New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNAS

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

pnas.org

If you know anyone (18+) that lives in US, and is of Jamaican descent, please share this survey! Thank you. ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #AcademicSky

I'm staying at my friend's house. Will my friend expect to stay at my house, next time? What if I said, I'm staying at my parent's friend's house. Will my parent's friend expect to stay at my house next time? How relationships change expectations: see🧵on new paper by @aliciamchen.bsky.social

Alicia Chen@aliciamchen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship

People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...

news.mit.edu

Hi everyone! My paper on cognitive representations of relationships and their developmental origins is finally out! I had a blast responding to the commentary and was honored to be able to engage with people who laid the foundation for my research program. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

How do we represent maps of social relationships in the mind & brain? To find out, we tracked 1st-year university students’ friendships, as well as students’ *beliefs* about who was friends with whom in their network. Yang breaks down what we found in the quoted thread 👇🏻 Broader context below:

Yang Teoh@yyangteoh.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Hossein was supposed to come to my lab as a grad student but couldn’t because of the travel ban. I had a blast writing this paper with him, but it was bittersweet knowing he should have been in person with us. ❤️ check out 🧵below. part of a special issue on kissing led by Deb Lieberman.

Hossein Samani@hsamani.bsky.social · 7mo ago

This paper is like a souvenir of one of the most frantic and meaningful periods of my life — started during a war and travel bans and now published amid social protests in my home country. Many thanks to @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social for her amazing warmth and support throughout this journey!

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🧵👇

What does it mean to understand language?

Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

arxiv.org

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories. In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space

Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

academic.oup.com

39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing March 26-28, 2026 hsp2026.org MIT, Cambridge MA, USA. email: info@hsp2026.org Special session: Language and thought in minds and machines Submission deadline: December 12 2025 (Real deadline; no extension)

(1)💡NEW PUBLICATION💡 Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures Work with Curtis Chen and Ted Gibson Link to paper: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi... In memory of Curtis Chen.

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

How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology

Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

nature.com

New paper announcement! journals.lww.com/greenjournal... The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology is an unusual place for me to publish… Let me tell you the story of this paper.

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle! We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate. It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations. Spread the words!

If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵 1/n

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire. Our computational cognitive model explains why! Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7 News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu 🧵

Super excited to have the #InfoCog workshop this year at #CogSci2025! Join us in SF for an exciting lineup of speakers and panelists, and check out the workshop's website for more info and detailed scheduled sites.google.com/view/infocog...

Cognitive Science Society@cogscisociety.bsky.social · last yr.

#Workshop at #CogSci2025 Information Theory and Cognitive Science 🗓️ Wednesday, July 30 📍 Pacifica C - 8:30-10:00 🗣️ Noga Zaslavsky, Thomas A Langlois, Nathaniel Imel, Clara Meister, Eleonora Gualdoni, and Daniel Polani 🧑‍💻 underline.io/events/489/s...

As always, CogSci has a fantastic lineup of workshops this year. An embarrassment of riches! Still deciding which to pick? If you are interested in building computational models of social cognition, I hope you consider joining @maxkw.bsky.social, @dae.bsky.social, and me for a crash course on memo!

Cognitive Science Society@cogscisociety.bsky.social · last yr.

#Workshop at #CogSci2025 Building computational models of social cognition in memo 🗓️ Wednesday, July 30 📍 Pacifica I - 8:30-10:00 🗣️ Kartik Chandra, Sean Dae Houlihan, and Max Kleiman-Weiner 🧑‍💻 underline.io/events/489/s...

So excited our paper is now out in ‪@cognitionjournal.bsky.social‬! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions

Cognition@cognitionjournal.bsky.social · last yr.

“People Evaluate Idle Collaborators Based on their Impact on Task Efficiency” 📢 New paper from: Elizabeth Mieczkowski, Cameron Rouse Turner, Natalia Vélez, & Tom Griffiths www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... TL;DR: Sometimes it's acceptable not to help with group work 🧵👇

🎤 "Your #CogSci presentation was quite good this year." How flattered or offended will you be? The answer may depend on whether you speak British or American English 🇺🇸🇬🇧. Our new #CogSci2025 paper reveals systematic differences in how different cultures interpret the same words.

If you’ll be at #CogSci2025, consider (or at least consider considering) attending our @cogscisociety.bsky.social workshop on meta reasoning 🤔🤨🧐 We’ll be discussing problem selection through various lenses represented by a great lineup of speakers!

Meta-reasoning @ CogSci

Workshop Description People are general purpose problem solvers. We obtain food and shelter, manage companies, solve moral dilemmas, spend years toiling away at thorny math problems, and even adopt a...

sites.google.com

Thrilled to announce our new publication titled 'Decoding predicted future states from the brain's physics engine' with @emiecz.bsky.social, Cyn X. Fang, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/full/10.... (1/n)

Decoding predicted future states from the brain’s “physics engine”

Using fMRI in humans, this study provides evidence for future state prediction in brain regions involved in physical reasoning.

science.org

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...

Domain Interactions | CogSci 2025

Organizers

sites.google.com

The first big talk I have given since starting my lab in 2023! 🧠 👶 💻📊Thank you @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social for the invitation and recording. Feedback welcome!

Kempner Institute at Harvard University@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · last yr.

New in the Kempner Institute Seminar Series: @shariliu.bsky.social of Johns Hopkins University presents her research elucidating the computations that enable brains to make sense of living agents and inanimate objects. youtu.be/xojTiQC9uIc #psychology #neuroscience #devpsych

Excited to share our new paper "Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity" direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... @rplevy.bsky.social And looking forward to speaking about this line of work tomorrow at @nyudatascience.bsky.social!

Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity

Abstract. Two prominent, yet contrasting, theoretical views are available to characterize the underlying drivers of language evolution: on the one hand, task-specific utility maximization; on the othe...

direct.mit.edu

We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? 🧵👇 ⭐️ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, @neilbramley.bsky.social, Chris Lucas, @natvelali.bsky.social & @cocoscilab.bsky.social

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu). Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993). Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025. Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele, @alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here: www.amacad.org/daedalus

Daedalus Home

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

amacad.org

(1/9) Excited to share my recent work on "Alignment reduces LM's conceptual diversity" with @tomerullman.bsky.social and @jennhu.bsky.social, to appear at #NAACL2025! 🐟 We want models that match our values...but could this hurt their diversity of thought? Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2411.04427