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

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

Faculty colleagues, please let your students know about our PhD program in Developmental and Brain Sciences at UMass Boston! Online info session coming up on 10/22 at 4.30 pm. Applications are due 12/1/25 www.umb.edu/academics/pr... #devpsych #devsky #AcademicSky

New paper: the ‘Double Ring Illusion’! Does the visual system integrate *intuitive physics*? This new illusion developed by Brent Strickland and I offers a straightforward demonstration – one that you can experience yourselves! Demos in thread👇 [1/6]

Interested in understanding how young humans think about social relationships? I am reading PhD applications this year! **Please note**, that Harvard now requires the GRE. More information here: www.ashleyjthomas.com/workwithme

New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh? We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social. Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative. A 2 min demo (and a short thread): 1/7

New publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article. We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)

really enjoyed this. h/t to @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social for the pointer.

📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year! Links below: Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903 Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989 Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970

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)

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Returning science to the status quo is inadequate. They’ll print the harms of funding cuts while it gets clicks, but if their wealth is on the line, they’ll mangle our work as badly as RFK Jr does. This is what “depoliticized” science looks like. We should politicize science as much as possible.

Substack is back in the news again for the wrong reason: this time, the platform sent a push notification to a neo-Nazi newsletter featuring a swastika logo. Here's Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best on Decoder two years ago struggling to answer a question about moderating hate speech.

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)! Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US. Please reach out if you have any questions!

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

Come see my lab at the Cognitive Science Society Conference #cogsci2025

PostDoc position (3.5y) available in interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center "Common Ground". 🎯 Topic: Pragmatic reasoning about Common Ground 🎓 linguistics | philosophy of language | cognitive science 📅 Deadline: July 14 tinyurl.com/3vd9wa6p Please share! @toddthelinguist.bsky.social

Fun new paper led by Sebastian Holt, training adults on artificial number systems. Most work tests only base-10 learning; we trained adults on a range of base systems & manipulated whether numbers were learned as part of a counting system, or unordered words. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

big if true

Our R01 was part of yesterday's "mass termination" at Harvard; 1 of ~1000 NIH grants in Trump's "fight". The irony of how many Jewish (& non-Jewish) researchers/scientists/physicians/patients/students will be harmed in the name of "fighting antisemitism" is sickening.deliberately cruel. #AcademicSky

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/n... #NASA-GISS

What makes people feel entitled to rewards—the effort they put into their work or the outcomes they achieve? Out now in PNAS; with Jin Kim and Jared Wong: Achievement. Effort seems to matter very little (if at all). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share a new paper accepted to @cogscisociety.bsky.social 2025 on the cognitive representation polysemy and their use in reasoning! Pre-print here: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Thread below! (🧵1/9)

Athulya Aravind and I wrote a chapter on Pragmatic Development for the Cambridge Companion to Child Syntax. Comments are welcome! Link: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...

This one is finally out (journals.lww.com/neuroreport/...) w/ open data (osf.io/nmsj5/)!

I've written a new (short) paper on modified numerals, where I attempt to solve a whole bunch of problems by using the notion of a 'negative individual' in the ontology of pluralities (an idea from philosopher Justin Bledin). Check it out! ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008...

Paper w/ Gergely Csibra now out in Psych Review! Work in CogDev often assumes that infant object representations are perceptual/spatial in origin. There is a ton of beautiful work showing that this is not always the case — e.g. they represent objects that they are only told about (1/4) (links below)

I am hiring a lab manager to start ~ July 1st. sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

you can’t build your politics around being anti-cringe. like 30 years ago every corny Republican dipshit started saying “DEMONcrats” and now they rule the nation with an iron fist

New paper in Open Mind! What does it mean to help? What is the goal of a helping action? We wanted to probe infants' & preschoolers' helping concept - specifically, whether they think helpers reduce others' action costs. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

Hi semantics friends, this is the SALT 35 organizers at Harvard taking over from our SALT 34 at Rochester colleagues! We begin with the hopefully welcome news that this year's abstract submission deadline is now this Friday (Dec. 20), extended from this Wed Dec. 18: saltconf.github.io/salt35/

My paper with Yasu Sudo “Free choice with anaphora” is out now (early access) in Semantics and Pragmatics doi.org/10.3765/sp.1...

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to share my new preprint, entitled “Mapping the Neural Taxonomy of Mental Objects in Moment-to-moment Cognition"! You may have heard about notions like pointers, object files, mental files, etc. across language science, vision science and the philosophy of mind. 1/2

Consider two beliefs: 1. Believing that the bathroom is down the hall 2. Believing that the Democratic Party is a threat to our whole society It seems like there’s some deep difference between these two beliefs. But what is the difference? Our studies explore that question

New Paper is out with @romanfeiman.bsky.social and Athulya Aravind in @psychscience.bsky.social We argue that children are not biased to assume that words are mutually exclusive. We speculate that previous experiments find mutual exclusivity because they present (grammatically) biased words

🚨 Steven Frankland and I are recruiting jointly-advised graduate students to work on high-level cognition! They will be part of the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth and earn their Ph.D. in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Deadline: Dec 1: pbs.dartmouth.edu/graduate-pro...

35 years of studies argue that kids assume word meanings are mutually exclusive. In @psychscience.bsky.social, @gaborbrody.bsky.social, Athulya Aravind, and I argue kids aren't making an assumption. We show 2y.o. only think words are mutually exclusive when they're told so. 1/ osf.io/awtch

🎉Our paper "Three- and Four-Year-Old Children Represent Mutually Exclusive Possible Identities" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology! You can read the preprint here: osf.io/rx4h9 (1/5)

Do infants represent collision events that violate Newtonian constraints on elastic collisions as causal? I tested this in my new paper with Susan Carey, "Infants' representation of Michottean triggering events", out today. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky #CogSci

Looking for a PhD student interested in finding out what makes human cognition special, studying symbolic thought, compositionality, behaviour & 🧠, co-supervised by Paul Muhle-Karbe, Sarah Beck, School of Psychology, Uni of Birmingham Lab meetings in 🌳👇 reach out by 24/5 more in 🧵 Please share 1/n

New preprint w @drbarner.bsky.social!TL;DR: even 3yos comprehend yesterday & tomorrow when tested on consecutive days, 1-2 years earlier than in other studies! BUT still struggle w hypothetical events. Tasks in which time actually passes maybe more sensitive to early time concepts! osf.io/gs3r4/

Last but not least... I am on the job market since last summer and it hasn't been exactly a lucky ride. 😟 If anyone knows of positions for academics with an aptitude for interdisciplinary and evoutionarily grounded approaches to social cognition, do let me know! 🐒♥️ (15/15)

First bsky post and new paper alert! 🚨 Late to sharing this, but here's a short review of a decade of work with Gergely Csibra on how infants represent giving, and why it matters (for event cognition and the origins of the relational mind). Thread below! 🧵👇 http://t.ly/S6cLw (1/15)

New paper is out at JEP:G: psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...