out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

met up with this guy (we’re neighbors) for champagne! congrats @noamchompers.bsky.social

the best news!! 🤩

well, i suppose i can now share a spot of good news. i've accepted a permanent position at australian catholic university. i'll be moving to sydney in january. i'm just delighted

people making some wild claims on the bird website

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Noam and Noam-in-training watching the tall Lord of the Rings guy score goals

no longer true 😢

still true

just when you think you’ve made it, you book a train ticket that allows for academic titles and realize you can always have more doctorates

this is still true btw

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

repost now while you still can

here’s a list of countries that have played one or more knockout games but have never conceded a goal in any of them: canada

only nation in world cup history that has won 100% of its knockout games

if the tournament stops now do we win

nobody will remember: - papers you published - grant dollars you raised - citations you received people will remember - conference parties you hosted @socphilpsych.bsky.social #SPP2026

Packed house for the “Nature/Nurture” panel at @socphilpsych.bsky.social! #SPP2026

@talboger.bsky.social’s poster-coaster experience lands in Baltimore this afternoon! Come see him present his work at the @socphilpsych.bsky.social at this evening’s poster session, then grab a coaster as a souvenir. Available while supplies last!

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵

i like wemby vs chet because it looks like waluigi had his own waluigi in mario party

What a cool result!

I always admire when folks publish their papers accompanied by a supplementary-style page on their website - such a high-value and potentially more accessible #openscience way to directly communicate research (plus I imagine it improves peer-review, is there data on that somewhere?)

"for example, participants who find simple shapes aesthetically pleasing also find simple melodies pleasing" the science is clear: you are not not qualified for a SRE team if you don't enjoy hyperpop, breakcore, djent, etc.

Excited to have been wrong about this! A few years ago, Tal told me he was working on intuitions about complexity. I knee-jerkily said, “but surely that’s not a natural kind! Why think that people have intuitions about complexity across domains?” Good thing this is the last time I’ll ever be wrong!

Super excited about this paper by the amazing @talboger.bsky.social, now in press @ @nathumbehav.nature.com! Before you ask: No, it has no corresponding lab merch (cf www.perceptionresearch.org/anagrams/mer...). But yes, it has deep questions, creative experiments, and foundational implications!

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The program for the 52nd meeting of the SPP is now available ✨ Taking place at Johns Hopkins University, June 17-20:

Come join us at #phiVis #VSS2026!

in ONE HOUR we close out #VSS2026 with the 6th iteration of #phiVis! Ft. talks and commentaries by @matthiasmichel.bsky.social Wilma Bainbridge, Will Davies, @vivianpaulun.bsky.social, Frédérique de Vignemont, and Bill Warren! 1pm-3pm in the Banyan/Citrus Room

How opaque is our own visual processing to us? Our final lab presentation at #VSS2026 is by Noa Perlmutter, whose talk (w/ @ianbphillips.bsky.social) reports a surprising degree of awareness of our own visual biases. 11:30am in Talk Room 2!

how fat free is the gelato? wrong answers only #vss2026

at last, I have assembled all 4 of the Boger Coasters. The power of exactly matched low-level features is MINE

Here's an airplane. And here's a duck. But wait — they're the very same image, just rotated! Right now in the Banyan Breezeway, @talboger.bsky.social shows how these and other 'visual anagrams' can be used to study the perception of animacy. (This is also your chance to grab your lab merch) #VSS2026

Is the person in this video stepping over a real box? Or are they only pretending one is there and performing a convincing pantomime? At 6pm today in Talk Room 2, Sholei Croom presents their latest work on naive intuitions about perception and action! #VSS2026

Once upon a time, representational momentum seemed to be about motion. Then Alon Hafri + @jorge-morales.bsky.social + others extended it to other continuous visual properties. Can we go even further? At 2:45pm in the Banyan Breezeway, @talboger.bsky.social reports repmo for written phrases! #VSS2026

Excited for the lab's presentations at #VSS2026!

Lana in action! #VSS2026

How well-calibrated are we to the difficulty of the (mental) actions we are about to take? *Right now* in the Banyan Breezeway, undergraduate Lana Milman explores the perception of "mental affordances", using countability as a case study! #VSS2026

not saying we have the best lab but…we have the best lab 🤩❤️ #vss2026

Free wine (and free philosophy) at the #phiVis opening reception table! Stop by :) #vss2026

This project is so interesting, both for thinking about the political dimensions of social cognition, and for thinking about the architecture of basic level categorization in general

Rui Zhe in action! @ruizhegoh.bsky.social #vss2026

What categories come to mind for these people? All kinds of answers would do. But at #vss2026, @ruizhegoh.bsky.social (w/ Jiayi Li & @ianbphillips.bsky.social) report an androcentric bias in image classification—Jolie is called a "woman" more than DiCaprio is called a "man". 345pm, Banyan Breezeway!

Vision Science's Christmas is almost here! Our lab will present work —including collaborations with the one and only @meganakpeters.bsky.social — on mental imagery & vividness, LLMs, advanced decoding of reality monitoring signals in fMRI, pupillometry of fake light & visual discomfort! #vss2026

It's #VSS2026! SO excited about the projects we've brought with us this year, and of course #phiVis to close things out. Come say hi, and don't forget to grab your lab 'merch' 👀 perception.jhu.edu/vss/

Heading to #vss2026? Check out the presentations from our lab @vssmtg.bsky.social