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.

Accepted at EACL - excited about Morocco!

This paper, written by two friends, was accepted at EACL!

Not much for resolutions but I really wanna say "No" more this year. NO!

Does our "semantic space" get stuck in the past as we age? New work by @ellscain.bsky.social uses historical embeddings + behavioral data to show we are truly lifelong learners. Older adults don't rely on historical meanings—they update them to match current language! 🧠✨ doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

One of my most cherished parts of writing a paper is writing its limitations section — I have no idea why (no psychoanalysis pls)

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Work with Sean!!

Very excited to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rutgers University-Newark in January 2026!

Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3

Work with Leonie!! 🦁

R/ggplot needs more solid shapes -- do ppl agree?

🥳Life Update! I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be starting as assistant professor for Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social in April! I’m deeply grateful to everyone who supported me on this journey. I will be recruiting PhD students with @scadsai.bsky.social, stay tuned for details!

@najoung.bsky.social and I did a side quest during NeurIPS and gave a joint talk at UCSD on our thoughts about the role of NNs/LLMs in Human CogSci! Thanks @alexwarstadt.bsky.social and Rachel Dudley for hosting us! Catch our slides here: docs.google.com/presentation...

Did I spend about an hour making this title slide? Yes. Did it come at the cost of prepping the actual talk? It did. But.. was it all worth it in the end? No, no it wasn't.

📢 Postdoc position 📢 I’m recruiting a postdoc for my lab at NYU! Topics include LM reasoning, creativity, limitations of scaling, AI for science, & more! Apply by Feb 1. (Different from NYU Faculty Fellows, which are also great but less connected to my lab.) Link in 🧵

Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!

New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46

I’ll be at NeurIPS this week spending time at the hallway track (most of conf), the poster session on Wednesday, and later at the workshops! @yuluqin.bsky.social will be presenting our paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.13328) in the Weds. poster session! Say hi, esp. if you’ve applied to do a PhD w/ me!

Excited to have Rachel and Deborah present their work here at UT!

Najoung = one of the most nuanced thinkers in the field! Go get trained by her! 🐨 🤖

🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026! If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply! PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_... Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...

Nice to see the practice of using minimal pairs being formalized!

if you’ve had Szechuan peppercorns do you experience them more as a) tingly (like a vibration) or b) numbing (like super weak lidocaine) ~And~ are you colorblind (we‘d need to correct for base rates but let’s just try to crank the anecdata knob first; @elenatenenbaum.bsky.social this is for you)

honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

Delighted Sasha's (first year PhD!) work using mech interp to study complex syntax constructions won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP! Also delighted the ACL community continues to recognize unabashedly linguistic topics like filler-gaps... and the huge potential for LMs to inform such topics!

Never did I imagine I'll hear "Dhoom Machale" at an election victory party in the US! LFG!

I’ll be in Boston attending BUCLD this week — I won’t be presenting but I’ll be cheering on @najoung.bsky.social who will present at the prestigious SLD symposium about the awesome work by her group, including our work on LMs as hypotheses generators for language acquisition! 🤠👻

N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

The psychology program at NYU Abu Dhabi has open rank open area positions in cognition-perception-cogneuro. Wonderful colleagues, excellent research infrastructure (incl MRI, MEG, EEG), close ties to NYU New York. Superfast growing part of the research world apply.interfolio.com/175417 #neuroskyence

🧠 New at #NeurIPS2025! 🎵 We're far from the shallow now🎵 TL;DR: We introduce the first "reasoning embedding" and uncover its unique spatio-temporal pattern in the brain. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2510.228...

Introducing Global PIQA, a new multilingual benchmark for 100+ languages. This benchmark is the outcome of this year’s MRL shared task, in collaboration with 300+ researchers from 65 countries. This dataset evaluates physical commonsense reasoning in culturally relevant contexts.

Our #NeurIPS2025 paper shows that even comparable monolingual tokenizers have different compression rates across languages. But by getting rid of whitespace tokenization and using a custom vocab size for each language, we can reduce token premiums. Preprint out now!

Check out UT Linguistics very own Austin German's new article on interaction and variation in Z Sign in @glossa-linguistics.bsky.social

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

If I spill the tea—“Did you know Sue, Max’s gf, was a tennis champ?”—but then if you reply “They’re dating?!” I’d be a bit puzzled, since that’s not the main point! Humans can track what’s ‘at issue’ in conversation. How sensitive are LMs to this distinction? New paper w/ @sangheekim.bsky.social!

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io

"Although I hate leafy vegetables, I prefer daxes to blickets." Can you tell if daxes are leafy vegetables? LM's can't seem to! 📷 We investigate if LMs capture these inferences from connectives when they cannot rely on world knowledge. New paper w/ Daniel, Will, @jessyjli.bsky.social

Curious as to if people think if (when?) ‘superhuman AI’ arrives, will the building blocks of its performance be human recognizable concepts which have been applied and combined in new and novel ways to achieve ‘superhuman’ performance? Or will it be completely uninterpretable?

We're hiring! UT Linguistics invites applications for a position in computational linguistics to begin next academic year 2026-27 (rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure). apply.interfolio.com/175156

Happening now! Poster 42!

Catch Qing’s poster in the morning poster session today!! I’ll also be there, talk to me about UT Ling’s new comp ling job/methods to study linguistic generalization/and how LMs *might* inform language science!

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 🤘

Come join us at the city of ACL! Very happy to chat about my experience as a new faculty at UT Ling, come find me at #COLM2025 if you’re interested!!

I will be giving a short talk on this work at the COLM Interplay workshop on Friday (also to appear at EMNLP)! Will be in Montreal all week and excited to chat about LM interpretability + its interaction with human cognition and ling theory.

On my way to #COLM2025 🍁 Check out jessyli.com/colm2025 QUDsim: Discourse templates in LLM stories arxiv.org/abs/2504.09373 EvalAgent: retrieval-based eval targeting implicit criteria arxiv.org/abs/2504.15219 RoboInstruct: code generation for robotics with simulators arxiv.org/abs/2405.20179

I’m at #COLM2025 from Wed with: @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue am introspection arxiv.org/abs/2503.07513 @qyao.bsky.social Wed am controlled rearing: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850 @sashaboguraev.bsky.social INTERPLAY ling interp: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16002 I’ll talk at INTERPLAY too. Come say hi!

Heading to #COLM2025 to present my first paper w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social ! When: Tuesday, 11 AM – 1 PM Where: Poster #75 Happy to chat about my work and topics in computational linguistics & cogsci! Also, I'm on the PhD application journey this cycle! Paper info 👇:

Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁 Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit: 1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850