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.

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has written another tour de force, showing how efficient coding reshapes numerosity representations in parietal cortex.

Baccarelli was paid $700/hour for his work on a case against Tylenol. I will charge $0/hour to tell courts, FDA, and everyone else that correlations can arise from latent variables in the absence of a direct causal relationship. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

And today in the @nytimes.com... I suggest that papers stop "suggesting a link" so that reporters stop suggesting that papers are suggesting to readers that there might be a causal relationship. They could alternatively suggest that correlations are sometimes caused by latent variables.

Waiting for the news report that latent variables exist and can explain correlations between two other variables.

Timely reminder that 'associative' language leads lay people to confuse correlation and causation, as @tomerullman.bsky.social and I showed a few years ago. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... Snapshot from the BBC: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Scientists have plenty of math envy, but at least we don't have to deal with discovering infinitely many counterexamples to our conjectures.

I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful. When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

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-...

Excited to share a new preprint based on my work this past year: **TreeIRL** is a novel planner that combines classical search with learning-based methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance in simulation and in **real-world autonomous driving**! 🚘 🤖 🚀

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

Someone in my lab built a dungeon for continuous training of planaria, with an imprint of Beatrice Gelber on the door (I know, she didn’t actually work with planaria but she’s still our patron saint). 😍

out now in Open Mind: "People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior" by Bigelow & me Paper: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... OSF: osf.io/yzbrq/?view_...

Apparently US conservatives are still critiquing the "shrimp treadmill" study as an example of wasteful academic research. I actually can't think of any better metaphor for academia than "shrimp treadmill". I feel seen! www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk94...

Exciting to see more theoretical work on these fundamental questions!

I'm excited to share that my new postdoctoral position is going so well that I submitted a new paper at the end of my first week! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A thread below

Interested in applying to graduate programs or research positions in psychology? Want more information and feedback on your submission materials? Then Harvard’s Prospective Ph.D. & RA Event in Psychology (PPREP) Is for you!! psychology.fas.harvard.edu/pprep More info in the link!! Please retweet!

I had an illuminating interaction with a colleague who said that they try to find time to do a few paper reviews per year. It made me realize that different researchers have widely varying expectations about reviewing, probably because there are no public norms.

We have been working on a project where we try to "break" Weber's law, but to our surprise the law itself is pretty flimsy under standard conditions. I'm curious to hear any suggestions for a robust demonstration (specifically, where the just noticeable difference is proportional to magnitude).

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

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I just finished reading this excellent paper, highly recommended.

Alas, only Oxford professors can pull off this kind of chastisement for missing class.

RIP foreign PhD students in the US. So sad and self-defeating. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

I wrote about the tragic death of Adam Raine and the venal negligence of "AI Safety." www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

My wife almost spit out her tea laughing while I read this to her.

I just read this amazing paper. Many provocative findings here.

The heartbreaking thing about this is that there’s already a proven way to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine that produces unforeseeable results that include fantastically profitable ideas (and some life-saving ones) and generally benefit society and this machine is called a university