Lance Ying, William Van Uitert, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Pragmatic Reasoning in Design https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26322 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26322 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.26322
Sam Gershman
@gershbrain.bsky.social
Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University https://gershmanlab.com/
Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Using Theory of Mind to Arbitrate between Social and Non-social Learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28601 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.28601 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.28601
Sometimes my kids are so out to lunch they literally forget to eat the lunch I packed them.
For those interested in memory transfer (the topic of my book): #16mmfilmography (avgeeks.bsky.social) hosts The Way Out Men, a documentary that features James V. McConnell studying his cannibal worms (featured at 9:45): 16mmfilmography.org/film/the-way... #hps #philsky
The Way Out Men (Part One) — 16mm Filmography
16mmfilmography.org
I'm really excited about this work. In addition to a new genome assembly for Stentor, we show through transcriptomics that a pathway for long-term depression (in neurons) is involved in mechanosensory habituation... despite the cell having no synapses!
bioRxiv Molecular Biology@biorxiv-molbio.bsky.social · 2w agoAn improved Stentor coeruleus genome and time-resolved transcriptomics link cyclic nucleotide-dependent kinase signaling to single-cell habituation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.23.740246v1
This is a really interesting and important study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... However, isn't it concerning that sweeping conclusions about functional organization of cortex are being reached on the basis of a single task?
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
nature.com
calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!
I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics recently, observing an interdisciplinary group of scientists as they grappled with the limits of language in the face of biological complexity. My scene report: clairelevans.substack.com/p/report-fro...
Report from Goleta
An account of three days haunting the halls of the Institute for Theoretical Physics.
clairelevans.substack.com
We're looking for volunteers for our #CCN2026 community event's live problem-solving demos! Join a 10min think-aloud session solving an everyday planning task or playing a video game, and help kick off our panel discussions. 🎬 🙌 Please sign up here if you're interested: forms.gle/D7HNwFE1pet9...
CCN 2026 Naturalistic Problem Solving event interest form
Please fill out this form if you're interested in attending our community event at CCN 2026! No sign-up required to join, but an RSVP helps us get a headcount. Time: Wednesday, 5th August 2026, 16:0...
forms.gle
LLiu, Shuze@liushuze.bsky.social · 2mo ago
Join us at both conferences this summer! Our #CogSci2026 workshop features a series of invited talks on problem representations and abstractions. Our #CCN2026 community event opens a broader discussion on naturalistic problem solving: frameworks, tasks, methods, and where the field should go next.
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.
Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...
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
A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
Editorial
I am extremely pleased that Open Mind has gone from concept to reality with this inaugural issue of our first volume. It has been a long road. Nick Lindsay at MIT Press had a vision for creating an op...
direct.mit.edu
To adapt to a new prior, tuning curves should "move" toward more frequent stimuli ('prior attraction'). But in adaptation studies they are shown to move away from the more frequent stimuli ('adapter repulsion'). Oh also how do tuning curves move at all?? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks - Nature Communications
How sensory systems rapidly adapt to changing stimulus statistics remains unclear. Here the authors show that gain adaptation in recurrent networks can implement fast efficient coding, unifying prior ...
nature.com
It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!
—— 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
Join us at both conferences this summer! Our #CogSci2026 workshop features a series of invited talks on problem representations and abstractions. Our #CCN2026 community event opens a broader discussion on naturalistic problem solving: frameworks, tasks, methods, and where the field should go next.
Mark Ho@markkho.bsky.social · 2mo agoHow do human minds make sense of big, messy problems? 😵💫🌀 How do we distill complexity into something simple enough to solve? 🤔💡 We’ll be tackling these questions (and more!) at two workshops on task representations, abstractions, and construals #CogSci2026 #CCN2026 🧵 framing-the-problem.github.io
New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...
Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship
People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...
news.mit.edu
A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.09.731162v1
1/11 When we think about learning, we think about brains. Neurons. Animals. But what if learning began much earlier? Our paper in PRXLife, led by @maorknak.bsky.social explores whether a unicell relative of animals can use environmental cues to anticipate future stress. 🧵 Link: go.aps.org/4vAU56R
In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell pureed a bunch of worms and fed them to other worms. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories...
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine
In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.
quantamagazine.org
Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵
This paper is absolutely wild and amazing. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions
Birds use a variety of navigational strategies, including the geomagnetic field, especially when other cues are not available, such as under overcast or nocturnal conditions. Magnetite particles in th...
science.org
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...
Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins - Volume 49
cambridge.org
Error-driven representation learning in the mesolimbic system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.18.725950v1
I totally agree, science is not a simple optimization problem, or at least not in the form conceived by most existing systems. @battleday.bsky.social and I wrote about this recently from a somewhat different perspective (emphasizing the 'problem problem'): gershmanlab.com/pubs/Battled...
gershmanlab.com
Melanie Mitchell@melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 3mo ago"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...
World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence
Abstract. This special issue examines how natural and artificial intelligences (AIs) model the world, and what this modelling reveals about cognition and r
royalsocietypublishing.org
🥳 Super excited to share our lab's first preprint, led by @hungyun.bsky.social "Distinct tasks engage shared neural subspaces in human hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/9)
biorxiv.org
I think preferences for active asset management arise from a failure to distinguish skill and luck, perhaps the greatest destroyer of wealth. It's also what creates conditions for "cognitive arbitrage" by asset managers.
Arthur Prat@arthurpr4t.bsky.social · 3mo agoespecially after mgmt fees and trading costs. That's the whole Warren Buffett paradox, who recommends everyone to buy indices, while himself cherry picking stocks (successfully). But given that it is possible, "why not me? I'm sure I can do it" seems to be the usual response.