If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

New paper w/ @ryskin.bsky.social in Open Mind! Words change: “broadcast” once meant scattering seeds; “tweet” was just a bird sound. Do older adults keep earlier meanings, or update as language evolves? Our new paper investigates how semantic representations differ across age groups. 🧵👇

The question is an open one and it depends on us. The would-be destroyers of science #Trump #Vought #RFKJr #Bhattacharya #Memoli are just men. Zealots, fools, charlatans, opportunists. There are more of us than there are of them. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New study out in Neuron: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne.... This work led by Zaid Zada uses fMRI hyperscanning of real dyads to show that speaking and listening rely on shared neural systems; and that conversation recruits unique brain processes that aren't observed in passive comprehension.

Great to see this paper on sensory expectations in motor control from @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @andpru.bsky.social out in Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience 🧪

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

Now out in TopiCS as "Simulating Symbolic Evolution in the Lab: Potentials and Implications of Using Transmission Chains to Study Early Symbolic Behavior at the Emergence of Homo sapiens" doi.org/10.1111/tops... Thread below! w @felixthehauskat.bsky.social & many others.

We're hiring at the Associate Professor level in Social Psychology! Join us in our vibrant and wonderful department and area. Contact Markus Brauer, search committee chair, for details ([email protected]). Job ad here: shorturl.at/nnvv8

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

Impressive new RCT on professional learning/teacher beliefs/instructional practices. It uses a team-based, theory-driven, methodologically rigorous & large scale research design to uncover core insights about increasing student engagement & learning. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Now in press at Topics in Cognitive Science! We review children's understanding of different kinds of visual media across contexts, and argue that this work has important implications for childhood learning and assessment tools @cogscisociety.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... damn this is so very clever! "... we investigated how the brain categorizes stimuli that are not linearly separable in the physical world ... The sensory manifold was ... expanded into a seven-dimensional perceptual manifold..."

The Press and @openmindjournal.bsky.social are pleased to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). Learn how your institution can support this initiative to continue providing the latest #cogsci research—free of charge—here: bit.ly/452nMma

New preprint in advance of a Phil Trans paper. Outlining a theoretical argument bridging Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning. And empirical data that kids do too! arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

This is a nice in-the-wild example of a rather complex dynamic semantic speech act: a conditional with a factual antecedent, an imperative consequent which itself embeds a factual consequent, producing a warning, and is itself conjoined to another disjunctive imperative consequent. 🐦🐦 #philsky

New paper on lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language with Swedish colleagues. Using a combo of elicitation (in-person), survey (online) & corpus data, we look at some changes in lexical choices over time & discuss methods for measuring variation of variation #linguistics doi.org/10.16995/glo...

A case in point: Dave Freedman has found abstract feature-based categories in LIP, supposedly a "where" not a "what" area. He also found them in the superior colliculus, which is supposed to be an oculomotor structure and have nothing to do with visual categories! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you speak whale, you may know that sperm whales communicate with click vocalizations that they group into units called codas. A new study in @openmindjournal.bsky.social shows that within these codas appear to be vowels & diphthongs, used similarly to humans: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

new: Eric Bigelow @ericbigelow.bsky.social suggests the 2 main ways of controlling LLMs (prompting & steering) can be understood as changing model beliefs (as in Bayesian belief updating) "Belief Dynamics Reveal the Dual Nature of In-Context Learning & Activation Steering" arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00617

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Excited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉 David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops. 📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...

🧩Natural language isn’t all you need. We’re great at evaluating text-based reasoning (MATH, AIME…) but what about long-horizon visual reasoning? Enter 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗚𝘆𝗺: a minimalistic testbed for evaluating agents on spatial reasoning along a difficulty ladder

A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

Ok activists and nerds... I promised that I was SO MAD ABOUT HOW CONFLICT-AVOIDANT "CENTRISTS" UNDERMINE RESISTANCE TO FASCISM that I would resort to math to make this point and that I would write it up in a paper. So, here ya go. Share, enjoy, and get up on that soapbox. osf.io/preprints/so...

Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Well this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

“Thousands of very competitive projects in areas like cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorders and public health improvements most like went unfunded in 2025. Similarly, at the National Science Foundation, the roughly 3,000 fewer new grants encompassed reductions to every area of science”

I have news. Wonderful news. New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief. philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF

On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.

My alma mater, Northwestern, has decided to grovel to a desperate loser, at vulnerable people’s expense

New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat. Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!

Almost off to @euripsconf.bsky.social in Copenhagen 🇩🇰 🇪🇺! I'll present 3 posters: 🧠 Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models: Thursday's poster session. Going to NeurIPS? @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social and @nolovedeeplearning.bsky.social will present the paper in San Diego Thu 13:00 arxiv.org/abs/2505.13138

"There is a power law of joint communicative effort and it reflects communicative work" 📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social "Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures" Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @kudilvebilis.bsky.social

Task learning is compositional, so would behavior be! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor. osf.io/preprints/ps... People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵

We recently released OlmoEarth—an open spatio-temporal foundation model for planetary intelligence, trained on multimodal Earth observation, OpenStreetMap, & other open data. It sets a new accuracy/efficiency Pareto frontier and powers our OlmoEarth Platform. Technical report now on arXiv. 👇

I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’ doi.org/10.31234/osf...

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof). We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice! international.au.dk/about/profil...

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC.

We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias: Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently? Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white? 1/

📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025! arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972 It started from a question I kept running into: When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions? 🧵⬇️

My collaborator @aditijh.bsky.social has some cool work on cell-type LDS :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tokenisers are a vital part of LLMs, but how hard is it to find an optimal one? 🤔 Considering arbitrarily large alphabets, prior work showed this is NP-hard. But what if we use bytes instead? Or unary strings like a, aa, aaa, ...? In our new paper, we show this is still hard, NP-hard!