I had a fun time teaching this paper this year: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

If I could only find the 7 minutes it takes to read this... back to the grind I guess.

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

Agreed. And many labs (including mine right now) will be "The Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab" or "The Cognitive and Neural Computation Lab" or "The Vision Lab".

PSA for prospective grad students: Professors usually have no clue what labs' names are. If you say you worked in the Perception Lab at U of X *maybe* I can make an educated guess of who the PI is but not always (lab names are too generic). Always use the lab PI's name in your CV/emails/applications

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

🚨New preprint🚨 Across 42 countries, we tested whether national-level cultural tightness—how strongly societies enforce norms—shapes responses to climate-related norm messages. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xzj7r_v1

This was a challenging week but this is how my day started so I’ll call it even

Become a Visiting Fellow! Interested in joining the Center for Philosophy of Science? Applications for 2026-27 now open for Visiting Fellows! Postdoc applications will be available soon! More info about our programs available on our website at https://www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/programs/overview/

The next session of the MIT Consciousness Club is on Thursday 16, 12pm-1:30pm. Rachel Denison will present “Attentional Distortions of Subjective Perception”. More information here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con....

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

... & most of all to my amazing partner who is willing to pick up his life & move across the world with me. (PS Do you know any aerospace-ish companies in London? My partner will need a new job!! 🙏) And THANK YOU to UCL EP for welcoming me -- here’s to the next big adventure in London 🥂

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

Another day, another friend who's been traumatized and whose career is being derailed because a dude couldn't keep it in his pants (and the whole system ran to protect him). Ugh, everything sucks.

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

I’m scheduled for surgery today on my Achilles tendon, followed by 2 weeks of no weight bearing.😵‍💫 So, like any good scientist, I got together 7 colleagues to study consequences of limb disuse. Introducing the HEALING study with @laurelgd.bsky.social @sneuroble.bsky.social @briemreid.bsky.social

Our lab went climbing (yes, on a Tuesday morning, oops) and it was really fun! 🧗‍♂️ it was the first time for a few of us and I can totally see why people get into it.

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg: #psychskysci #neuroscience doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Shamelessly promoting my favorite paper. Everybody who was anybody in the history of science/philosophy/mathematics had a view on the moon illusion. frances-egan.org/uploads/3/5/...

A few people have asked if the reason why some LLMs perform this visual imagery task successfully is only because the stimuli / task-type we used were in the models' training data. If this were so, data contamination would make our results uninteresting. See this thread for why this isn't the case.

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Merriam-Webster's social media posts have been top notch for a while. This video doesn't disappoint.

Awesome work by @jorge-morales.bsky.social and team, using LLMs to suggest that propositional reasoning might be enough to solve classic imagery tasks! ✨

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

🚨 Out now in @commspsychol.nature.com 🚨 doi.org/10.1038/s442... Our #RegisteredReport tested whether the order of task decisions and confidence ratings bias #metacognition. Some said decisions → confidence enhances metacognition. If true, decades of findings will be affected.

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

The Milgram experiment but the guy in the white coat is a chef and he's assuring me that it's ok to add more butter

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio. led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

There’s a new #philosophy feed in town! 📣 #PhilosophySky combines the best philosophical discussion via the #PhilSky and area-specific hashtags with announcements from 250+ philosophy-related accounts making it the most comprehensive feed for academic philosophy on Bluesky! bsky.app/profile/did:...

As a wannabe psychophysicist, this sounds so nerdily exciting.

detection d' is generally overestimated, coz we tend to be too lazy to collect the necessary data in order to correct for the unequal variance between target present vs absent distributions. turns out we can do this for free - using reaction times data. so, let's do it~ osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠📈

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Simon Goldstein and I have a new paper, “What does ChatGPT want? An interpretationist guide”. The paper argues for three main claims. philpapers.org/rec/GOLWDC-2 1/7

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

I hadn't read Turing's 1950 "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" (where he introduced the imitation game, a.k.a. the Turing test) since the advent of LLMs. It's so striking that people asked so many relevant questions about artificial intelligence right at the inception of the field.

Xueyi Huang (working with @jorge-morales.bsky.social at Northeastern) presented her work on Experiment 2A at the Vision Sciences Society meeting in Florida. Read the abstract here: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

It would seem that Apple needs to hire more vision scientists (or Ancient Greek architects, who knew they had to bulge the columns of the Parthenon and other temples for them to look straight).

People say they don't teach real world skills in college anymore. People are wrong. We tried writing in cuneiform yesterday in my "What is a word?" class

I had forgotten what a marvelous writer Gilbert Ryle was: "Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet."

We're glad to finally bring you this update!

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-...

Happy to announce that the AC in our place has been finally fixed. Ready for the Boston summer heat!

The Dept. of Psychology at the U. Wisconsin–Madison has an opening for an Assistant Professor in the area of Computational Neuroscience and/or Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI). Domain of behavior or cognition is open. Details at jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

UC Davis is hiring! A tenure-track assistant professor of psychology, in human cognition or cognitive neuroscience #psychjobs recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

Interested in applying to graduate programs or research positions in psychology? Want more information and feedback on your submission materials? Then Harvard’s Prospective Ph.D. & RA Event in Psychology (PPREP) Is for you!! psychology.fas.harvard.edu/pprep More info in the link!! Please retweet!