The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Unsupervised nonmotor learning in the human cerebellum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.740142v1

Our view (imo) best explains the infant data that we and others have collected over the past several decades, and contrasts with more "maximalist" views which posit a richer starting state for infants' object representations (i.e. Spelke objects). PDF available at philpapers.org/rec/KIBMOR

New from me and Alan Leslie! We got the band back together to lay out our view on object representations in the infant mind: non-discursive indexes that operate within a language of thought, & which get development of a more complex object concept off the ground www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I recommend reading Chomsky's classic review of Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" (perhaps the greatest take-down in intellectual history): chomsky.info/1967____/ Chomsky later wrote a review of "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" focusing on the sociological issues: www.nybooks.com/articles/197...

I've seen attempts to rehabilitate BF Skinner, arguing that he was unfairly maligned (most famously by Chomsky), that he was caricatured by cognitive scientists. I was surprised to hear even Josh Tenenbaum say that Skinner wasn't so bad. So I picked up "Science and Human Behavior" to see for myself.

1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

And we're live! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16459. come be my postdoc! these positions will be primarily supported by my NIH R01 on infant word learning, with a bit of wiggle for some other projects/new ideas/collabs.

bergelsonlab@bergelsonlab.bsky.social · last mo.

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 wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

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!

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

Barbu Revencu@barbu-revencu.bsky.social · last yr.

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8

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

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

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...

Hiring! Athulya Aravind and I are looking for a full-time Postgraduate Associate at Yale (Linguistics/Psychology). The position is designed as preparation for PhD applications in linguistics, cog sci, or psychology, including structured mentoring and research training. tinyurl.com/mrxjya5t

Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hiring! Athulya Aravind and I are looking for a full-time Postgraduate Associate at Yale (Linguistics/Psychology). The position is designed as preparation for PhD applications in linguistics, cog sci, or psychology, including structured mentoring and research training. tinyurl.com/mrxjya5t

I think the “gaps in the field” approach to teaching research doesn’t help trainees because they fixate on gaps as inherently meaningful sometimes gaps exist because no one cares

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. 🧵

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint: "Social-information seeking in development: The child as experimental psychologist" (w/ Azzurra Ruggeri). osf.io/preprints/ps... We review literature on how children use their information-seeking and hypothesis-testing skills to learn about other agents, & ask whether...

Everyone who does work that is more formal than mine is lost in trivial details and needs to focus on real philosophy. Meanwhile. anyone who does work less formal than mine needs to get serious and quit being so frightened by a little math.

New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Constituent-constrained word prediction during language comprehension - Nature Neuroscience

Zou et al. reveal a key difference between human brains and large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategi...

nature.com

New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending osf.io/ucxra_v1

New out in Language: an experimental and theoretical study of the pragmatics of spatial loci with Dorothy Ahn and Annemarie Kocab. Maybe you're not supposed to have favorite collaborations, but I'll just say I feel a deep gratitude for the opportunity to work with these two! doi.org/10.1017/S009...

📣 📣 I am beyond excited to announce I will be joining the Yale Dept. of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in July 2027! Deepest gratitude to my colleagues and mentors, without whom this would not have been possible. More to come—I'll be recruiting students and hiring staff this coming year!

Our new paper on causal judgment is now out! Led by Can Konuk, with Salvador Mascarenhas. We study how causes that feature several variables (`A and B caused E') are represented in the human mind. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Plural Causes

Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

direct.mit.edu

New paper in Memory and Language in collaboration with the Language Comprehension Lab (lcl.ceu.edu) "Remembering times ahead: The effect of linguistic framing on representational momentum in state-change events" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (I'm 3rd author, but the only one on bsky) 1/5

Remembering times ahead: The effect of linguistic framing on representational momentum in state-change events

When people remember scenes, they can draw from different sources to reconstruct their memory, such as what they saw, and linguistic descriptions of w…

sciencedirect.com