How do people flexibly integrate visual & textual information to draw mental inferences about agents we've never met? In a new paper led by @lanceying.bsky.social, we introduce a cognitive model that achieves this by synthesizing rational agent models on-the-fly -- presented at #EMNLP2025!

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.

Interested in doing a PhD at the intersection of human and machine cognition? ✨ I'm recruiting students for Fall 2026! ✨ Topics of interest include pragmatics, metacognition, reasoning, & interpretability (in humans and AI). Check out JHU's mentoring program (due 11/15) for help with your SoP 👇

Excited to share that my lab will be accepting applications for our very first PhD student to start in Fall 2026! Interested applicants can learn more about the lab here: wordpress.lehigh.edu/littlelearne... And Lehigh’s graduate program here: psychology.cas.lehigh.edu/graduate

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

“Okay great I opened the city gates like you suggested. And yeah, if you could generate a list of fun things to do with a giant wooden horse that would be super.”

Do you use AI for clinically relevant neuroscience problems? We have a faculty search at Yale that might be for you! Info about CBMH: medicine.yale.edu/brain-mind-h... Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/157186. We start reviewing apps in November!

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘

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...

We have an open-rank position in quantitative psychology at Yale! Please apply if this describes you: apply.interfolio.com/171903

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️! We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺 🔗 minds-making.github.io June – July 2024, free & open to the public (all career stages, all disciplines)

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/...

Now out in JPSP ‼️ "Inference from social evaluation" with Zach Davis, Kelsey Allen, @maxkw.bsky.social, and @julianje.bsky.social 📃 (paper): psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 📜 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...

My new piece in @theguardian.com Techno-optimism is human pessimism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele, @alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here: www.amacad.org/daedalus

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us! careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc... and careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

🚨 Finally out! My new @annualreviews.bsky.social in Psychology paper: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵

New paper in Open Mind! What does it mean to help? What is the goal of a helping action? We wanted to probe infants' & preschoolers' helping concept - specifically, whether they think helpers reduce others' action costs. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to [email protected] by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

🔊 New paper just accepted in JPSP 🥳 In "Inference from social evaluation", we explore how people use social evaluations, such as judgments of blame or praise, to figure out what happened. 📜 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor... 1/6

I'm hoping to hire a postdoc this year to join our growing lab at Yale! Looking for someone interested in EMA/digital phenotyping, formal theories, complex systems, & computational psychiatry. If this sounds like you, please reach out! Official ad coming soon.

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Six more days to submit a grad application to the Harvard Psychology Department! I'm reading applications this year. My lab studies how people think about social relationships, usually with babies and children!

If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS! We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15

Moral psychology postdoc opportunity at the University of Toronto! Please repost, and pass on to anyone you think might be interested.

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thrilled that this is now out in Cognition! Really cool (and fun!) project on hierarchical planning led by the amazing @cgcorrea.bsky.social 🎉

Excited to release what we’ve been working on at Amaranth Foundation, our latest whitepaper, NeuroAI for AI safety! A detailed, ambitious roadmap for how neuroscience research can help build safer AI systems while accelerating both virtual neuroscience and neurotech. 1/N

Humans use language to express thoughts primarily built around the basic agent-patient causal structure *who does what to whom* Is this a structure of language or a structure of thought? Does it exist outside language? A new wave of exciting papers speak to this question. A 🧵👇

Overparenting is on the rise and hurts children’s motivation starting in early childhood. How can we help parents step back? Our new paper in Child Dev shows that pointing out learning opportunities reduces overparenting. srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New Paper is out with @romanfeiman.bsky.social and Athulya Aravind in @psychscience.bsky.social We argue that children are not biased to assume that words are mutually exclusive. We speculate that previous experiments find mutual exclusivity because they present (grammatically) biased words

This is neat arxiv.org/abs/2402.17930

Society for Philosophy and Psychology 2025 (June 19-21, 2025 at Cornell) is going to be 🔥🔥🔥 and the submission portal is now live! Submit abstracts of 750 words+1 figure by Jan 24, 2025 at 11:59pm EST easychair.org/my/conferenc....

The Department of Psychology at University of Wisconsin–Madison is searching for an assistant professor in the area of computational approaches to language (broadly construed). Please share widely! jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Me too!

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...

Our paper with Joan Ongchoco, Isaac Davis, and Laurie Paul is out today! We use computational modeling to understand/formalize the notion of epistemic transformative experience direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Dream Science 2.0 — AKA New Strategies for the Cognitive Science of Dreaming - Online ahead of print in Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2024 doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.004. by Remington Mallett, Karen R Konkoly, Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr, and Ken A Paller

I’ll be considering applications for a PhD student to start in Fall 2025! I’ve been having a blast starting up the Exploration, Learning, and Mind Lab at the University of New Hampshire this fall, and I’m excited to grow our lab community. App review begins 1/15. Learn more: liquinlab.github.io

Okay the people requested one so here is an attempt at a Computational Cognitive Science starter pack -- with apologies to everyone I've missed! LMK if there's anyone I should add! go.bsky.app/KDTg6pv

When you face a decision, you usually have so many options that you can’t possibly consider them all. So how do people determine which options to consider? Our new paper with Joan Ongchoco and @julianje.bsky.social

Our paper "Relational visual representations underlie human social interaction recognition" led by @manasimalik.bsky.social is now out in Nature Communications www.nature.com/articles/s41...