Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

📢 We're recruiting! 18-month postdoc in civic science & AI-human interaction @BrownUniversity, hosted by ARIA (NSF AI Institute). Bridge computational brain science with community engagement & public impact. Apply by Aug 1: apply.interfolio.com/188112

Live footage of the US Eastern Seaboard: youtu.be/TadK2L0-4-I?...

Sunshine (2007) | 3.1% brightness of the sun | Power of the sun scene | Chris Evans | Cillian Murphy

YouTube video by Movie stamps

youtu.be

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ambiguity and confirmatory reward learning

We tend to interpret feedback in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Such confirmatory tendencies are often viewed as cognitive flaws, but mig…

sciencedirect.com

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

Pointing out that “everyone else is already doing it!” is a classic way to motivate prosocial behavior. But how can we encourage actions which aren't popular yet? In a new paper in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social, Mike Norton and I had a lot of fun testing a method using "collective streaks." (1/5)

"I notice that your survey sends bots to an endless purgatory of link redirects. To properly assess potential risks, in your revised protocol please provide a list of all URLs, and clarify whether LLM survey participants are conscious and capable of experiencing psychological anguish."

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

404media.co

Pointing out that “everyone else is already doing it!” is a classic way to motivate prosocial behavior. But how can we encourage actions which aren't popular yet? In a new paper in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social, Mike Norton and I had a lot of fun testing a method using "collective streaks." (1/5)

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

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/... 🧵

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS

Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

pnas.org

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Pre-doc Researcher/Lab Manager! 🚨🚨 Full-time pre-doc research opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026). Review begins April 10 Apply: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive... Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇

Research Assistant II

Company Description: By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds...

jobs.smartrecruiters.com

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...

Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability

Abstract. We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N =

doi.org

Come by to check out our symposium on *Evaluating and predicting performance and learning* this Saturday at #SPSP2026! We have a fun lineup of speakers @stavatir.bsky.social y.social, Evan Weingarten, and @davidlevari.bsky.social

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

Matan Mazor@matanmazor.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?" We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity) 📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps 📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok 📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers osf.io/preprints/ps...

Please contact Nina if you're interested in working with us! Much of this work is also with @dgrand.bsky.social & @tomcostello.bsky.social, and others! Very fun collaborative environment. And Nina is wonderful to work with!! (She is also the coolest among us, FWIW)

Nina Wang@ninawang.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Interested in doing a postdoc on misinfo/belief change with me and @gordpennycook.bsky.social? We are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at York University. Contact me for more details! #PsychJobs

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

🎉 Congratulations to our very own David Badre on being elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society! This prestigious honor recognizes his sustained and impactful contributions to cognitive science. Read more here: tinyurl.com/5n8rdrsm

David Badre Elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society

tinyurl.com

Cognitive Science Society@cogscisociety.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Please join us in celebrating the 2026 CogSci Society Fellows: David Badre, David Barner, Nick C. Ellis, Matthew Goldrick, Ulrike Hahn, and Anna Papafragou. Congratulations to all! 👏 Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/fellows to learn more about their research and impact on the field!

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The “Crowd Size Illusion” and the Relativity of Number Perception

When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Gabe Waterhouse@gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · last yr.

I am excited to announce my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social ) about a new illusion of *number*: the “Crowd Size Illusion”. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology

Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally ...

cell.com

Over the years I've been asked many times for advice on pedagogy, what to read to learn more, etc. I've finally put together a bunch of materials into one blog post: Key Advice • Readings • Neuromyths • For Computer Scientists • Classroom Tips. Enjoy! parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/ped...

Pedagogy Recommendations

Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

parentheticallyspeaking.org