Hossein was supposed to come to my lab as a grad student but couldn’t because of the travel ban. I had a blast writing this paper with him, but it was bittersweet knowing he should have been in person with us. ❤️ check out 🧵below. part of a special issue on kissing led by Deb Lieberman.

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories. In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing March 26-28, 2026 hsp2026.org MIT, Cambridge MA, USA. email: [email protected] Special session: Language and thought in minds and machines Submission deadline: December 12 2025 (Real deadline; no extension)

(1)💡NEW PUBLICATION💡 Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures Work with Curtis Chen and Ted Gibson Link to paper: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi... In memory of Curtis Chen.

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New paper announcement! journals.lww.com/greenjournal... The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology is an unusual place for me to publish… Let me tell you the story of this paper.

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle! We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate. It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations. Spread the words!

If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵 1/n

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire. Our computational cognitive model explains why! Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7 News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu 🧵

Super excited to have the #InfoCog workshop this year at #CogSci2025! Join us in SF for an exciting lineup of speakers and panelists, and check out the workshop's website for more info and detailed scheduled sites.google.com/view/infocog...

As always, CogSci has a fantastic lineup of workshops this year. An embarrassment of riches! Still deciding which to pick? If you are interested in building computational models of social cognition, I hope you consider joining @maxkw.bsky.social, @dae.bsky.social, and me for a crash course on memo!

So excited our paper is now out in ‪@cognitionjournal.bsky.social‬! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions

🎤 "Your #CogSci presentation was quite good this year." How flattered or offended will you be? The answer may depend on whether you speak British or American English 🇺🇸🇬🇧. Our new #CogSci2025 paper reveals systematic differences in how different cultures interpret the same words.

If you’ll be at #CogSci2025, consider (or at least consider considering) attending our @cogscisociety.bsky.social workshop on meta reasoning 🤔🤨🧐 We’ll be discussing problem selection through various lenses represented by a great lineup of speakers!

Thrilled to announce our new publication titled 'Decoding predicted future states from the brain's physics engine' with @emiecz.bsky.social, Cyn X. Fang, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/full/10.... (1/n)

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

The first big talk I have given since starting my lab in 2023! 🧠 👶 💻📊Thank you @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social for the invitation and recording. Feedback welcome!

Excited to share our new paper "Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity" direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... @rplevy.bsky.social And looking forward to speaking about this line of work tomorrow at @nyudatascience.bsky.social!

We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? 🧵👇 ⭐️ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, @neilbramley.bsky.social, Chris Lucas, @natvelali.bsky.social & @cocoscilab.bsky.social

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu). Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993). Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025. Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

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

(1/9) Excited to share my recent work on "Alignment reduces LM's conceptual diversity" with @tomerullman.bsky.social and @jennhu.bsky.social, to appear at #NAACL2025! 🐟 We want models that match our values...but could this hurt their diversity of thought? Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2411.04427

🚨 Now accepting commentary proposals!! 🚨Thrilled to share that our paper --- "Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition" --- was accepted for publication at Behavioral and Brain Sciences and is open for commentary!

I am hiring a lab manager to start ~ July 1st. sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

Very excited to share this preprint! The project started with me rambling to Sam how I believe people keep uncertainty in mind and explore internally, and ended up with a halloween-themed experiment and a cool model :) It is a very rewarding experience and I have learned so much from Sam and Fred!

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

new paper out with @ashleycleung.bsky.social and dan yurovsky in child development! 📄🔓: doi.org/10.1111/cdev... brief 🧵 below on our findings!

🧵 New meta-analysis on sources of infant looking in Nature Hum Behaviour. Led by Linette Kunin, w Sabrina Piccolo & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (paywall) tinyurl.com/33yfwcaa (access to pdf).

Our paper, "A hierarchical Bayesian model of adaptive teaching," is now out in Cognitive Science @cogscisociety.bsky.social. With co-authors Andrew Palacci @natvelali.bsky.social @rdhawkins.bsky.social @gershbrain.bsky.social 🔓📄 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#Workshop at #CogSci2024 COGGRAPH: building bridges between Cognitive Science and Computer Graphics Organisers: Kartik Chandra, Anne Harrington, Katherine Collins, Christopher Kymn, Kushin Mukherjee, Sean P. Anderson, Arnav Verma, and Judith Fan Learn more at coggraph.github.io

People are really good at creating conventions - new ways of talking - during dialogues. But what happens in larger groups? And what about when people can only respond using 😁?! New paper by Veronica Boyce, Robert Hawkins, Noah Goodman, and me, now out: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint. Feedback welcome! Example yesterday, in the wild. Me: "If I do a nice thing for my friend, we both expect they will later do a nice thing for me, but if I do a nice thing for you, then we both expect that I will keep doing that nice thing for you. Why?" Reply: "Cuz you're my Mum!"

I'm excited to share this new preprint with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social: We find that knowing about an existing social relationship can drastically change people’s expectations and evaluations of generosity. (1/11) 📄 osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you study infant looking, check this out: "An Asynchronous, Hands-Off Workflow for Looking Time Experiments With Infants" psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... First Author: Gal Raz. Co-Authors: Sabrina Piccolo, Janine Medrano, Shari Liu, Kirsten Lydic, Catherine Mei, Victoria Nguyen, and Shari Liu

now officially out in Cognitive Science! "Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy" (by Bass, Espinoza, Bonawitz @ebonawitz.bsky.social , and me) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New preprint with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social and Chris Bourg, where we find equal levels of and very high support for open science across an opt-in survey (27% response rate) and a representative sample (95% response rate). osf.io/preprints/os...

First bsky post and new paper alert! 🚨 Late to sharing this, but here's a short review of a decade of work with Gergely Csibra on how infants represent giving, and why it matters (for event cognition and the origins of the relational mind). Thread below! 🧵👇 http://t.ly/S6cLw (1/15)

Very excited to be at CDS with my lab! Come check out our work!! @brandonmwoo.bsky.social @ashleycleung.bsky.social and blueskyless others!

Our fearless inaugural lab manager @bellafascendini.bsky.social is going to grad school (🥳🎉), so the CoLab is hiring a lab manager!! Please share with anyone who wants to deepen their experience in cog sci before grad school. Review starts on 3/15! research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/18575/r...

How do people interpret punitive events (differently) and what do they learn from it? Excited to present our work (with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social) at #SPSP2024 and moral psychology preconference (in collaboration with Josh Tenenbaum) @spspnews.bsky.social

#PsychSciSky #DevSci #CogSci 🪄😮 🧐 🧠 New paper in Img Neuro w @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Kirsten Lydic and Jerry Mei: Using the tools of cog neuro (fMRI) to study dimensions of novelty in violation-of-expectation (VOE) studies from infant cognition. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00068 (1/9)

go.ted.com/shariliu My talk 'How Babies Think About Danger' is available on the TED website, and today it is featured on the homepage. (Original talk from Dec 22, TEDxMIT.) In it I talk about babies, danger, and how a dangerous situation changed developmental psychology for the better.

First post and big news - I am starting as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Georgia Tech in Jan 2024! www.language-intelligence-thought.net

I am reading PhD applications this year, with a special interest in students who would like to work on the topic of perceived danger. But open to all applicants who share some of my interests. Visit www.liulaboratory.org to see papers, lab values, and tips for application writing.