a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

This is really nice work. I especially like the dissociation between stimulus probability and reward effects on dopamine.

That's a new one... I guess now that James Watson is dead, Rosalind Franklin can finally become active in science again?

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

Depiction of a professor using his research time to pore through last year's student handbook in order to prove to an undergrad who received an A- that the grading guidelines are not new.

Goal selection through the lens of subjective functions: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948 I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.

Academics criticizing OA fee cap: www.science.org/content/arti... I understand the equity concerns, but I'm surprised that people have so little faith in market forces. If there's no money to pay the fees, the fees will come down.

I've been trying to think through my misgivings about machine psychology. I think it's reasonable to argue that cognitive science should try to understand all cognitive systems, including machines. And it would be useful to know the biases of agents we are interacting with or delegating work to.

Our🥶COOLNESS paper to date is finally published! Ice cold and lithium dramatically delay forgetting (extend memory) in C. elegans. Why? read all about it! 👇 rdcu.be/eVhn2

Is there any evidence for anti-Hebbian plasticity during sleep? This is an old hypothesis that continues to get cited (and to appear in some computational models), yet I haven't been able to find any study that shows this. There's ample evidence of synaptic downscaling, but that's different.

I would like to juxtapose this with this. bsky.app/profile/mitp...

The Press and @openmindjournal.bsky.social are pleased to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). Learn how your institution can support this initiative to continue providing the latest #cogsci research—free of charge—here: bit.ly/452nMma

Alright scientists! It's that time again! Time to sign up for Skype a Scientist's spring semester. Want to get matched with a classroom in 2026? Sign up now 🥰 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Harvard is under intense budgetary pressure, yet there are many people at the university receiving enormous compensation packages: www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/05/top-... I assume these numbers haven't changed, otherwise Harvard presumably would have announced it.

This is so clever: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Cost of 1 spike: 10^8 ATP (~3-7 bits) Cost of adding 1 nucleotide to a string: 1 ATP (2 bits) Cost of releasing 1 typical extracellular vesicle (exosome ~100nm): ~10-100 ATP Conjecture: it's more energy-efficent (in bits/ATP) to communicate between neurons with RNA packaged in exosomes

Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

"I dived deep in the ocean of astronomical theories, true and false, and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect." Quoted in The Golden Road, by William Dalrymple

The Harvard Gazette has a nice story on my student @yangxiang.bsky.social and her work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Congress is currently considering a piece of legislation that would effectively sever all scientific ties between the US and China. Unbelievable. You can read the AAU response here: www.aau.edu/key-issues/a...

Descartes thought the mind controls the body, but popular science in the 21st century has fliipped this on its head: an inverted homunculus in the brain controls the mind. Our mental states are hydraulic tubes through which hemodynamic spirits flow, animated by the soul residing in neural tissue.

I've worked with Momchil for years and can't recommend his lab enough!

John J. Vastola, Samuel J. Gershman, Kanaka Rajan: A Variational Manifold Embedding Framework for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22128 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22128 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.22128

The best brain-machine interface remains the mouth. Evolution spent 4B years of evolution on R&D developing the device, so I guess it's not that surprising. Yet it still rarely appears as a baseline in evaluations of new devices.

In his Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration, the composer Hector Berlioz envisioned an ideal orchestra that included 30 grand pianos, 30 harps, 360 singers, 120 violins!! As Gertrude Stein said, "If it can be done, why do it?" www.hberlioz.com/Scores/Berli...

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

Storing long-lived memories via molecular error correction: a minimal mathematical model of Crick's memory switch https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.13.688304v1

If funders wanted to make a huge positive impact on scientific practice, they would mandate that all publications appear first as registered reports, that APCs are only paid for RRs, and that grant applications only require preliminary data for RR sample size determination / power analysis.

Don’t count US science out just yet. The largest economy on the planet will rebound in a very big way. It’s already correcting….. episteme.com

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

New #J2C Certification: Synthesizing world models for bilevel planning Zergham Ahmed, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chris Bates, Samuel J. Gershman https://openreview.net/forum?id=m9V4JHLJrD #planning #reinforcement #games

Kazuki Irie has a forthcoming paper in NeurIPS that studies the following idea: Linear attention has cheap, unbounded memory but low precision, whereas softmax attention has expensive, bounded memory but high precision. These can be combined to build better transformers. arxiv.org/abs/2506.00744

John J. Vastola, Samuel J. Gershman, Kanaka Rajan: Gradient Descent as Loss Landscape Navigation: a Normative Framework for Deriving Learning Rules https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26997 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26997 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.26997

“They’re earning huge profit margins because we’ve all kind of acquiesced to a system in which we provide free services to corporations. Part of the open access movement is an attempt to break that,” Gershman said. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Gonna wear this to the next faculty meeting to see if they think I’m Steve Pinker.

What's with machine learning researchers always reporting standard deviation instead of standard error? My understanding is that the error bars are typically used to back up inferential claims about significant differences between sample means (although statistical tests are rare, another problem).

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers: @openmindjournal.bsky.social The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

Applying to do a postdoc or PhD in theoretical ML or neuroscience this year? Consider joining my group (starting next Fall) at UT Austin! POD Postdoc: oden.utexas.edu/programs-and... CSEM PhD: oden.utexas.edu/academics/pr...

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/

Is there any evidence that the brain uses something like a target network in deep reinforcement learning (i.e., a slowly updating copy of the "online" network used to control the policy)?

Everything would be much simpler/cheaper/efficient if scientists could apply for funding by just sending their CV to the funder. If the funder likes what's on the CV, they send money. Instead of progress reports, the scientist just sends an updated CV, and the funder can decide whether to give more.

When I was an undergrad, I saw a talk by Oliver Sacks about music. During the Q&A, someone asked Sacks if he thought science would reveal the deepest mysteries of art. Sacks (a rare humanist among scientists) said that he doubted it, at which Eric Kandel (the host) leaped up and grabbed the mic.

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

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

Everyone knows that temporal contiguity is important for associative learning. As the interval between a cue (e.g., a light) and an outcome (e.g., shock) gets longer, the conditioned response (e.g., freezing to the tone) is acquired less quickly.

Interested in understanding how young humans think about social relationships? I am reading PhD applications this year! **Please note**, that Harvard now requires the GRE. More information here: www.ashleyjthomas.com/workwithme

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

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

I was part of an interesting panel discussion yesterday at an ARC event. Maybe everybody knows this already, but I was quite surprised by how "general" intelligence was conceptualized in relation to human intelligence and the ARC benchmarks.