I think AI has tremendous potential to help us *help each other* This year I built an AI copilot to help support and scale mentorship. I plan to write a couple of blog posts on what I learned from this. Here's a link to the first one! infinitecare.substack.com/p/what-i-lea...

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

Excited to share this work has been selected for an Oral at the Reinforcement Learning Conference Continual RL workshop! @continual-rl.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/cogs...

cogscikid.bsky.social@cogscikid.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵

Look how far we've come in just a few years! We're fast as well! It turns out, recruiting reviewers is much easier when they're not being used as free labor for massively profitable publishers Support free-to-publish and Open Access science by submitting to Open Mind today! direct.mit.edu/opmi

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Pleased to share that this work is now published in TMLR! openreview.net/forum?id=RuW...

Andrew Lampinen@lampinen.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Why does AI sometimes fail to generalize, and what might help? In a new paper (arxiv.org/abs/2509.16189), we highlight the latent learning gap — which unifies findings from language modeling to agent navigation — and suggest that episodic memory complements parametric learning to bridge it. Thread:

Very excited to share that my lab will be moving to Princeton (Neuroscience & Psychology) this fall. I'll be recruiting at all levels (more info to come soon), please share / get in touch if you're interested in joining!

Newborns' preference for faces is learned rather than based on a innate face-like template academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

What can face preference in newborns tell us about their face representation? Contrasting learned familiarity with inherent bias accounts

Abstract. Possible mechanisms behind newborn face preferences are debated, including innate templates, top-heavy bias, focus on eyes, and rapid learning ex

academic.oup.com

@manybabies.org in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Can an army of babies and dogs rescue psychology from its reproducibility crisis?

Labs are teaming up to run a host of huge projects that aim to bring rigour to cognitive science.

nature.com

Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵

Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)

If a student reads a typical psychology paper, picks an experiment, and tries to replicate it, they have roughly a coin-flip chance of success. That's the punchline of a decade of metascience, and it's the focus of Ch 3 of Experimentology. 🧵 experimentology.io

We've updated the preprint of our Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science paper (arxiv.org/abs/2502.20349) — we've tried to clarify and streamline the arguments, and added some new examples: 1/5

Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science: Towards generalizable models and theories that capture the full range of natural behavior

How can cognitive science build generalizable theories that span the full scope of natural situations and behaviors? We argue that progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers timely opportunities ...

arxiv.org

Do RL agents really need to replan from scratch for every new goal? Why do rodents "preplay" goals they haven't pursued? We think these questions share a candidate answer.

📢 Applications for the Kempner AI Fellows Program are now open! This program is designed for early-career researchers with strong technical preparation in modern machine learning. Applications close June 1st. Learn more and apply 🔗 bit.ly/4ehVxWj #KempnerInstitute

Kempner AI Fellows Program - Kempner Institute

The Kempner AI Fellows Program is for early-career researchers ready to contribute to ambitious AI/ML research. Fellows work with Kempner investigators on active projects spanning foundation models, A...

bit.ly

Our work on the perception of intermittent odor stimuli out in @natcomms.nature.com! Led by @luxorboero.bsky.social & former grad student Hao Wu; key contributions from @btolooshams.bsky.social, @siddjakes.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, @josephdzak.bsky.social, Farhad Pashakhanloo, Demba Ba.

Can language models use subtext in their communication? Can they use common ground to incorporate subtext more effectively? In our new preprint, we study these questions across various domains — from visual communication to story writing games.

The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏

Skills in Claude Code are versions of Marvin Mnisky's frames that actually work what a time to be alive Neural networks ended up making Mnisky's dreams come true I wonder if he's rolling over in his grave

Last week to apply for a 3yr postdoc with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself. Deadline is March 15th hmc-lab.com/TAMPostdoc.h...

Charley Wu@thecharleywu.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Come work with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself! 3 yr Postdoc on category learning w/ structured, program-like representations. Funded by the www.theadaptivemind.de Excellence Cluster! Deadline is Mar 15th, details 👇 Please share widely 🙏

"The present study shows how constraining an RL-SSM with eye gaze data can further enhance its predictive ability." dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

A reinforcement learning and sequential sampling model constrained by gaze data

Author summary When people are deciding between options they have encountered in the past, their preferences are largely based on their memory of past experiences with those options. However, simply l...

dx.plos.org

Pretty excited for tomorrow's lab meeting of unsolicited research advice

There are nearly 100 events across NYC this weekend hosted by neighbors, for neighbors, to protect each other from ICE and organize in our communities. Art builds, ICE-out parties, park play dates, DJ events, town halls. You name it—there’s something for everyone. Find an event near you here:

"if your toy statistical model predicts a certain curve under “ideal” research practices, and you find a different curve, it’s possible that the curve derived from undergraduate probability has nothing to do with scientific practice" 😂

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 6mo ago

LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

SWC is the best place to do neuroscience in the world

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 6mo ago

We’re hiring a Group Leader! Join us to lead a transformative initiative in human systems neuroscience. Find out more and apply ⤵️ www.sainsburywellcome.org/content/curr...

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date): academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868 An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here: forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...

A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics: arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929

Learning Abstractions for Hierarchical Planning in Program-Synthesis Agents

Humans learn abstractions and use them to plan efficiently to quickly generalize across tasks -- an ability that remains challenging for state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) agents and deep rei...

arxiv.org

🪰 How do dozens of tiny fly muscles cooperate to move a leg? We’re excited to share the first 3D, data-driven musculoskeletal model of Drosophila legs based on Hill-type muscles, running in OpenSim and MuJoCo simulation environments. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06426