BREAKING: SANDWICH GUY ACQUITTED. NOT GUILTY!

Who will they come for next?

Looking for graduate students for next year! We have fully-funded positions open to study signed languages, cognitive/educational neuroscience, development, and educational technology! Email me for more info or see here: tinyurl.com/EdNeuro2026 Please share!!

⏰ Reminder Nominations for the #ElmanPrize close November 18🗓️ Know a mid-career cognitive scientist who combines stellar research with community service? Nominate them today! cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/

2025 Here the largest fraction is for R01 awards, followed by RF1s, and R21s. In most cases, these were R01s that had not particularly reason to be forward funded except that NIH had put itself in a situation when large amounts of funding needed to be committed by the end of the fiscal year 21/25

I'm very excited about this conference!

a nicely balanced article on The Compact from @inquirer.com www.inquirer.com/education/co...

I’ve seen those wiggly curves before in the work on spatial location! Typicality weighting is everywhere.

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

Happy Tuesday after the first Monday in November! For those who are eligible and haven’t yet, please exercise your right to VOTE!!!! 🇺🇸

On my lab reading list— A neural state space for episodic memories: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

YES! "to explain all human cognition, we inherently must include development". Beyond the Adult Mind: A Developmental Framework for Predictive Processing in Infancy - Ward - Topics in Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Bravo! Standing up for the rule of law and for human rights in a tough time-- Lakeview resident calls on CPD to investigate federal agents for immigration raid on his property www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/31/l...

Lovely work by my colleagues, great illustration of what happens when cognitive science meets real world readoning cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

I was excited to get to know Pablo at #ESPP in Warsaw!

What a great idea! www.inquirer.com/education/ma...

Very clear overview by Brian Hare www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagaz...

The French version of the Rosalind Franklin tale. But Martha lived longer, went on to many achievements, and yet…. Marthe Gautier, 96, Dies; Had Key Role in Down Syndrome Breakthrough www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/h...

I hear a lot about misinformation as a "symptom" of "distrust". Here we test this & find that while trust is important, it doesn't buffer: misinfo isn't mitigated by high trust. Both misinfo & distrust *independently* predict vaccine denial. It's a disease of its own! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

❤️ local papers

Here's my latest contribution to the "Lost Science" series at the New York Times: Jay Falk, a scientist who studies why some female hummingbirds look just like males. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qF7Qje

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

I'm recruiting PhD students for my lab at Northwestern! I'm reviewing applications for the Department of Psychology for the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Clinical areas, due 12/1. 🧠 Come join the CATS Lab: nucatslab.com Learn about our latest research: iamh.northwestern.edu/research/res...

Congrats, great choices for Cogneuro research:

The Founders knew Congress - especially the House - was the backbone of U.S. democracy. It should be a huge story that Mike Johnson, serving Trump, has all but shut it down From the Reichstag Fire to Putin's toothless Duma, this is what dictators do. My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

When researchers bring up confounders without ever having declared the actual analysis goal

Estimates of each protestbon #NoKingsDay and the bottom line. Biggest ever except for an asterisk for Earth Day 1970 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

And the left isn’t full of diversity and contradiction?

Made me chuckle

The world we want- www.unicef.org/ethiopia/sto...

Tomorrow. D.C. The National Mall. Sunup to sundown.

All the more reason for universities to stand strong - the public recognizes this is a rotten deal My message to Vanderbilt and all univs - "it is essential to reject the entire idea of trading away institutional, faculty and student freedoms for government benefits" bsky.app/profile/lkfa...

These tips vary from useful to slightly crazy but they are interesting—

Nicholas Evans, of our Advisory Board, is featured in The Observer – his decades of fieldwork open windows onto how people think, remember, and inhabit place through language — Read Laura Spinney’s profile: Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages observer.co.uk/news/science...

Stress drives the hippocampus to prioritize statistical prediction over episodic encoding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.683838v1

Babies born healthier may be the most transformative of all Universal Basic Income effects. Epigenetics shows that healthier babies will be healthier adults, who will have healthier babies, and low birth weight is correlated to less healthy adults who earn less. www.science20.com/news/correla...

When we go to Chicago we live here. Terrifying. Federal immigration agents tear-gas Lakeview, raid Lincoln Park as feds focus on city's affluent North Side www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/24/f...

So close to where I live. Ice was a block away today. About to go escort students from our local school to their transit home. Just evil.

I owe my whole career to Judy. As an undergrad in her lab, her enthusiasm for research motivated me to ditch my med school plans & pursue dev psych. She paid me a stipend so I didn’t have to work full-time & could spend more time in the lab. So much gratitude to have learned from the best 💖

Wondering about the dispute? Watch the full Reagan radio address here:

My comments to the Michigan Daily on what to make of being added to the "Professor Watchlist."

Expecting experience, not getting it, the brain adapts www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One of the folks involved is @stevenmweisberg.bsky.social www.dallasnews.com/news/2025/10...

New paper with @ingridsbrain.bsky.social Samantha Cohen and First authored by Kate Hill. Her postbac project -- great work, Kate! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/X62JS...

mRNA vaccines seem to work synergistically w/ cancer immunotherapy. In patients, the vaccine acts like a siren that triggers the release of immune signaling proteins, instructing the immune system to attack tumors. We need to funding for mRNA based therapeutics. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...