Far too long in the making.. but finally out in #AnimalBehaviour @asab.org: Orang-utans and chimpanzees #cooperate strategically based on the partner’s incentives. doi.org/10.1016/j.an... w/ @elisafelsche.bsky.social , Josep Call & @federicorossano.bsky.social

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

Editors of Developmental Psychology have put together a great summary for early career scholars on how to do a good peer review for their journal. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

In an increasingly divided world, how do strangers become friends? Parakeets might have something to teach us! New paper on formation of affiliative relationships, led by Dr. Claire O’Connell doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

updated preprint from @loganjames.bsky.social @themusiclab.org: humans share acoustic preferences with a variety of other species I love this finding—in call/song/noise/etc pairs where we know (from prior work) that animals have a preference, humans reliably identify the more-attractive sound

Hunter-gatherer communities like the Ainu often suffered severe consequences from settler colonialism. I wrote about how Pokémon, the world's biggest media franchise, tackles this painful topic. www.eurogamer.net/as-pokemon-l...

Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*? In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts. tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

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

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore? Well, I wrote about it. 🧵

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes? I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)

"Critics charge EP with producing unfalsifiable 'just-so stories.' Yet EP explicitly employs Popper’s hypothetico-deductive method: abductive reasoning from proximate data to hypothesize evolved functions, deduction to generate novel predictions, and empirical testing to confirm or falsify them."

Save the date! Remote participation will be also possible:)

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system. In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My review of Sex is a Spectrum, by Agustín Fuentes 🧪 #BioAnth blog.edhagen.net/posts/2025-0...

When an animals' groupmates go out of sight, do they also go out of mind? In a new paper in Proc B @royalsocietypublishing.org, Luz Carvajal and I show that a bonobo (Kanzi) can keep mental tabs on the whereabouts of multiple hidden social partners royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/4GI7G...

Hot on the tail of our Tsimane IGE study comes the theory paper that motivated it! What are the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of social plasticity in dynamic environments? See our new Functional Ecology paper to find out more besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

my review 'core systems of music perception' is on the cover of TICS this month (algorithmic art by @kennyvaden.bsky.social) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints: 🧵

It’s Friday night (somewhere) so settle in for a 🧵that combines fermented fruit, scrumping monkeys, etymology, Larson cartoons, & Gothic art to tackle the enduring mystery of why humans are so astoundingly good at metabolising alcohol! or read our new 🧪 paper ;) academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

You've probably seen all manner of hunting bows, but have you seen one of these? This is a millstone, used for pounding baobab pulp and seeds into flour. Almost every Hadza household has one.

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

How do economic concepts relate to the promise of foundational research? In our new paper, we propose an account of scientific pursuitworthiness that spells out talk of 'costs' and 'benefits' in terms of theoretical virtues. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #philsky #HPS

2/2 This leaves far behind the famous saying that everything in evolution ends up becoming a crab. Crabs have evolved independently five times (through evolutionary convergence). (paper, 2021) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Such a readable and fascinating argument by @jessiemunton.bsky.social of @cambridgephilos.bsky.social To see a visual object is to see how it could be, not just how it is. #openaccess #philsky

"The psychology of death, at least as conceived by terror management theory, is dead. We killed it." www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/psychologi...

Some coverage of our new paper on the evolution of human eye appearance and why the famous cooperative eye hypothesis (which has served the field well) should be abandoned. Published in Biological Reviews: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My colleague Quentin Atkinson wrote this piece - How Not To Run a University. It is an insanely good read about how managerialism is destroying universities. Make time for it. Talk about it. Share it. quentinatkinson.substack.com/s/how-not-to...

All ~40 Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Biology are available to download for free this week. Find them at www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨Preprint alert 🚨 Forager food-sharing is often portrayed as “a positive insistence on equality” (Woodburn) or an “instinct” to equalise inequalities (Fehr). A new paper with @kris-smith.bsky.social, exploring Hadza reallocation decisions, challenges this view. 1/10 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

one of my favorite science stories got debunked...

"Rethinking Ostensive Communication in an Evolutionary, Comparative, and Developmental Perspective" now published in Psychological Review psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Possibly the best thing I've read about ChatGPT yet. h/t @melaniemitchell.bsky.social amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

I wrote a chapter on a functionalist account of social identity. IMO, thinking about identity in an instrumental way helps explain a lot of behavior that seems otherwise baffling. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

:: (not really) Trigger warning:: Stay in your lane, or pay a career penalty www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

All redundancy is awful, the fear, the sense of failure, the challenge of finding other work. It's such a common disaster in the UK most families know it. But looking at my academic friends facing it now, it's particularly bad. They have twisted their whole lives around the pursuit of these roles >

Preprint of data from my first project as a postdoc with With @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social and Liz Spelke. Data and writing from 2019, figures are new :) osf.io/preprints/ps... First, we replicate @lindseypowell.bsky.social 's finding that infants reach for imitators using a very different setup.

"The philosophers want proper philosophers, [...] the psychologists want proper psychologists, but the one thing everybody agrees on is that we must support unorthodox career paths." An achingly intimate post about the Janus-faced whims of academia, and the toll it takes on our spirits.

🧵New paper out in Cognition Why do people moralize harmless carnal sins (e.g. gluttony, masturbation)? @danielnettle.bsky.social & I find that these behaviors activate reciprocity-based moral judgment—no need for a distinct "purity" module. 50 days free link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l18D2Hx2-...