It's a struggle, but it's gratifying once things start coming together. What I have on paper tonight is a clean expression of idea I didn't have well-formed when I began this morning. Some people think we should hand off this painstaking form of labor to LLMs and get back to doing science.

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help? New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hello fellow nerds! The upcoming Australasian Mathematical Psych Conference (AMPC) is going to be on Feb 23-25, and they've just put out the call for abstracts. Details below. This is one of my favourite conferences and this year it's in Singapore(!!) which should be awesome.

Interested in how we make preference-driven decisions, and how this is implemented in the brain? We report that neural correlates of evidence accumulation (CPP, Mu/Beta) are also observed during value-based decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by @laurencf.bsky.social (Lauren Fong) 1/n

Mamdani says in his victory speech, “we will hire thousands of teachers.” This, and not the proprietary chatbot classroom, is the future of education.

my knowledge of Hume has unexpectedly come in handy for my fire safety training test

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped

When there is a random way to do something, there is a less random way that is better but requires more thought. In this case, regression models that make no sense don't belong in a multiverse analysis. An inferential regression without a causal justification is like an opinion without reasons.

Using EEG 🧠⚡ and representational similarity analysis, we mapped how the neural representations of food attributes (e.g., taste & health) unfold over time when viewing foods🍎🍰🥗 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social theconversation.com/our-brains-e... doi.org/10.1016/j.ap...

actually, even better: if we can get ChatGPT to write all the prompts then we can do without researchers altogether get rid of all that human curiosity and scientific enquiry bullshit and cut straight to the point of academia: profitmaxxing for the mad lads at Elsevier

The linked course is an incredibly well-written, clear explanation of how LLMs work and outlines really thoughtfully what the can, and can't, do. Recommended read for absolutely everyone out there. #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬

I, too, smoked a lot of weed in my dorm room sophomore year

Now out in Open Mind! @drbarner.bsky.social and I find that when people hear a conditional statement like “If you mow the lawn, you’ll get $5,” they often interpret it as “only if you mow the lawn”, a pragmatic, perfected meaning. doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

Melbourne people! We're very lucky to have the one and only Alison Gopnik giving a talk here on November 11th at 6pm. Details below, open to the public, should be fabulous 😊 Space is limited so do be sure register! alisongopnik.bsky.social psychunimelb.bsky.social

A little while ago I wrote a blog post about this work for @spspnews.bsky.social 🧑‍🤝‍🧑👫👭 Check it out here: spsp.org/news/charact...

Very excited to share a new preprint that’s been brewing for a long time! This work was led by the exceptional @traceym.bsky.social, and made possible by a developmental + comparative + computational dream team. osf.io/preprints/ps...

michael? peter.

totally couldn’t tell

Reports indicate there has been a week-long gas leak at Bluesky HQ

Slight timeline cleanse maybe? I was interviewed about teaching and the article ended up being kind of sweet and full of bunnies so some of you may enjoy it 😊

i would like a future where psychological scientists could do their job without needing to be babysat by a chat bot

A few words on survey weights, why I'm embarrassed to have forgotten to take them into account in the past, and how I got lucky because I personally didn't get burned. Not a mistake I intend to repeat in the future blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

Using Linda Evangelista’s 💅 “I won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000” to explain smallest effect sizes of interest to people

One of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.

If you want a break from the horrors, check out this podcast about some cool science, featuring excellent friend and colleague Frank Mollica! #unimelb

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

Information and Misinformation by Andrew Perfors: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.a2555670

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

Do ant colonies work like liquid brains? Check this great paper in @pnas.org led by @ceabcsic.bsky.social Pol Fernandez and F.Bartumeus that shows how to explain collective foraging by modelling ants as neural agents @jordipinero.bsky.social @frazambelli.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

CogSci proceedings paper on the perceptual drivers of reference production — with Paula Rubio-Fernandez and Frank Mollica — is now out: escholarship.org/uc/item/4w25... You can see my talk about it in the Perception 2 Session!

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Latest post. Don’t know how many I have still in me helendecruz.substack.com/p/cant-take-...

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Richard Levins was born OTD in 1930. We treat a problem with multiple models, each with different simplifications but with a common biological basis. If we get similar results we have “a robust theorem…. Hence our truth is the intersection of independent lies.” 🐋🌱🦫🦋🧪 #EvoBio #PhilSci #HistSTM

Happy to share some new theoretical work with @andyperfors.bsky.social that will appear at CogSci this year! We argue (and demonstrate through simulations) that people can determine how much to trust other agents by thinking about how those agents have acquired their knowledge. 1/3

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

incredible