Innocent Ampeire has devoted his life to the orphaned chimps at Ngamba Island Sanctuary. He's been accepted into a remote Master's in Conservation Leadership, building the skills to lead conservation and safeguard the sanctuary's future. He's raising £9,100 for tuition: whydonate.com/fundraising/...

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

The web of constructs and assumptions is what Cronbach (1955) called a "nomological network." Constructs sit above the plane of observation; we only ever measure them indirectly through specific operationalizations.

Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained go.nature.com/3RiE5HN

Trump USAID Cuts Killed One Million People 750,000 died in the first year. By 2030 defunding USAID will kill 9.4 Million people, and 2.5 Million Children under the age of 5. Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/o...

📣NEW paper📣 To date, only humans demonstrate meaning-based, generative communication. However, recent discoveries of combinatorial versatility in chimpanzee + bonobo vocal sequences open the possibility of generative communication in other species. Read here 👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CPCAMM...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Building on our Nature Comms framework, we show that feedback shapes risk preferences across the lifespan—not always improving decisions, but sometimes inducing age-specific biases, including gambler’s fallacy in adults. osf.io/preprints/ps...

So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

Are you a researcher based in the USA 🇺🇸 or Canada 🇨🇦 interested in pursuing curiosity-driven research in Europe? Join the ERC and Euraxess for a webinar exploring ERC funding opportunities. 👇️ 📅 20 May 2026 🕚 11:30 AM ET | 8:30 AM PT 💻 Online Find out more and register:

Joe Henrich emphasizing the importance of formal models at #CES2026

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

Rob Boyd tracing the origins of Cultural Evolution as a field #CES2026

#neuroskyence #Medsky

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

At #CES2026 @mchimento.bsky.social presenting exciting new methods for modeling the visual field of birds to study cultural diffusion in naturalistic settings

Just out: Recently discovered chimp gene-tool-culture are more likely due to permanent population splitting & expansion (i.e. "demic diffusion") than to female dispersal. *free* pdf link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1n3XqAlZXf... #ces2026 @ces2026.bsky.social #hbes2026 @hbes2026.bsky.social

This ! "Scientists can start to demonstrate authenticity by remaining resolute in our values: truth, accountability, freedom of ideas, open debate, transparency, and public good" excellent essay form a few months ago from @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2026/03/12/n...

Lab hike to Castle Frankenstein 🧌 Supposedly the inspiration for Mary Shelley's book

Like a drug dealer, this tech donor offers a free resource that will inevitably hook its users into a dependence, enriching the donor while simultaneously reducing the value of the education students receive. I'm old enough to remember a President Biden who offered sensible regulations on AI.

New paper 🚨 "Cultural evolution – of the arts". Together with @masonyoungblood.bsky.social we wrote a short paper – half essay, half bibliometric analysis – aiming to describe this emerging research area (1/3) doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

New paper from @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social: Can parents direct infants' attention using language in free-play interactions? The answer is a resounding no - infants just as likely to switch attention to objects their parent is or is not talking about during free play dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Excellent opportunity for researchers in computational humanities and AI: a 3-year Research Fellow/Postdoctoral Researcher position in Helsinki focusing on trustworthy AI across linguistic and cultural diversity. jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki... Please spread the word!

🚨 New preprint lead by the unstoppable @luiantaverra.bsky.social 👇 Does avoidance distort our beliefs you ask? Do anxious traits modulate this relations? Find out in the paper ^^. Also check out the new gamified task that Luianta developed: luiantav.github.io/dog-island/

🚨 Our lab's first paper is published! The claim: anxiety distorts not just what looks threatening, but the task models people use to plan. 🧵 This tiny study provides preliminary support that world model variation is critical to explaining anxiety. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🚨🚨 The Social Learning and Decisions Lab is hiring! 🚨🚨 We're looking for a postbacc project coordinator/research assistant to join our team this summer. More details about the position and how to apply here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ySeA... Please share widely and reach out with any questions!

🚨 Permanent position! theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de is looking for a managing director of our new outreach hub. This is an unlimited time position at an E13 paygrade (~postdoc level) Apply by May 31st 👉 www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt... Please share widely 🙏

🚨 New preprint w/ Valerio Rubino and Peter Dayan: how do people discover and use compositional structure under constraints? osf.io/preprints/ps... A key factor is a simple heuristic that favors reuse of repeated and symmetric fragments across scales, is robust to time pressure, and sped up RTs 🧵👇

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

10 years ago we identified a stage in social-event processing in which perception recognizes that two social agents are connected. A new study now shows that this stage is fully encapsulated from language and semantics. Soon to appear in @APA JEP:HPP Preprint osf.io/ngjwu/files/...

Join us for Cognitive Science for Climate Change on May 26 at ENS Paris 🌍 Exploring how cognitive science and computational modelling can help us better understand climate action. Conveniently scheduled for those coming to Paris for #SBDM. 🎟️ More details: www.eventbrite.com/e/billets-co...

In FY24, the Harvard Management Corporation (responsible for the university endowment) paid $89M in compensation: paddockpost.com/2026/02/10/e... During this same period, the endowment underperformed the S&P500 by about $4B.

I am presenting our work this week at #NCMKobe26 @ncmsociety.bsky.social Our poster is during the Thursday/Friday session: **P2-G-182** - _A computational account of tactile suppression during reaching movements_ Dimitris Voudouris @dominikstrb.bsky.social Katja Fiehler @c-rothkopf.bsky.social

Lab field trip to Frankfurt for the opening symposium of the new collaborative brain imaging institute cobic.de

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint (by Vandendriessche et al.) In everyday life, choices often lead to multiple simultaneous outcomes — some positive, some negative. Yet most reinforcement learning research has focused on situations where each choice produces only a single outcome 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

The government needs to stop such hostile approach. p.dw.com/p/5BzYN

Hungarian Elections! Big day first and foremost for Hungary, but it also has major importance for the EU and beyond I'll be posting updates all day

We are offering two 4-year PhD positions in our new SNF project "The Evolutionary Roots of Altercentrism"

📄 New preprint: The blessing and curse of Value-Shaping imitation (by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social) osf.io/preprints/ps... Imitation is central to human learning: but not all imitation processes are equally adaptive. We study their computational properties using reinforcement learning models.

The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

Question for the hive mind: how much trust do you place in Prolific's authenticity checks as part of their 100% Human participant guarantee? What other checks do you add in your experiments? www.prolific.com/resources/au...

New in Nature Human Behaviour: How Deceptive Online Networks Reached Millions in the US 2020 Elections www.nature.com/articles/s41... -Reached at least 37M Facebook and 3M Instagram users -3 networks out of 49 responsible for >70% of users reached -Exposed users older, more conservative

Holy shit. This is like if a foreign country bombed MIT. Sharif University is the top science and engineering institution in Iran, and one of the top in the world. Absolutely unconscionable www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

🚨 New independent group leader position as part of theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de April 12th deadline. Details 👇. Pls share 🔁 www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

🔍 What happens when you give middle-schoolers unrestricted access to ChatGPT for science tasks? Findings from our new paper led by Rania Abdelghani w/ @koumurayama.bsky.social @celestekidd.bsky.social Hélène Sauzéon 🧵👇