Today, UCL turns 200. 🎉 For two centuries, our community has opened doors, challenged convention and pushed the boundaries of knowledge across every discipline. Thank you to everyone who’s been part of the UCL story, here’s to the next century. ✨ #UCL200 #LoveUCL

checking the status of my manuscript

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

But in both bias and sycophancy scenarios, LLMs can do something amazing that people cannot. They can use their own API to simply *ask themselves* the question with the relevant information redacted. We show this literal self-simulation vastly outperforms prompting.

Give it a try here! self-model.github.io/pretendingNo...

New Preprint with @matanmazor.bsky.social: Overcoming both bias and sycophancy requires LLMs to imagine not knowing something they know. Like humans, they struggle with this. But unlike humans, LLMs can do something remarkable: they can, quite simply, *ask their counterfactual selves*.

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

Ninth UK university confirms opting out of Elsevier deal. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

We're starting a PhD programme in Philosophy at Ashoka! Anyone can apply by April 15 for admission this year, and we will ensure that admitted applicants receive enough funding to support them for the 5 year programme. More info here: www.ashoka.edu.in/programme/ph...

לבדו בין כה וכה

Reward models (RMs) are supposed to represent human values. But RMs are NOT blank slates – they inherit measurable biases from their base models that stubbornly persist through preference training. #ICLR2026 🧵

The race is on to re-home 120 ex-commercial laying hens in Didcot before February 8th. The British Hen Welfare Trust is appealing for would-be kind hearted chicken keepers to come forward by 4pm Friday and give the hens a chance at a free range retirement.

My Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Are you sure there’s no mosquito in the room? With @matanmazor.bsky.social, Chichi Dézier, @nfaivre.bsky.social & Louise Goupil, we study how we combine multiple sensory sources to be confident in presence and absence: While detection rely on one modality, confidence requires both channels to align!

Fascinating. Also....what if the tiny people are real and all around us and the mushrooms just let us see them.

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Out now in @nconsc.bsky.social 🧠😶‍🌫️ academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Loulan (19 months old, shoulder height 29cm, 11.5kg) is now in a shelter in Romania, but will arrive in the UK by the end of the month, and is looking for a loving home. abldr.org.uk/applications...

We have never needed this guy more

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

As the inner endless loop of "jingle bells" and "last Christmas" is gradually departing, 🚨 reminder about this funding opportunity for postdocs to transition to a PI role by Research Ireland👇

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p... #cogsci #neuroskyence

Anyone Else Here xkcd.com/3188/

The attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

I’m predicting that no amount of peer reviewed research will be sufficient to convince a lot of folks that they can’t reliably distinguish between AI and non-AI writing, no matter how well read they are.

Hey, it's actually pronounced "jaslight" You've been saying it wrong this whole time.

Cultivate insight, not just information.

From Kinds of Minds (1996)

Getting journal rejections like

All eyes on UCL for its 200th birthday. Across 3 nights our Wilkins Building and main Quad will transform into an immersive sound and light experience as UCL illuminated takes us through the history of London’s oldest university. 11–13 Feb 2026 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/event-ticketing/app/ev/25074/

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This is truly amazing: some LLMs can detect when concepts are injected into their internal activations. transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introsp...

Very happy to see the UK government making a commitment to phasing out animal testing www.gov.uk/government/n...

Because everything is shit, I give you ... Puggles. #Platypus #AustralianWildlife

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺 This Friday, November 7th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Simon Van Gaal giving a talk entitled "Linking global state fluctuations and recurrent processing to conscious perception in humans" In person or online. For more information: www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

I built a DAG diagram with garden hoses for teaching. Pictured: a collider bias diagram, inspired by a blocked pipe situation I experienced (which I credit with giving me the intuition though it also ruined my belongings in the flooded cellar).

Super happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social

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/

Whenever you feel annoyed by someone on the internet, think instead of someone you appreciate and send them a note to tell them so.

“There’s almost no limit to what you can get people to do if you let them think it is their idea” Jim Downey - former SNL writer

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

The Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford University is recruiting PhD students this cycle! We are a supportive team who happened to wear bluesky appropriate colors for the lab photo (this wasn't planned). 💙 Lab info: cicl.stanford.edu Application details: psychology.stanford.edu/admissions/p...

Everything you always wanted to know about intracranial correlates of #consciousness (but were afraid to ask): arxiv.org/abs/2510.08736 With @francoisstock.bsky.social, @liadmudrik.bsky.social, @meaperei.bsky.social and many great clinicians too busy for bsky! #iEEG

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

All credit to @danwphilosophy.bsky.social