How do children’s exploration strategies change across development? New preprint with Azzurra Ruggeri, Silja Kessler, and @ericschulz.bsky.social: “Tiny Alchemists: The Developmental Emergence of Empowerment in Exploration” osf.io/preprints/ps... Paper summary below 1/6

Can’t remember what was quoted here, but let’s please make it our collective effort to stop giving US our power and money, stop depending on it for science, and I don’t know, e.g. stop holding international conferences there?

Jorge Ramírez-Ruiz@jramirezruiz.bsky.social · 2y ago

I forever wonder why keep giving the US so much power (I get it — they *have* power and we leave in a preferential attachment social network, but if we know this, I don’t know, do as much as we can to distribute wealth and power?)

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

Our new paper "Noisy memory generates value in changing environments" just got published in Adaptive Behavior! doi.org/10.1177/1059... tldr: we find that stochastic encoding of outcomes can perform better than perfect encoding (woot?), esp. if you have asymmetric encoding (for reward vs no reward)

The idea that self-censoring is a new form of oppression forced on white men rather than a normal part of having a prefrontal cortex and existing in society is some of the biggest bullshit in the centrist/right wing coalition gender grift

Millennium Falco@ritamitsuko.bsky.social · last yr.

LMAO I WISH

Cracked the code for good coffee at conferences #rldm2025 @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social

Cool heated exchange. Looks like social media sometimes shows the true, dark side of people (if you missed it you missed it I guess). Otherwise the exchange is interesting, and it’s always cool to see disciplines engaging.

Andrew D Wilson@adw.bsky.social · last yr.

Hmmm. Why is this ecological, if it’s about how brains represent things?

And it looks like Canada will keep being Canada, the good and bad, but more importantly, we will not live in the dark timeline.

It's really hard to overstate how hugely favored conservatives were up until two months ago. Here's the graph of Canadian polling between March 2023 and March 2025. (Reminder: blue is conservative.) Those are months and months of 20+ point leads for Tories.

Our workshop at RLDM on intrinsic motivation is still accepting abstracts for lightning talks - two weeks left to submit! More info on our website: sites.google.com/view/pimbaa2... Come join us in Dublin! 🤩 @jramirezruiz.bsky.social @surabhisnath.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social

PIMBAA @ RLDM2025

Inviting all Curious Agents to attend our workshop! The goal of PIMBAA is to bring together experts in intrinsic motivation across cognitive sciences, neuroscience, developmental science, robotics and...

sites.google.com

🚨 RLDM Workshop alert! 🚨 You are coming to @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social in Dublin this summer? Come to our fun, surprising, novel, information-seeking workshop on intrinsic motivations in biology and AI! We have an amazing lineup of speakers! Visit our website: sites.google.com/view/pimbaa2...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... - really pleased that this paper with Henry Potter is now published in the European Journal of Neuroscience 😊

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience

The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Lately my 3yo falls asleep caressing my arm and head and I don’t know what I did to deserve this but boy life is simple and beautiful sometimes

“Forget that old adage: that history continues to keep us from the world we want to see” - Lake Street Dive lyrics to uplift your Saturday… and that bounce appropriately in my mind while reading the “The future is not written“ chapter from @wiringthebrain.bsky.social‘s Free Agents

🚨 Inviting all Curious Agents 🔍👀 to attend our workshop @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social!! With amazing speakers from across disciplines, we attempt to arrive at the core principles underlying intrinsic motivations in biological and artificial agents 🎮🧠🤖💪 Website: sites.google.com/view/pimbaa2...

PIMBAA @ RLDM2025

Inviting all Curious Agents to attend our workshop! The goal of PIMBAA is to bring together experts in intrinsic motivation across cognitive sciences, neuroscience, developmental science, robotics and...

sites.google.com

Hey hey! Going to RLDM this year? We are organizing the interdisciplinary workshop PIMBAA: Principles of Intrinsic Motivations in Biological and Artificial Agents. Join us (and our amazing speaker lineup!) to discuss IMs in Neuro, CogSci, RL and Robotics. Website: sites.google.com/view/pimbaa2...

PIMBAA @ RLDM2025

Inviting all Curious Agents to attend our workshop! The goal of PIMBAA is to bring together experts in intrinsic motivation across cognitive sciences, neuroscience, developmental science, robotics and...

sites.google.com

Sometimes I do feel like wind power in Taiwan, and now I know why

Daily Spurious Correlation 🤖 @dailycorrelation.bsky.social · last yr.

Wind power generated in Taiwan correlates with Google searches for 'i am tired' (r=0.98)

Every time I see science in the US slowly (and rapidly) declining, I try to think how in Mexico we have a president that is a woman, a physicist, a former PI in sustainable energies and development. It helps.

I’ve slowly grown fond of Connections, anyone else here plays it? Yesterday was fun

Mathematical theme at the NYT crossword today ❤️

some ways to generate electricity A) use sunlight to drive photosynthesis in plants, let plants die, wait ~100 million years, dig up fossilized plants, burn plants, use heat to boil water, use steam to drive a rotating turbine, use generator to make electrons B) use sunlight to make electrons

One of the funnest things about going into a slightly different research direction is that at each new paper read, you come up with N questions and realize K papers afterwards they’ve all been addressed, then you repeat this branching combinatorial process until you die

I’ve been thinking about how monumentally stupid the Elon video game cheating thing is and I think it comes back to this post there aren’t a ton of people who work in cars, or rockets, or even software but everyone - everyone! - understands cheating at video games totally unnecessary self-own

CerberusXt@cerberusxt.bsky.social · 2y ago

Elon removing Asmongold bluecheck on Twitter for covering his Path of Exile cheating, and Asmongold scrambling for Elon validation in leaked DM, it's just pathetic inception :'D www.reddit.com/r/SubredditD...

We only accept that good ol’ fashioned American racism. Not that imported shit.

A reminder: for genotypes to produce phenotypes, they have to go through development

Looks like a crazy science ride!

David Schoppik@schoppik.com · 2y ago

Big paper from @paigel.bsky.social in our lab: Sensory feedback is always crucial for proper development, right? Wrong! Crazier still, the motor system is the slowest part of a developing reflex circuit! Surprises abound in this bluetorial c’mon along…. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/19

Something to keep in mind for 2025 Written by James Miller of A Small Fiction

Here’s a Christmas present for y’all: a new physics post! I’ve done these things on “the other side”—let’s see how many people are interested on 🦋! I’ll be talking about a famous principle in classical mechanics: that of “least action.” And I’ll tell you why it’s a misnomer! Buckle up! 1/26

Reading @wiringthebrain.bsky.social’ Free Agents, I remembered something Paul Cisek mentions in his talks (and credits Giovanni Pezzulo with), which is that the question to answer is not how intelligent agents solve the symbol grounding problem, but in fact how they solve the symbol detachment one