a couple years ago i contracted with one of subway's ad agencies for a small rotating sandwiches collab that ultimately they decided not to publish and i never did anything with. today feels like a good day to post one of them. here's my favorite subway sandwich, the veggie delight

How to Do Things with Condiments - JL Austin

In her #NWAV53 plenary, King discusses an example of a juror being dismissed from the pool due to forestressing in the word police (so PO-lice), because the prosecutor claimed that the pronunciation showed animus towards law enforcement. And this is exactly why I study prosody!

I'm in Suzhou to present our work on MultiBLiMP, Friday @ 11:45 in the Multilinguality session (A301)! Come check it out if your interested in multilingual linguistic evaluation of LLMs (there will be parse trees on the slides! There's still use for syntactic structure!) arxiv.org/abs/2504.02768

🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238 👇

BREAKING: Starbucks workers have just authorized a massive strike. Union Starbucks baristas voted to authorize the strike by 92%. Now baristas in over 25 cities could launch an unfair labor practice strike on Thursday, November 13th.

How do people flexibly integrate visual & textual information to draw mental inferences about agents we've never met? In a new paper led by @lanceying.bsky.social, we introduce a cognitive model that achieves this by synthesizing rational agent models on-the-fly -- presented at #EMNLP2025!

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.

I’ve been interested in political speeches for as long as I can remember. I’ve listened to nearly every inaugural and major address, and I’ve given tons of public speeches myself. Zohran’s talent in this arena ranks among the best. He’s damn good. Hella good. Remarkably good. Crazy to watch.

Listen to the whole speech. This is history. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7ys...

I’m enormously proud of what the socialist left in the United States has accomplished over the past decade. We’ve gone from nowhere to everywhere, working to build a majority coalition that can defeat fascist authoritarianism by transforming everyday people’s material conditions.

i believe that we can win. actual tears.

What happens when we model the detective archetype at scale? 🕵️‍♂️📚 Our new paper, accepted for #CHR2025 combines literary history and computational modeling to trace how the figure of the detective evolves across 150 years of French fiction. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00627

Evaluating distillation methods for data-efficient syntax learning aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

While the first year of life is crucial for language development, our team found that sound categorization continues to develop throughout the early school years. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Do parents exaggerate the pronunciation of words they believe their infants don’t know yet? Our new paper suggests no. ❌ w/ @julienmayor.bsky.social & @nataliakartushina.bsky.social 🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy

Kazuki Irie has a forthcoming paper in NeurIPS that studies the following idea: Linear attention has cheap, unbounded memory but low precision, whereas softmax attention has expensive, bounded memory but high precision. These can be combined to build better transformers. arxiv.org/abs/2506.00744

What makes dialogue 💬 constructive 🫂? We address this question in our #EMNLP2025 paper investigating how **responsivity** can characterize conversation quality ✨ Brandon Roy will be presenting our work (Oral) on Nov 7, Room A109 at 10:30. 🧵👇 ​​https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1798/

I will be attending EMNLP in China to present our paper with @bylinina.bsky.social (who will be in China, too) and Jakub Dotlacil in the BabyLM workshop! Looking forward to meeting people there! ✨ 😊 #EMNLP2025 @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social lnkd.in/e-Bzz6De

First human newborn paper from my NSF CAREER Award! Automated detection of mouth opening in newborn infants - with our amazing @umiamipsych.bsky.social team: Guangyu Zung, Yeojin Amy Ahn, @tiffany6390.bsky.social, @semaylott.bsky.social, Arushi Malik, @dmessinger.bsky.social doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Had a great time chatting with CASNL alum @sudkrc.bsky.social and sharing our recent work on arousal! Her editing/producing skills are next-level - she somehow wrangled my scattered brain into something that actually sounds coherent... A true miracle worker 😅

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Xiaochen Y. Zheng, Roshan Cools, et al: Abstract rule generalization for composing novel meaning recruits a frontoparietal control network doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

thrilled!! but speaking after @monicarosenb.bsky.social ??? that's too tough to follow

Pleased to share that our survey "Getting aligned on representational alignment" — on representational alignment across cognitive (neuro)science and machine learning — is now published in TMLR! openreview.net/forum?id=Hiq... Kudos to @sucholutsky.bsky.social @lukasmut.bsky.social for leading this!

"How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making"! Now out in @commspsychol.nature.com w @annikaboldt.bsky.social & Yishu Sun Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence #Metacognition #Confidence

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

A few thoughts about this deeply-flawed Jeremy W. Peters article.(Gift link.) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/u...

New BBS article w/ @lauragwilliams.bsky.social and Hinze Hogendoorn, just accepted! We respond to a thought-provoking article by @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, and argue that it's premature to conclude that conscious perception is delayed by 350-450ms: bit.ly/4nYNTlb

If you use the Monetary Incentive Delay task or any task with complex events in fMRI, you should read this. We demonstrate that common modeling approaches can result in bias due to omitted variables. By @jeanette-mumford.bsky.social & the ABCD task fMRI team. direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory? In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions. 🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Kinship terminology rarely perfectly reflects biological kinship. The root meaning of the Indo-European word "mother" isn't even "biological mother". The ancestral Indo-European system, the patrilineal Omaha system, calls your mother's sister and all women on mother's side "mother" (B in diagram).

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social

Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship. MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior. Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast. We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

Judy DeLoache passed away yesterday. She was a brilliant scientist and giant in the field of developmental psychology. She will be missed dearly.

Looking for a PhD program where you can study computational neuroscience? NYU has a fantastic array of researchers covering the field: groups.google.com/g/systems-ne...

From retinotopic to ordinal coding: Dissecting the cortical stages of visual word recognition www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 How do people's mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization? We find that people spontaneously construct goal-dependent causal abstractions that compress experience to privilege relevant information. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 🔗 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Check out our new preprint, led by Romy Froemer and in collaboration with Chih-Chung Ting and Sebastian Gluth: “Goals shape dynamics of attention and selection for value-based decision-making”. 🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers: @openmindjournal.bsky.social The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

Expecting experience, not getting it, the brain adapts www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428

Wrote this yesterday chanda.bearblog.dev/knowledge-is...

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

Really happy this is finally out (psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...). A lot of work (4 experiments!!!) by @alexandrenobre.bsky.social ! #neuroskyence

I'm extremely pleased to say that my paper "Brazen Dogwhistles" was published today in APA Studies on Feminism and Philosophy! This special issue focuses on @jennysaul.bsky.social's Dogwhistles & Figleaves, with several original papers and replies from Jenny. The whole issue is really fantastic.