We're looking for volunteers for our #CCN2026 community event's live problem-solving demos! Join a 10min think-aloud session solving an everyday planning task or playing a video game, and help kick off our panel discussions. 🎬 🙌 Please sign up here if you're interested: forms.gle/D7HNwFE1pet9...

have kids, and/or like to read and/or stuff? May I recommend "Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home"? (by @zachweinersmith.bsky.social)

On the Surprising Effectiveness of Little Treats

telling an LLM to "just fix style and grammar" can change a lot more than just style and grammar

"I used an LLM to help me write, but it was just to polish the style and grammar" is something you've probably come across, or done yourself. Many conferences and journals and teachers are ok with this. But does it...? Just focus on the style and grammar...?

If only BBS allowed replies to takedowns of commentaries to papers; clearly another Journal format is needed.

building some Lego with the kids and the instructions here had me puzzled for a moment if I'm supposed to reach for the 6 or the 9 bag

fireworks survivor

(by daughter, 9)

I wrote the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science entry on 'Intuitive Physics': oecs.mit.edu/pub/m27ympza... --- for those who don't know it yet, OECS (@oecs-bot.bsky.social) has accessible, informative, free, serious entries on many basic topics in cognitive science

conference papers are great because they force us to clearly state a limited point in an easy-to-understand, 8-9 page format. Obviously this would be seriously undermined if people could submit a 50+ page appendix that they treat as essential reading, but oh no oh no no no

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

officially woooooooo (breath) ooooooooo!

the Picture Superiority Effect refers to the finding that people e.g. remember the entity 'car' better if it is presented as an image rather than a word. it is most often associated with Dual Coding Theory, which says that the mind processed verbal and visual info as 2 distinct streams

expansion idea for the boardgame Sky Team: you must work as a pair to land this guy

Lisa Loeb: 🎵 You say, I only hear what I want to 🎵 Lisa Loeb's Partner: No I don't

This work was inspired by @tomerullman.bsky.social's “illusion illusion” paradigm (arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613) where VLMs mistake illusion-like images for genuine optical illusions. In both cases, models respond to what a problem looks like rather than what it actually requires.🔮

Levine @sydneylevine.bsky.social et al.'s "Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition" is out in BBS, highly worth your time: bit.ly/BBSLevine26 if you had time left, I had thoughts: "Non-negotiable problems for a negotiation framework of morality" bit.ly/BBSTUCom26

my daughter's book ("Annie's adventures in Bunnyland") has taken a turn

official ad to follow soon but heads up: 1-2 postdocs slots in my lab, hopefully w/fall start! reposts welcome, details to follow. babies! word learning! cognitive & linguistic skills! #CogSciSky #DevPsychSky 🐦🐦 (lab info: bergelsonlab.fas.harvard.edu/prospectives) also recruiting grads this fall!

when it isn't 4:00 yet

(i'm reviewing papers for a few ML conferences atm) we should give standard intros standard numbers, so people have the option of skipping them in both writing and reading e.g. a paragraph saying "LLMs are amazing [cite], BUT they still can't do many things [cite]" will be designated OPENING #7

I visited the Baltimore Aquarium recently, my first time for a while in a place like this (park, zoo, etc) without the kids. I noticed my soul was shriveled, no sense of interest in things, as other people's awe-struck children raced by me. which leads me to a proposal: "Wonder as service"

came back recently from another great SPP conference, much to consider. spotted at the conference: Dr. Peng Qian quizzing and delighting the audience, on the representational geometry of letter vs. spirit of the law @pqian.bsky.social

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

I'm back to reading Wodehouse and am guffawing out loud right out the gate

I gave comments for a news piece in Science on a recent preprint on AI finding loopholes ("Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society", Liu et al.) since these things are always cut short, I wanted to expand here: www.science.org/content/arti... arxiv.org/abs/2606.04075

did an an evil AI write this

I just came back from a Dagstuhl Seminar on "social intelligence in AI". There's much to consider, but I worry a current path we're on is:

Coda: I posted this in a cafe, and felt a shoulder tap. I turned to the beaming face of a kindly older woman "Sorry," she smiled, "I just had to talk to someone looking at a picture of The Blessed Mother" We spent 15m chatting pleasantly abt Franciscans; I take this all as a punishment from God

אני לאורלי, כשנגמר היוגורט האיסלנדי שאני אוהב:

starting another review and praying to Saint Lavigne (the Patron of Reviewers) for a good manuscript

(to the tune of Hey Jude) 🎵 Hey Claude, don't make it bad🎵

the last screen humanity will ever see

would you believe this is a 2003 painting of Gutenberg

yeah, he seems like the moveable type

another round of my daughter (9) vs. VLMs, trying to solve the kids' visual riddle from her kids magazine. This time around: where are the sneaky shoes? daughter got all 7 (there's some arguing over whether 2 connected shoes count as 2 different shoes or 1 'instance', I'm counting it as 1)

I was actually looking for a news article that had a quote by a politician, "my doctors are confident I'm on the road to a full recovery", but thanks I guess?

Rubik's Dog

hmmm.

I'm chaperoning my 4th grade daughter on a school trip and one boy next to me just taunted the other by yelling "HUGO YOU ARE LITERALLY AI GENERATED!!"

bird's eye view of tennis ball about to hit a pigeon

audio version courtesy of @ebonawitz.bsky.social here: on.soundcloud.com/CYE0rKB2RZAZ...

ML's Lament (to the tune of 'Part of Your World')

Patient: I can't do mental rotation and it's making me real sad :( Therapist: Oh come on, let's turn that frown upside-down! Patient: :(

going from my hotel to the location of the symposium, and this is right on the way. I bet this is how Odysseus felt, sailing by the Sirens

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Review request Spouse with open milk 🤝 "smell this and tell me if it's bad?"