New preprint! 🧠👀🤖 Behavioral and brain responses to language reflect different levels of linguistic representation w/ @whylikethis.bsky.social , @evfedorenko.bsky.social , and @rplevy.bsky.social (1/10)

Finally out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. Everything I think I know about word meanings. Particular focus on words that are unfamiliar or ambiguous. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My list on what to read about theory-driven cognitive science has now been updated to add a few more thoughts and references about the role of AI as 'in silico' models of human cognition. Your comments welcome - please add to the googledoc. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Theory: What to read

The role of theory in cognitive science Or: my guide to what to read if you really want to understand how to do good, robust , theory-driven cognitive science. (disclaimer: this is an aspirational gu...

docs.google.com

📄 New paper out in Collabra: Psychology. This work (with @perfors.net) shows how subtle differences in language use between humans & LLMs can be captured by measures of vocabulary centrality. 🔗 doi.org/10.1525/coll... @ucpress.bsky.social

How precise are numbers? Our new article in Language and Cognition (with @bodowinter.bsky.social and @lordlorson.bsky.social) finds that round numbers are used more approximately at higher magnitudes. (1/5) 👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

🎙️ 𝐍𝐞𝐰 #𝐖𝐢𝐀𝐈𝐑 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐎𝐮𝐭! In the new #WiAIRpodcast episode with @neuranna.bsky.social, we talk about the relationship between language, thought, and intelligence, with insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research. 📷 YouTube: youtu.be/e36ryy0Dsdo

Meaning emerges from context: by mapping how words share linguistic environments, algorithms can mathematically capture the nuanced relationships… Distributional Semantics by Gemma Boleda https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/gbaucew9 #CognitiveScience

—— 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

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

Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach

Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract. Semantic roles, namely the agent (‘doer’) and patient (‘undergoer’) roles, are fundamental to language acquisition, as they enable learners to map meaning onto syntactic structure. Grammars…

direct.mit.edu

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

Katerina Marie Simkova, Adrien Doerig, Clayton Hickey, Ian Charest: Representations in vision and language converge in a shared, multidimensional space of perceived similarities https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21871 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21871 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.21871

✨ Updated preprint ✨ Iris van Rooij & Olivia Guest (2026). Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? PsyArXiv osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aue4m_v2 @olivia.science Our aim is to make these ideas accessible for a.o. psych students. Hope we succeeded 🙂

What (if anything) can LLMs tell us about human language processing? I discuss this question and how psycholinguistics is moving forward with @colinphillips.bsky.social , to appear in BBS as a commentary on Futrell & Mahowald's article about LLMs & linguistics. arxiv.org/abs/2604.09466

Brilliant! In part b/c it holds up happiness as an illustration of what’s what 😉. But more seriously: IF YOUR SO CALLED THEORY DOESN‘T MAKE TESTABLE PREDICTIONS IT’S A FRAMEWORK. #TheoriesAreTheGoal Excellent example of an influential framework-not-a-theory here: experimentology.io/002-theories...

Mike Frank@mcxfrank.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖 What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics? I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061 To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!

Congratulations to @olaozpal.bsky.social & big team on new paper: large sample of children reveals the early origins of left-lateralization in language processing. Nice profile in MIT news: news.mit.edu/2026/languag...

Language development in the brain

The brain’s capacity to use and understand language expands rapidly in the first years of life. But by age 4, language processing is already handled by the left side of the brain, as in adults, accord...

news.mit.edu

New interactive simulation in my online textbook illustrating publication bias in meta-analyses, and some techniques to model bias-adjusted effect sizes. None of these work perfectly. We need an unbiased literature to draw valid inferences. lakens.github.io/statistical_...

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Excited to share our (w/ @smancha.bsky.social ) latest work, where we offered some EEG evidence suggesting that morphology and syntax might not be that different in language comprehension, capitalizing on some interesting properties of Mandarin Chinese. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Shared Neural Computations for Syntactic and Morphological Structures: Evidence From Mandarin Chinese

Although psycho-/neuro-linguistics has assumed a distinction between morphological and syntactic structure building as in traditional theoretical linguistics, this distinction has been increasingly c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Remember Chomsky's arguments about language innateness based on its putative un-learnability? Those arguments hinge on a pretty crazy theory of grammar. Here is Ted Gibson's summary of the original claims and a proposed solution in the form of dependency grammar: tinyurl.com/yzjrpbb8

Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by @binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL) 🤖🧵👇 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462 🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1

Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment

Determining whether AI systems process information similarly to humans is central to cognitive science and trustworthy AI. While modern AI models can match human accuracy on standard tasks, such parit...

arxiv.org

@kjhealy.co has a new version of his data visualization book coming out and 1) you’d be a fool not to get it especially if you do R stuff 2) it’s gonna be even more beautiful than the first one, which is truly lovely book 3) he put the ENTIRE content on his website for free, you lucky so-and-so

Data Visualization

A Practical Introduction

socviz.co

Idan Blank (UCLA, psych) makes the complex intuitive if you want to learn how LLMs work, watch👇 newly posted to YouTube (no ads) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGMn...

How Transformers Work: A Detailed, Conceptual Explanation (No Coding / Math)

YouTube video by IbanDlank

youtu.be

Out today! "How Does a Deep Neural Network Look at Lexical Stress in English Words?" w/ I. Allouche, I. Asael, R. Rousso, V. Dassa, A. Bradlow, S.-E. Kim & @keshet.bsky.social doi.org/10.1121/10.0... 1/

How does a deep neural network look at lexical stress in English words?

Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the following questions: What informs their decisions, and h

doi.org

**New** chapter on “Literacy” just published in the Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. The whole series is super, accessible chapters and no paywalls, a great resource for teaching. oecs.mit.edu/pub/epclh9no...

Literacy

oecs.mit.edu

The elusive lemma: On the representation of grammatical information in the mental lexicon. New paper by Antje Meyer. doi.org/10.1080/2327....

The elusive lemma: on the representation of syntactic information in the mental lexicon

According to Levelt, W. J., Roelofs, A., and Meyer, A. S. [(1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1–38.] theory of lexical access, word produ...

doi.org

1/10 A new paper by shirilevari.bsky.social shows that sound symbolism highlights the properties that distinguish referents from their competitors: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A🧵

Sound symbolism highlights relative distinctiveness: Evidence from English vocabulary

There is robust evidence that people associate certain sounds with meanings, yet the prevalence and importance of sound symbolism in natural language …

sciencedirect.com

New in Cognition: In politics, people are not always truth seekers. Often, we reach conclusions because they fit with preferred narratives: we are biased by ideological motivations. Are some people better equipped to overcome such bias than others?

Postdoctoral teaching associates: Two full-time posts, one permanent, one for 12 months jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Job Opportunity at Royal Holloway University of London: Postdoctoral Teaching Associate

Full-Time, Permanent/Fixed-Term - One permanent appointment and one 12-month appointmentApplications are invited for a Post-Doctoral Teaching Associate post in the Department of Psychology, Royal Holl...

jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk