Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sadly I will not be at VSS this year, but here's what our lab is up to! (In solidarity with many VSS attendees, however, I may be foregoing many hours of sleep -- not for long walks on the beach but due to the anticipated arrival of a second child any day now...)

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience? These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.

We plan to hire a post doc to start in Fall 2026 (flexible), in the Aulet Lab at UMass Amherst, funded for two years. The postdoc will help establish our developmental fMRI research program studying symbolic number acquisition in 4-8 year old children (among other things!).

A few years ago, my favorite website (@puddingviz.bsky.social) put out this great piece analyzing a study of how randomizing ability changes with age. It includes demos where readers produce sequences of random coin flips, dice rolls, and locations in a 3x3 grid. pudding.cool/2022/04/rand...

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo

Very proud that this is finally out! Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

Over the past several months, I've been working (in collaboration with www.thoughtscape.com) to rebrand my lab and improve our website. This new version better captures our core interests/ideas. I'm really, really thrilled with how things turned out: spatialcognitionlab.org

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This dispute will have to be settled 'on the field' next semester. Looking forward to it. 👋

Last night, we hosted the inaugural momentslab.org vs. spatialcognitionlab.org competition. After going down early following a disappointing Jenga loss, our team rallied to a 2-1 victory, winning in Codenames and pool. Proud to have won against such tough competition! 🏆

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

There’s a deep difference between sentences like: (1) Jane caused the glass to break. vs. (2) Jane broke the glass. A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2) [Thread]

Are OSF view-only links broken? A journal keeps un-submitting our paper because the link doesn't work, but (a) it did work, just before the update, and (b) it says it should be working as usual in the OSF interface. Anyone else having this problem, or know of a solution?

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

smh the bots are just repeating themselves at this point

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org

Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below: mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

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)

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system. In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

I'm recruiting a lab manager for my soon-to-be-launched lab at Ohio State! If you know of any recent grads who may be interested both in helping to build the lab and in developing skills in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, please share! osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

In the latest #UndertheCortex, @brynnsherman.bsky.social from @upenn.edu shares that repeated experiences are more vividly remembered and are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.

There’s something funny about saying that someone caused something to happen when they didn’t act intentionally — as if that phrasing assigns unintended agency to them. Why is that? In this new paper below, we take a linguistic approach to answering this question. Lots of interesting data here!

The first student-led paper from my lab -- from (first-year!!) undergraduate student @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social This is my favorite kind of project: A neat, visible illusion, with compelling data from multiple paradigms, plus some interesting theoretical implications. Check it out!

I am excited to announce my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social ) about a new illusion of *number*: the “Crowd Size Illusion”. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I have noticed that many cool people are starting labs at Ohio State right now. I've decided to follow their lead. Soon, my lab will be moving to Ohio State as well. You can learn more about our recent and upcoming work here: www.cogdevlab.org

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

New preprint! How do we integrate new information into prior knowledge? We find that existing knowledge enables rapid new learning but that interleaved replay during sleep promotes integration of new and old information. Modeling suggests a sleep context suppression mechanism. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Now officially out! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... (Free version here: talboger.github.io/files/Boger_...)

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

Evidence for episodic-like memory in infancy is everywhere, if you know how to look for it! It was such a pleasure to write this paper with @lillianbehm.bsky.social and Nick Turk-Browne, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. #psychscisky #cogscisky #philsky #cogdev

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Come see (first-year undergraduate student!) @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social give his first talk ever on a neat illusion of *number*!

A really thoughtful piece from @simine.com that’s worth a read: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We’re hiring postdocs to join my lab at UNC. If you’re interested in adolescence, brain, and social development, DM me. Our work incorporates fMRI, social media, and longitudinal methods. We study risks and opportunities in adolescence. If you’re at #SRCD2025 and want to meet, please reach out!

We were blown away by the public response to our findings that the infant brain can store memories. Many people wrote to share with us their first memories. To help us capture these reports, we created a short, anonymous survey. We hope you might also consider taking it. Please share with others! 🧠🧪

Now officially out in @psychscience.bsky.social ! journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... @samiyousif.bsky.social

Sam Clarke and I have been writing a lot about adaptation -- what it is, what it isn't, what it reveals about perception. We've just released a preprint that pushes the boundaries of adaptation even further. We document spatially selective adaptation to arbitrary *value*. philpapers.org/rec/CLACWS