anyone have a good technique for tracking project progress (app? whiteboard? a piece of paper?). i know someone that list all lab projects on a white board and have magnets that track through status like “coding” “in review” “in revision” etc…i’m wondering if someone dialed in a process for that

* my lab's new interest intake form was inspired by @brendenlake.bsky.social's process (lake-lab.github.io/apply/) which has served him well, and i welcome people to copy these questions --- it'd be fine if applicants adopt broadly similar text across labs! intake.gureckislab.org/interest/

🚨 New preprint: "Decision rule inference limits social escape from learning traps" (with Rheza Budiono and Cate Hartley of the @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social ✨). Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps.... This is more work on a very curious phenomena!

Interested in research in my lab? intake.gureckislab.org/interest/

weird - i studied categorization, concepts, analogy, similarity, & reasoning while being told it was a "dead area," people called my advisors "dinosaurs." in 2025 i'm listening to podcasts where like the gov. and tech giants are talking about how analogy is basically the key to the global economy. 🤷

... and belated congratulations to @guydav.bsky.social on an awesome dissertation!! Tour de force.

me too!

just in time for teaching, release 0.4.0 of slidev-theme-neversink, adds custom classes to stickynote and admonitions, a few bug fixes, updated to work with latest slidev 52.1.0 github.com/gureckis/sli...

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

Final reminder: Capstone proposal deadline is this Sunday, August 17! Partner with our master's students to solve real-world data challenges. Submit your proposal: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... More info: cds.nyu.edu/masters-in-d...

we're hosting a science party in nyc next summer 👇

fun write up about our recent work on the limits of mental simulation: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor... (original paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

tryin' to be in the band, not the band manager. todd.gureckislab.org/2024/09/25/l...

Job announcement 📢 @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction! Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions! apply.interfolio.com/165809

New on YouTube: (Informally) Introducing Smile v0.1.0. Video walkthrough which might be helpful for people who are smile-curious. youtu.be/m0nDalDrLMI?...

The mental simulation adversarial collaboration continues... #cogsci2025

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

packed, but 25% were creepy non-human plaster dolls

This was such a fun collaboration! I am thrilled to see this out today!! Amazing work by Cody Dong comparing memory-augmented LLMs to human episodic memory.

sad to hear about passing of margaret boden: www.theargus.co.uk/memorials/de... real cogsci pioneer and amazing writer. one of my favs by her: ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/i...

My slides from a internal workshop giving overview of Smile. Might be a helpful shortcut to getting an overview: talks.gureckislab.org/public/2025/...

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656 And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

more or less every time i try to explain to a working physicist that the way our mind represent physics might differ from the actual laws of physics, they look at me like i'm proposing the most zany post-modern humanities theory they have ever heard and slowly inch away from the conversation.

Today we open-sourced a new project for developing behavioral experiments online. It is called Smile. Announcement of v0.1.0: todd.gureckislab.org/2025/07/22/s... Smile has been used internally in my lab for several years and has substantially increased our productivity.

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Are people more likely to make discoveries when you give them incentives? My latest for Psychology Today with shout-outs to Todd Gureckis, Ben Newell, and Dan Bartels. @psychologytoday.com @toddgureckis.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulte...

📢 The Internet Archive needs your help. At a time when information is being rewritten or erased online, a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels threatens to destroy the Wayback Machine. Tell the labels to drop the 78s lawsuit. 👉 Sign our open letter: www.change.org/p/defend-the... 🧵⬇️

New preprint alert! We often prompt ICL tasks using either demonstrations or instructions. How much does the form of the prompt matter to the task representation formed by a language model? Stick around to find out 1/N

A few of us organized a workshop at the Choice Symposium a few years ago that resulted in this interesting paper taking an interdisciplinary view on cognitive costs, now out in Trends in Cognitive Science! authors.elsevier.com/a/1l7Lz_V1r-...

Students often ask me for advice on what projects to prioritize. Today I recommended putting every project you are working on in a different folder named 'untitled folder 1', 'untitled folder 2', etc... and to slowly move the mouse over each one waiting for it to speak to you from the future.

weird how people are talking about research grants. i get paid to teach. sometimes the government says "we want to do some research but we can't do it ourselves. if you can out-compete everyone else, we'll pay you to do it for us." it's not a subsidy, it's a competitive work-for-hire.

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

does anyone know -- if they cancel all of social behavioral economic (SBE) sciences at NSF and all the basic grants on learning at IES, what does that do to conference attendance at, say, cognitive science in 2026?

Clay Shirky on the impact of generative AI on learning: "As with calculators, there will be many tasks where automation is more important than user comprehension, but for student work, a tool that improves the output but degrades the experience is a bad tradeoff." www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

very few academics sounded alarm last year when Biden white house asked for a 19% increase for NSF in 2024 but in fact Congress cut it by 8%

the goal of any federal science funding body facing major cuts should be to help prop science operated in ways more independent of gov $. fund citizen science, fund open data repositories, fund crowdfunding, fund open-source tools and infrastructure. specific science projects can wait.

Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing: - Complaints about car-honking are down 70% - The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48% - 6 million fewer cars - Half as many traffic-related injuries - 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

science is about making more and more discoveries with less and less resources. if you only focus on the the first variable you are missing the point. people reducing community-wide research costs through standardization and open-sourcing are arguably the most impactful scientists.

New work in Nature Machine Intelligence by @guydav.bsky.social, @brendenlake.bsky.social, Todd Gureckis, Graham Todd, and Julian Togelius models how humans develop goals—research that could help bridge the gap between human intentions and AI systems. nyudatascience.medium.com/what-is-a-go...

important lesson here. do not abide.

some more congestion pricing Ws: Broadway attendance: up 21% Restaurant reservations: up 7% Pedestrian traffic: up 4% Retail sales: up $900M Commercial leasing: up 61% Subway crime: down 37% Car crashes: down 50% Honking complaints: down 69%

Congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto on receiving the Turing Award in recognition of their significant contributions to ML. I also stand with them: Releasing models to the public without the right technical and societal safeguards is irresponsible. www.ft.com/content/d8f8...

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence! From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

this seems not that inaccurate

checked what embarrassing 'woke' NSF projects dinged @ NYU. Surprised to see this project on quantum gravity listed. It, mildly, says an outcome would be the 'sustained growth' of women in high energy physics (PI is a woman). someone important and loud needs to clap back at this nonsense.

It's amazing that all cities don't do this.

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies. More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...