I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share: phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

A first blogpost from the LEVANTE team, introducing our global project perspective. A good intro if you're interested in learning more about cross-cultural developmental data collection using LEVANTE. levante-network.org/global-colla...

I reviewed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a new book with an old argument for why AI will kill us all. To put it mildly, I didn't like it www.newscientist.com/article/2495...

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

thanks for curating and share this database! looks amazing!

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

*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

love this Donna Brook poem

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

Thanks so much @dorsaamir.bsky.social and @chazfirestone.bsky.social, along with @mcxfrank.bsky.social, for your input on this! And ofc @sarahexplains.bsky.social and @parshallison.bsky.social for your editing!

How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we see the world? Wonderful piece in @sciam.bsky.social by @norabradford.bsky.social, ft. an interview with @dorsaamir.bsky.social about our work on the 'cultural byproduct hypothesis'. www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Sad but true. Lessons here though. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New 📰 Demand characteristics are a fundamental methodological concern in research with humans Yet little is known about the magnitude and consistency of these effects In a new paper, I, M. Wyatt, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social take stock of what we’ve learned via meta-analysis doi.org/10.1525/coll...

Our position paper is now out: "Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE): A Global Framework for Measuring Children's Learning Variability Through Collaborative Data Sharing". srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) What is LEVANTE? 🧵

Cogsci and AI: two different approaches as articulated by Josh Tenenbaum #cogsci2025

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.

I’m here at #CogSci2025! And I made some earrings to match my stimuli! If you want to chat about the ✨emergence of compositional structure in iterated reference games✨, come by my poster today at P1-M-125

Good morning #CogSci2025! We're really in our element here and excited to connect with you. Stop by table 4 to say hello! ☕ Tomorrow morning (10-10:30 AM, Salon 8): Join Michael C. Frank, co-editor of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (#OECS), for coffee and conversation.

Come see us at #cogsci2025! Here’s a (revised) list of posters and talks from my lab!

Come say hi tomorrow morning at our OECS coffee! #cogsci2025

We tried very hard to study language and communication during strategic games like prisoner's dilemma. Veronica Boyce did many experiments chasing what could have been an interesting result but in the end wasn't very strong. Now she's written a nice postmortem: osf.io/preprints/ps...

"increasing reports of AI hallucinations making their way into academic papers, court decisions, and White House reports [that] have been caught by humans; One wonders how many haven’t been identified and are being spread across the information ecosystem" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks to @elevenlabs.io for supporting LEVANTE voice generation with their Impact program! #ElevenLabs

Humbled and thank you, @mcxfrank.bsky.social! One dream for Elusive Cures is that its ideas trigger new insights that belong to its readers. I am *so happy* to hear that you not only appreciated it, but its ideas led you to connect dots that I’ve never even thought to think about.

I really enjoyed @nicolecrust.bsky.social's book, Elusive Cures! Here's a short book review: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2025/07/book...

Looking forward to #cogsci2025 next week - here's a list of presentations from my lab!

There is a place outside the house for the sticks. And the rocks. And the really big sticks that are more like logs.

Welcome to the team!!!!

Some big news: I'm leaving Newcastle University and the usual academic path with it. I'll be joining the LEVANTE project (levante-network.org) at Stanford as a research scientist, with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and a fantastic international crew of scientists and developers 1/

Centaur's performance may be largely driven by learning a good model of behavioral auto-regression—independent of the task. An important lesson for cognitive modelers: higher likelihood ≠ better account of behavior. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A truly good as well as great scientist

Obituary for John Flavell, who passed away this spring. He was a wonderful guy. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268

and it has a great lowkey mailing list :) lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/list...

one thing I believe as a journal reviewer is that it's best to avoid referring to the authors at all my job is to review the science, not the people who did it, and I think being really careful to leave the authors out of it makes for better reviewing. reads as less adversarial and more supportive

memo is a new probabilistic programming language for modeling social inferences quickly. Looks like a real advance over previous approaches: fast, python-based, easily integrated into data analysis. Super cool! pypi.org/project/memo... and osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very helpful paper by @mcxfrank.bsky.social on how to evaluate hiring & promotion cases. Especially important to consider in the wake of the pandemic and the current higher ed shitshow that have dramatically slowed publication 👇

Writing tenure/promotion letters this summer and reminded of this excellent paper from @mcxfrank.bsky.social, which informs my approach (no regurgitating CV facts or impact factors!) N-Best evaluation for academic hiring and promotion www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hot take: I like a lot of research on "digital twins" but I think it's kind of a lame name for a cognitive model! I'm sorry I didn't say that in my paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This book is highly recommended! Bonus is that I genuinely enjoyed working through it when it first came out

For me, this was a passion project that has already payed out its dividends. I love that we were able to put everything online -- including early drafts. The positive feedback we received along the way really helped keep the passion alive. Give it a gander! experimentology.io

Amazing resource that I now use myself in teaching graduate methods at UCSD! Highly recommended.

I have a lot of concerns about the Binz et al. Centaur paper, but I'll start this thread with what I like: Matching human behavioral data is critical when modeling human cognition. Trying to match neural data is interesting and possibly informative, but not sufficient for modeling the human mind. 1/

So cool! A free teaching resource for experimental psychology, with open science principles weaved throughout the book. It also directs you to open-source software tools for all the stages of running an experiment.

Earlier and drafts of this online resource have been available for a while. I've been assigning chapters for my methods courses. Students (and I!) find it so clear and helpful.

Looking forward to read this!

I took a lot of inspiration and material from this for my upper div undergrad methods course! It has been an amazing resource! 🙏

I feel extremely grateful to play a small part in creating the experimental methods textbook i wished i’d had in grad school!

I reference this resource *so* frequently, super readable and helpful! highly recommend to anyone who does experiments!