A new research Article in the journal by Aaron Baker and colleagues: www.nature.com/articles/s44... (in Press) @aajbaker.bsky.social @yarrowdunham.bsky.social @julianje.bsky.social

Got caught by surprise with the award! Thank you @ecbb2026.bsky.social !! Forgot to take a photo of my poster, but here's a glimpse of it featuring the showstopper Paul. ✨😁

ARAA@araa.at · 3w ago

So proud that two of our ARAA folk won awards at #ECBB2026! 🤩🥰 Congrats to @annaek.bsky.social and @awanib.bsky.social 🙌

How does the architecture of a city shape the way we think, talk, and draw space? And how do spatial conventions travel across cultural generations? New paper in Open Mind, spearheaded by Z Alinam (w J Nölle, C Vesper, K Tylén & me): doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.380 🧵 1/

When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization

Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...

doi.org

New paper with Liz Spelke, @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that when 4- to 6-month-old infants observe two individuals share saliva, they infer that those individuals have a close relationship. Free access link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1niQg_Oow0...

You roll a fair die, hoping to get a 6. If you are successful, did you *intentionally* roll a 6? In a new paper, I explain why people hesitate to call lucky outcomes intentional:🧵 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵

Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner’s generosity

Humans face the adaptive challenge of assessing how much other people value them. Evidence suggests that the human mind is well-equipped for this task…

sciencedirect.com

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

🚨 New in @science.org: CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines Link to the publication: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... I’m excited to share this paper, which I wrote together with @schneali.bsky.social, @corneliabetsch.bsky.social & @laulilleholt.bsky.social (1/5)

Charles Darwin died OTD in 1882. Stories of a deathbed renunciation of his doubts about Christianity and recantation of his theory circulated widely (mostly in the US, predictably). They were, however, lies. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to John Herschel. 🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci

Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Lindsey Powell@lindseypowell.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Far too long in the making.. but finally out in #AnimalBehaviour @asab.org: Orang-utans and chimpanzees #cooperate strategically based on the partner’s incentives. doi.org/10.1016/j.an... w/ @elisafelsche.bsky.social , Josep Call & @federicorossano.bsky.social

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable

Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

academic.oup.com

Editors of Developmental Psychology have put together a great summary for early career scholars on how to do a good peer review for their journal. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

A Guide to Peer Review in Developmental Psychology

Click on the article title to read more.

doi.org

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in call similarity between individuals). However, testing this causal effect can be difficult, because it requires ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

In an increasingly divided world, how do strangers become friends? Parakeets might have something to teach us! New paper on formation of affiliative relationships, led by Dr. Claire O’Connell doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

eva.mpg.de

updated preprint from @loganjames.bsky.social @themusiclab.org: humans share acoustic preferences with a variety of other species I love this finding—in call/song/noise/etc pairs where we know (from prior work) that animals have a preference, humans reliably identify the more-attractive sound

Humans share acoustic preferences with other animals

Many animals produce sounds during courtship and receivers prefer some sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergent evolution may generate similarities in preference across species and could und...

biorxiv.org

Hunter-gatherer communities like the Ainu often suffered severe consequences from settler colonialism. I wrote about how Pokémon, the world's biggest media franchise, tackles this painful topic. www.eurogamer.net/as-pokemon-l...

As Pokémon Legends: Z-A launches, we return to Pokémon Legends: Arceus' rose-tinted take on the past, and the hard questions it raises about Japanese history

Pokémon Legends: Arceus, relevent again upon the release of Legends: Z-A, makes an awkward job of engaging with history - but Game Freak should continue to try.

eurogamer.net

Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*? In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts. tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

New preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore? Well, I wrote about it. 🧵

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes? I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences | PNAS

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences

pnas.org

Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)

Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events

“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfold sequentiall…

sciencedirect.com

"Critics charge EP with producing unfalsifiable 'just-so stories.' Yet EP explicitly employs Popper’s hypothetico-deductive method: abductive reasoning from proximate data to hypothesize evolved functions, deduction to generate novel predictions, and empirical testing to confirm or falsify them."

Save the date! Remote participation will be also possible:)

Bartosz Radomski@bartoszradomski.bsky.social · last yr.

We are organising the 1st Basic Principles of Cognition conference at RUB, Germany, 9-10 October 2025. Save the date! #MinimalCognition #BasalCognition #CognitiveScience #CogSci #Philosophy #Mind #Life #Organism #Evolution basicprinciplesofcognition.wordpress.com #EPSA25 #ESPP #GAP12 #KogWiss

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making

Recent research from economics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and marketing is increasingly interested in the idea that people face cognitive costs when making decisions. Reviewing ...

cell.com

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)