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?"

God, reviewing the solar system: "One star"

81 (95% CI: 78 - 84)

make way for d̶u̶c̶k̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ goslings

going over manuscripts

at last, I have assembled all 4 of the Boger Coasters. The power of exactly matched low-level features is MINE

כשהכל בסדר:

It's #VSS2026! SO excited about the projects we've brought with us this year, and of course #phiVis to close things out. Come say hi, and don't forget to grab your lab 'merch' 👀 perception.jhu.edu/vss/

woah look at this amazing line-up of speakers (and also Tomer Ullman), talking about Intuitive Physical Reasoning at #vss2026 tomorrow! I'd be there if I could, and I can, so I will. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @rtpramod.bsky.social @shariliu.bsky.social SP Arun Kelsey Allen

out now in Psych Review, a project many years in the making: "Reverse Engineering the Centered Self" bit.ly/4wp9fgN

every time I hear The Middle

"when a crime is committed in the garden of Eden, there's only one person you can call... watch the season premiere of...COPEVE" "...coming this Fall"

my decision making class comes to a close today with the final exam; this is the bonus page at the end

happy grading season, from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago

I accept the nomination. My first move is to set the acceptance rate at 0%, instantly catapulting us to being the most prestigious program in the country

suppose you took the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, but changed the planks into a railroad track and the rigging into a trolley until eventually it was a moral reasoning thought experiment, is this still a thought experiment about identity?

that time of year again

some recent backyard views

I've been binge-watching Amphibia with my daughter and now everything reminds me of Him

some more GPT explanations of New Yorker Cartoons

one of these seems not like the others

Job Alert 🚨 - please share! My brilliant friend and collaborator, Fumihiro Kano, is launching a new Ecological & Collective Cognition lab at Kyushu University, and has postdoc, grad, and tech openings! Lab video: youtu.be/rXT-yjQzJxU More details: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

new season of the Wire but it's all about structural issues with American higher ed

To sleep, perchance to honk shoo; aye, there's the rub

coming back from Cambridge UK I'm reminded of this bit at the airport from the last time I was here (about 15 years ago): security guy: purpose of visit? me: summer school him: for what? me: machine learning him (blankly): ... what, you mean like toasters and stuff?

next up in our head-to-head discussion series, "We Can Have a Civil Discussion about Difficult Topics vs. No We Fucking Can't"

for my decision making course, I spend the semester growing a beard, and on the last class ("transformative decisions") I shave it. Every year, the students hate it. but my own kids? they hate it too.

New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).

באופן כללי צריך להיות סולם שמגדיר את היחס בין כמה המרואיין מעניין לכמה המראיין מעפן, אני מציע לקרוא לזה "סולם קודנר"

(בעולם שבו קודנר הזמין אדם לפודקסט של הארץ לדבר על זה שהוא ראה ינשוף בסופרמרקט) קודנר: שלום למרואיין, שבא לכאן לדבר על הפעם שהוא ראה ינשוף בסופרמרקט מרואיין: שלום ק: אז בוא ספר לנו, מה היה באותו יום? מ: נכנסתי לסופרמרק- ק: וסופרמרקט, רק להסביר למאזינים שלנו, זה מקום עם אוכל ומזון מ: כן...

another visual puzzle for young ones from my daughter's kids-paper: "find all instances of 'cleaning'" (my daughter did) maybe it's too much to expect current models to find them all, but they don't (left: puzzle; middle: gpt; right: gemini) (Also: 'washing dog'? come on now)

New paper in PBR: "Working memory’s pointer system is governed by physical objecthood, not spatiotemporal information" rdcu.be/fd2tY Without valid WM pointers, we miss OBVIOUS changes in visible items; the study shows that this "resetting" process is all about objects and not spatiotemporal change!

my son had to annotate part of a Shakespeare play for his homework and most of it is "Dirty Joke(?)", which is fair enough, but for Shakespeare is like putting next to everything the remark "seems like English again?"

student: what is it like, to be faculty? me:

having just sunk a small fortune into my dream (a sweet little coffee shop called "Bird in Bush"), I round the corner. As I look up, the happy whistle dies on my lips:

this must've cost extra

Kilroy was here

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

Jumping on the #CDS2026 presentation bandwagon. Check out these talks and posters by the Computational Cognitive Development Lab & Friends, if you're so inclined. Also, I'll post times for a coffee/tea/cocoa hour where you can drop by at chat/introduce yourself in the next day or so! (Stay tuned.)

very much liked this new book by Barnett and Harris