Can kids track how unfamiliar speakers use grammatical patterns to guess who is speaking? Yes they can, at least when the speakers are groups of nifty-looking aliens! Exciting new work on early sociolinguistic development by Yiran Chen and Lynna Tran in my lab. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Children infer speaker groups from variation in morphosyntactic patterns

Abstract. Variation in how people use language provides powerful cues to social identity. As children join a language community, they must acquire such soc

academic.oup.com

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

good morning!! it's day 2 of #cogsci2026, and we're so excited to hear about new work from Seo-young Lee, Jess Mankewitz, Polina Tvilodub, Jinyi Kuang, and Karla Perez!

How do people make use of so many different modalities to communicate? Come learn more at our Unconventional Communication workshop at #CogSci2026! 🗓️ Wed, 7/22, 8:30am 🔗Full program: unconventional-communication.github.io Here's what we'll be covering 👇

Telling two people to be selfish barely changes their behavior, unless they both know they got the same message! Our #CogSci2026 paper reveals that these group expectations only matter when we all know that we share the same expectations.

Fri 7/24 (am): David Tomz, @kushinm.bsky.social, & co. ask about the drivers of visual variation in European Paleolithic cave art — a wonderful team spanning cognitive science & archaeology (Poster Session 2, 10am)

Heading to #CogSci2026 in Rio this week? Overview 🧵 thread highlighting work being presented by members of the Cognitive Tools Lab (cogtoolslab.github.io) — come say hi! 🧠🛠️✨

When you meet someone new, what kind of questions do you ask? It’s tempting to think that *really* getting to know people is just a matter of asking the right questions. Excited to share the next chapter in ongoing work on what makes a *deep question* with amazing collaborators...

Really proud to be part of this dream team! We make a strong case for end-to-end systems that can not only propose new cognitive theories but *validate* them by collecting human data! ✨ Check out project lead Ben’s thread for the highlights and a link to our preprint!

Ben Prystawski@benpry.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New preprint! AI agents have shown impressive scientific automation capabilities. Can we apply them to psychology research, *including* human data collection? We introduce auto-psych, a framework that proposes cognitive models and uses them to design and run human experiments. 1/

Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

Just wrote a new blogpost trying to summarize my thoughts on the question of how and whether to use AI for research in psychology and cognitive science: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/usin...

Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!! cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Hello bluesky world :) excited to share a new paper on data visualization literacy 📈 🧠 w/ @judithfan.bsky.social, @arnavverma.bsky.social, Holly Huey, Hannah Lloyd, @lacepadilla.bsky.social! 📝 preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... 💻 code: github.com/cogtoolslab/...

Do children understand all types of visual media in the same way? "Cross-contextual diversity in children’s early understanding of visual media" - a new review paper led by Rebecca Zhu: osf.io/preprints/ps...

There are many people I’ve seen on here asking about how we go forward in the current moment We don’t have all the answers, but in the guide below my co-authors and I discuss building and sustaining academic communities dedicated to antiraicm Now at Collabra: Psychology osf.io/preprints/ps...

Happy CogSci evening to those who celebrate May your figure axis labels be large and visible

Why does Western paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often abbreviations? Our new #eSymb preprint (osf.io/preprints/ps... w Pagnotta, Psujek, Mendoza Straffon and Tylén ) challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices based on cogsci experiments. 1/

Same

I’m still recruiting for this position — please get in touch if you’re interested in working together!

Bria Long@brialong.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab! Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org

We have extended the deadline for this position to January 31st. Also, the start date is pretty flexible; if you're graduating next spring/summer and interested in the role, apply!

Bill Thompson@wdt.bsky.social · 2y ago

We have a postdoc position available in my lab at UC Berkeley, 2 years+, flexible start date, research focus is social reasoning and cultural evolution from a computational perspective. Deadline = November 29th. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04639

I don't know who needs to know this, but Pro Publica has an online thing that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial. (which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases) projects.propublica.org/claimfile/

Find Out Why Health Insurance Denied Your Claim

You likely have the right to access records that explain why your insurer denied your claim or prior authorization request. Use ProPublica’s free tool to generate a letter requesting your claim file f...

projects.propublica.org

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...

Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz@laurasn.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Manybabies4 paper is out! Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1000 babies tested in 37 labs; "Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition"

📄👀: cross-modal information flow in multimodal large language models neat interpretability work on how visual and linguistic information is integrated in MLLMs: "the model first transfers the more general visual features of the whole image into the representations of (linguistic) question tokens."

Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models

The recent advancements in auto-regressive multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising progress for vision-language tasks. While there exists a variety of studies investigatin...

arxiv.org

Our new paper “Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?” was just presented at #EMNLP2024! This is work led by Steven Feng, with Noah Goodman. arxiv.org/abs/2408.03617

Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?

While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of t...

arxiv.org

Not only are we back with a new episode but with a brand new series called "A conversation with a luminary", where we chat with a trailblazing developmental cognitive scientist. We're kicking things off with a conversation with the Rubinstein Professor Jenny Saffran! Enjoy! itsinnate.fireside.fm/21

A conversation with a luminary #1: Jenny Saffran

itsinnate.fireside.fm

Okay the people requested one so here is an attempt at a Computational Cognitive Science starter pack -- with apologies to everyone I've missed! LMK if there's anyone I should add! go.bsky.app/KDTg6pv

UW-Madison Psychology is hiring a new assistant professor in the area of computational approaches to language (broadly construed). Please share with interested parties! jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Assistant Professor, Computational Approaches to Language - Cluster Hire - Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Job Summary: This position is a full-time, tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant Professor level in the Department of Psychology at UW-Madison. The search is for a job candidate whose exper...

jobs.wisc.edu

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...