screaming "NO!" as I do a U-turn

John Locke, Poster

Goal selection through the lens of subjective functions: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948 I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.

is there a field in which it is common to cite papers in a nested way? As in, "(Cohen, 2011, as cited by Levi, 2017)"?? (I keep seeing students do this in their class papers and it is odd to me)

oOOOooooOOooooo

תודה, רבי א״י

i teach a seminar on the Imagination, that I split into 5 Acts, e.g. 'Act 1: Imagery, Scene 1: The Imagery Debate'. A nonsense challenge for myself is to find a somewhat-related quote from Shakespeare for the topic, from any play, but it has to be that Act/Scene combo

(walking with daughter, 9, she asks about Hannukah) me: where to start...so, Alexander the Great, he- D: wait, is this For Real? me: hm? Oh yes, yes. So, (a bit later) me: ...they went into the Temple, and found a cruse of oil, and- D: is *this* For Real? me: ...no, no

New preprint on prosody in the brain! tinyurl.com/2ndswjwu HeeSoKim NiharikaJhingan SaraSwords @hopekean.bsky.social @coltoncasto.bsky.social JenniferCole @evfedorenko.bsky.social Prosody areas are distinct from pitch, speech, and multiple-demand areas, and partly overlap with lang+social areas→🧵

oh what fun it is to have this paper out :)

kids: we built a Lego Phoenix! me: wow! now you can take it apart and build a Lego Phoenix! kids: ?......😡

how your end-of-semester email finds me

The Press and @openmindjournal.bsky.social are pleased to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). Learn how your institution can support this initiative to continue providing the latest #cogsci research—free of charge—here: bit.ly/452nMma

new: Eric Bigelow @ericbigelow.bsky.social suggests the 2 main ways of controlling LLMs (prompting & steering) can be understood as changing model beliefs (as in Bayesian belief updating) "Belief Dynamics Reveal the Dual Nature of In-Context Learning & Activation Steering" arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00617

When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵

time for some escapist reading on the legal system in imperial China well damn

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

you have climbed the mountain to learn Kung Fu from the ancient Master, but you are not worthy

started watching the old Poirot show in the evenings and I think I'm in love

Congress is currently considering a piece of legislation that would effectively sever all scientific ties between the US and China. Unbelievable. You can read the AAU response here: www.aau.edu/key-issues/a...

my grand theory of social media induced madness is that many of the ills of social media are about extension neglect. ...by which I just mean "people fail to take into account how many people *didn't* react to them"

i left the girl with some Edward Gorey books and 3 days later found this tiny story lying around

Well this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

that time of the year

just finished 'Circumventing the Law' by Stein Hain and I quite enjoyed it, lots of fun examples of loopholes and "cunning" in Jewish legal tradition

My lab at USC is recruiting! 1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829 2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📢 Applications are open for the 2026 #JacobsCIFARFellowship! A new partnership between the Jacobs Foundation and CIFAR supports early- & mid-career researchers advancing how children learn & develop worldwide. 🗓️ Apply by 2 February 2026 → cifarportal.smapply.io/prog/jacobs_...

whenever a new video-generation model comes out I check if it can create centaurs from the prompt 'half-man, half-horse'. The answer is almost always 'no'. This is Veo 3.1's response to "a half-man, half-horse creature running along the beach"

my daughter has been making little bunny guys and I liked them so much I made them into stickers

Personal Statements, Addendum: some are written as if the applicant is a passive object that greater forces act on: "I was led to X | this moved me to Y | I become fascinated by Z" I encourage you to position your "journey" as an active choice, with you as the agent that makes the choices.

noticing something about the Bhavacakra

How and when and why do children use loopholes? Our research on this hits the Big Time*: (* Big time = SciShow, with Hank Greene) youtu.be/f7FhKywXRGk?... (original paper in question: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

How and when and why do children use loopholes? Our research on this hits the Big Time*: (* Big time = SciShow, with Hank Greene) youtu.be/f7FhKywXRGk?... (original paper in question: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

I proposed these names for new AI-induced Psychoses a few months ago as a joke but the emails I've been getting have pushed me to think Banotti Mania may actually be a thing

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...

I can't claim to understand what it's like to be that guy from Memento, but I do have to pull up my phone and scroll through photos in order to answer the question 'so what did you do this weekend?'

something i noticed in preparing a class

wonder if I can re-arranging this Epstein name dump to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire

dear academic book presses 👋 Don't Do This 🤗

oh wowww

A chiliagon is a 1000-sided polygon, famous in philosophy for Descartes using it as an example of the diff b/w imagining something visually and conceptualizing it. Anyway I tried to get Gemini to draw it

ICYMI I wrote a funny book to trick children into reading literature!

new pre-print, "Chain of Time: In-Context Physical Simulation with Image Generation Models" (by Wang, Bigelow, Li, and me) arxiv.org/abs/2511.00110