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!

we released Olmo 3! lot of exciting stuff but wanna focus on: 🐟Olmo 3 32B Base, the best fully-open base model to-date, near Qwen 2.5 & Gemma 3 on diverse evals 🐠Olmo 3 32B Think, first fully-open reasoning model approaching Qwen 3 levels 🐡12 training datasets corresp to different staged training

proud to share this work, led by the brilliant @ilinabg.bsky.social, now out in Nature! Ilina finds that speech-sound neural processing is VERY similar in a language you know and one you don't. differences only emerge at the level of word boundaries and learnt statistical structure 🧠✨

aclanthology.org/2025.finding... "annotators strongly took the LLM suggestions, significantly changing the label distribution compared to the baseline. We show that when these labels created with LLM assistance are used to evaluate LLM performance, reported model performance significantly increases"

New paper: Evidence of crossmodal compensation in the conceptual representation of blind people: while they share visual associations with sighted people, blind people more strongly associate concepts with touch direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠 w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN

🧠Our new preprint is out on PsyArXiv! We study how getting more feedback (seeing what you could have earned) and facing gains vs losses change the way people choose between risky and safe options. 🖇️Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... It's a thread🧶:

popsicle stick joke writers room >> laffy taffy joke writers room

I was honored to speak at Princeton’s symposium on The Physics of John Hopfield: Learning & Intelligence this week. I sketched out a perspective that ties together some of our recent work on ICL vs. parametric learning, and some possible links to hippocampal replay: 1/

Every academic should join the @aaup.org national and their local AAUP chapter. If your uni doesn't have one, start one! Colorado academics, check out @aaupcsu.bsky.social! We're active, growing and looking to collaborate. Join the resistance on academia's front lines.

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

WE WON!!! The US District Court for the Northern District of California has issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP et al v. Trump et al (the wall to wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of Title VI to reshape the University of California system. Read the order here:

Our latest hyperscanning study tracks how neural coupling unfolds during genuine conversation and how it differs from simply reading scripted dialogue: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I'm recruiting a grad student! My lab at NYU (psych dept) studies the computational basis of moral cognition and aims to build AI systems that are aligned with human values. Now admitting a PhD student for Fall 2026. Apps due 12/1. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

As of this morning, Starbucks workers across the country are officially ON STRIKE. And we're prepared for this to become the biggest and longest ULP strike in Starbucks history. Say #NoContractNoCoffee with us: DON'T BUY STARBUCKS for the duration of our open-ended ULP strike! $SBUX

Prohibited activities include advising Chinese graduate students. For reference, a recent Georgetown report estimated 16% of STEM graduate students in the US are Chinese nationals. This would take out entire fields at the knees, which is perhaps the point.

this is really bad

chicago! how can faculty make sense of the rapidly shifting economic and epistemic conditions for learning? how should faculty exercise governance and exert expertise over expensive partnerships between universities and technology companies? join us for Theory At The Bargaining Table Dec 4!

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

new motor control task just dropped: putting on pants

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...