I’m honored to be part of the #PackardFellows class of 2026! With the help of funding from @packardfdn.bsky.social, I look forward to developing new ways to understand the architecture of the human mind and brain at @jhu.edu

Packard Foundation@packardfdn.bsky.social · 4d ago

We’re thrilled to introduce the 2026 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering — 20 innovative early-career scientists, mathematicians, and engineers whose bold ideas have the potential to deepen our understanding of the world and improve people’s lives. 🔗 www.packard.org/2026fellows

I’m excited to share my project with @shariliu.bsky.social on the asymmetric relationship between the neural correlates of dynamic object processing and spatial working memory! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 Preprint alert! 👶🧠🌊 "The Emergence of a Distinction between Things and Stuff" osf.io/preprints/ps... So excited to share my first infant study, with the wonderful Sanghee Song and Liz Spelke.🎉 Do babies expect sand to behave differently from solid objects? 🧵1/5

New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:

Trends in Cognitive Sciences@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social · last mo.

Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

Sad to be missing #cogsci2026, but if you’ll be there, be sure to go to Amber Liu’s talk on Friday (Oral Talk 13): “How an understanding of bodily energy constrains theory of mind” 🔋💭

official ad to follow soon but heads up: 1-2 postdocs slots in my lab, hopefully w/fall start! reposts welcome, details to follow. babies! word learning! cognitive & linguistic skills! #CogSciSky #DevPsychSky 🐦🐦 (lab info: bergelsonlab.fas.harvard.edu/prospectives) also recruiting grads this fall!

I just submitted a comment on the proposed new OMB rule, which is very dangerous fo rUS science. I urge you to consider doing the same. You can do so very easily at this web page: fight2win.standupforscience.net/campaign/164... A short comment is fine but write in your own words. More info follows..

Stand up for Science

Stand up for Science

fight2win.standupforscience.net

Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

—— 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

Who's excited for #SPP2026 happening at JHU? @socphilpsych.bsky.social

New ep! 🚨 We chatted with Dr. Shari Liu (shariliu.bsky.social) about her recent Nature Reviews Psychology paper. How do infants make sense of other people's minds? According to Shari, part of the answer lies in understanding the physical world. itsinnate.fireside.fm/40

Mind o̶v̶e̶r̶ Matter? (with Shari Liu)

itsinnate.fireside.fm

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...

It's #VSS2026! SO excited about the projects we've brought with us this year, and of course #phiVis to close things out. Come say hi, and don't forget to grab your lab 'merch' 👀 perception.jhu.edu/vss/

Heading to #vss2026? Check out the presentations from our lab @vssmtg.bsky.social

woah look at this amazing line-up of speakers (and also Tomer Ullman), talking about Intuitive Physical Reasoning at #vss2026 tomorrow! I'd be there if I could, and I can, so I will. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @rtpramod.bsky.social @shariliu.bsky.social SP Arun Kelsey Allen

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

Like every Mother's Day today I am asking that you consider a donation to @nationalbailout.bsky.social to help free mamas who are separated from their families by the injustices of pretrial detention systems. secure.actblue.com/donate/freeb...

Donate to #FreeBlackMamas

With your generous support we are able to continue to bail out community members, provide life-changing supportive services and resource groups who are organizing to transform the criminal justice sys...

secure.actblue.com

wandering the Sonora desert in a carefree fashion like

Bingo! Do I win a prize now?

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of the visual system in newborn infants is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com with @simonag.bsky.social and Darko Odic! We show that young children and adults use different internal signals for reporting memory versus perceptual confidence judgements. But by age six, the internal signals become comparable. Free access link: rdcu.be/fgZvV

Also receiving a NAS award was Ilya Sutskever, cofounder of OpenAI whose new company Safe Superintelligence (currently just a webpage) is valued at $32 billion. The current budget of NSF is $9 billion; Trump wants to cut to $4 billion. Make this math make sense. >>

Takeaways from this term’s writing workshop for grad students and post docs:

Is core knowledge actually core *perception*? In a forthcoming piece in BBS, @shariliu.bsky.social, Lisa Feigenson, & I comment on @daweibai.bsky.social et al.’s target article. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vnbep

So excited about this preprint: Bottom-up and generative computations uniquely explain neural responses across the social brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... An amazing colab led by @manasimalik.bsky.social with Minjae Kim, @tianminshu.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social Manasi's thread 👇

Manasi Malik@manasimalik.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯‍♂️ (With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

By age 4, children understand lexical causatives to refer to direct causes and periphrastic causatives to indirect causes in causal chains. Understanding causation by absence develops later in older children. @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social

How children map causal verbs to different causes across development - Nature Human Behaviour

This study shows that, by age 4, children understand lexical causatives to refer to direct causes and periphrastic causatives to indirect causes in causal chains. Understanding causation by absence develops later in older children.

nature.com