understanding relates to their judgments of responsibility. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share our new work at #CogSci2025! We explore how people plan deceptive actions, and how detectives try to see through the ruse and infer what really happened based on the traces left behind. 🕵️‍♀️ Paper: osf.io/preprints/osf/vqgz5_v1 Code: github.com/cicl-stanford/recursive_deception 1/

The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #cogsci2025 💪

Our latest on the cognitive science of LLMs! To be presented @CogSci‬2025 🎉 LLMs are increasingly involved in human collaborations. How do LLMs assign responsibility and reward to collaborators? Is it similar to how humans do it? 🤖🧑 📃 gershmanlab.com/pubs/XiangBi... (1/4)

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/...

Make sure to check out our tutorial on "Counterfactuals in Minds and Machines" 👍

Very grateful to be a part of this project, expertly led by @carlotapares.bsky.social !! Make sure to check it out if you're at ICML this year 👍

People receive more blame for unanticipated consequences of their actions if they could have been informed of said consequences but chose not to. We review possible explanations in our new paper. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

What an exciting day for cognitive science with a double feature @nature.com including tiny models (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) and less tiny ones (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Excited to see our Centaur project out in @nature.com. TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.

🎈 Out now: 🎈 "The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination" (by Balaban & me) of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Thank you #SPP2025 for a wonderfully stimulating conference! Coming to SPP is always a good decision 👍

When and why do people choose to self-handicap? @yangxiang.bsky.social explains it at #SPP2025 More here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

How do you get to know someone? @erikbrockbank.bsky.social shares his insights at #SPP2025. More here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

A key takeaway from 20+ years of computational RL is: model-free=automatic, model-based=deliberate. My new paper w/ @benedek.bsky.social challenges this view, suggesting that MB algos are more ubiquitous, & automatic processing more sophisticated, than currently thought: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social) revisits rationality: From doing the right thing to doing the right thinking. #SPP2025

The #spp2025 preconference on possibilities kicks off!

Last minute #spp2025 talk prep going well! 🤦

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

Thank you Shalini Gautam for sharing your work with us on how children's counterfactual reasoning develops! When children make social judgments, they care not only about what a person did, but also about what they could have done. 📃 srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....