Trump Doctrine, ladies and gentlemen.

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

📣📣📣 Applications for the 2026 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!! Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply! More info: disi.org

@ucsandiego.bsky.social once again leading the way on high-quality teaching faculty positions. We should all follow!

excited to share some recent work! neural networks trained on multi-view sensory data are the first to match human-level 3D shape perception we predict human accuracy, error patterns, and reaction time—all zero-shot, no training on experimental data arxiv.org/abs/2602.17650 1/🧠

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

Fabulous lineup and a critically important topic!

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

I have no way of knowing if this is a fair assessment, but it sure does seem to track..

@mehr.nz as a non-musician appreciator of music, I often have the thought that cognitive scientists should be more astonished of how insanely good we (humans) are at making music. But maybe b/c lots of ppl have some musical literacy, the sentiment is "well duh." And I want to scream no, seriously!

At what point do the stochastic parroters admit that maybe (just maybe) they were wrong? arxiv.org/abs/2601.183...

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below

Groundhog Day Meaning xkcd.com/3202/

Ooo

Last night, GOP Senator Rand Paul went on national TV to flatly reject DHS's lies about the Pretti execution: "My advice to [DHS], if they're watching: If you come into [our hearing] and try to justify that [Pretti] was assaulting a police officer, that cannot be acceptable."

👏 www.nature.com/articles/d41.... (you may say BUT AI can't do ___! Sure! Because intelligence isn't all that matters!)

Can someone enlighten me - how are there 100s of thousands of agents on #moltbook already? Are people directing them to the site and asking them to read the posts and opine? If not (or not only) what is happening?

How does that saying go...? If your mind is too open, your brain might fall out?

New paper out in Psych bull & review! With @glupyan.bsky.social It’s a big-picture review on cross-domain mapping: how people connect things across senses and concepts, and why (weak) synesthesia and metaphor might all be part of the same story. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

I would've thought I'd hear about this first from my employer than from the NYT...

The federal government is executing American citizens in the middle of the street for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech. This is tyranny. No free people can accept this kind of government. We need to bring an end to the Trump regime.

Huge congratulations to Matthew Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social, recipient of the 2026 Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building! This honor will be celebrated at #CogSci2026 with a dedicated symposium. Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/ to learn more

Trump is ranting and hallucinating now, before a world audience, on live TV. While our decades-long allies talk about how to protect themselves. Anyone who sounded the way he does, RIGHT NOW, would be moved from "main" part of assisted living facility to the memory unit. Hey GOP: just listen.

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432 I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

🚨 NEW VIDEO 👇🏽This puts an end to all the lies. Horrific. They were having a calm exchange seconds before he murdered Renee Good, and she was barely moving and clearly avoiding him. Stop the lies.

What we are all seeing, and for those who chose not to view but are reading the details of, is the murder of a US civilian in broad daylight by armed forces of the US government, endowed with the powers this administration has allowed them to have. State’s rights only matter if we enforce them.

Just stumbled on something I wrote back in 2016 that I totally forgot about -- a commentary on a special issue of PB&R on concepts. I think it holds up pretty well! featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/symbodiment-...

I can’t fully articulate the way my stomach dropped when I saw this headline. Please know the evidence has not changed. The people in charge have changed, and they did not consult any relevant experts or the public. “This new policy has not been vetted with pediatricians, the public, or the ACIP”

What can cognitive science learn from AI? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-cogni... I outline how AI has found that scale and richness of learning experiences fundamentally change learning & generalization — and how I believe we should rethink cognitive experiments & theories in response.

Just finished @blaiseaguera.bsky.social 's Who are We Now. Whatever your priors, you'll be moved. hatandbeard.com/products/who...

Who stands in the desert all smashed and alone? OZ-Y MAN-DIAS Vast trunkless legs sunk in sands level and lone OZ-Y MAN-DIAS If King-of-Kings hubris be something you care OZ-Y MAN-DIAS Just look on his Works all ye Mighty: despair OZ-Y MAN-DIAS

this guy represents all of humanity right now

yeah I mean it’s genuinely sad that the “reasonable old school” Republican (who Dems eagerly and unanimously voted to confirm) is out here doing pressers blatantly geeked out coke and it’s not subtle

I hope you’re having a better day than me. I just learned my own cognition is intractable…

There are only two reasonable reactions to the invention of a tool that lets you build arbitrary mathematical bridges between language and other mediums: "Neat!" and "Uh oh..."

There's a very smart book by our own Chris Knight which unravels the puzzles and paradoxes of Chomsky's politics and science. Quite differently from his usual critics, Chris was coming from the LEFT of Chomsky. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decodin...

Bookmark this post as a 12/2025 snapshot of what's wrong with the AI discourse on this site. @edouardmachery.bsky.social

This is so important. One way to have more realizations like this is to time travel. Another is to just travel travel. And also talk to people from different places. Oh, and to have lots of immigrants in your society.

Want to have holiday lunches with our social faculty for years to come? That chair could be yours! Tatum Jolink will also be joining the department in the fall of '26. Check out our job posting: shorturl.at/4Vc1T @spspnews.bsky.social @affectscience.bsky.social

What is this timeline?! www.wired.com/story/people...

My commentary on @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social excellent forthcoming BBS paper "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models". arxiv.org/abs/2512.12447 Have a read. It's 🌶️

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We're hiring at the Associate Professor level in Social Psychology! Join us in our vibrant and wonderful department and area. Contact Markus Brauer, search committee chair, for details ([email protected]). Job ad here: shorturl.at/nnvv8

Too many people see this as a personal activism platform and not a microblogging website where you get to talk about the stuff you like and your lunch as well. Treating it as a misery pipeline just makes you miserable to be around. Go post a photo of your pet and a song you wanna talk about.

Oof!

"It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing....It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." Tom Stoppard, on complexity theory, in Arcadia. One of the world's best playwrights. RIP. www.bbc.com/news/article...

🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI. We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods. paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu #VisionScience #NeuroSkyence