Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…

direct.mit.edu

I wasn't able to attend #CogSci26 this year, but happy to share that a paper I presented there two years ago is now published in journal-length form 😊 The paper studies how people can rationally infer others' goals in open-ended spaces, and yet do so rapidly and spontaneously.

New paper finally out in @NatureComms with E. Leib, D. O’Shaughnessy, C. Gallardo, @sferrigno.bsky.social, and @spiantado.bsky.social. 📝Children across cultures discover the latent algorithms that structure what they see, even without instruction, feedback, or formal schooling.🧵 tinyurl.com/4a238m2d

Happening now, come by! #CogSci2026

Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz@laurasn.bsky.social · 4w ago

Pride month is over but #CogSci2026 is coming up - if you identify as LGBTQ* and are heading to Rio, join our Queer in CogSci affinity group meetup! cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-affin...

very chill, very normal view from the conference venue #CogSci2026

Geometry is not something humans invented from scratch —congratulations to Jialin Li on her first, first author paper. More to come from this team… @spiantado.bsky.social @wenjieli.bsky.social @jialin21.bsky.social @emilymsanford.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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...

You roll a fair die, hoping to get a 6. If you are successful, did you *intentionally* roll a 6? In a new paper, I explain why people hesitate to call lucky outcomes intentional:🧵 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

And so after a very brief hiatus, version 0.7.0 of "learning statistics with R" exists. Full rebuild in quarto, stylistic fixes, "epilogues from 2026" to comment on how the world changed since original publication, and as an added bonus, no longer misgenders the author learningstatisticswithr.com

Learning Statistics with R

learningstatisticswithr.com

I'm extremely stoked to go to #CogSci2026 next week! Will talk about our project on how children choose informative observations that allow them to learn about features of agents. Happening Friday afternoon in the "Development of social cognition" session. See you in Rio (or online) :)

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...

a rare example of a science figure that looks like a shitpost which is just photos of real events: babies trying to climb into tiny toy cars, sit on tiny toy chairs, and slide down tiny toy slides doi.org/10.1126/scie... (fig. 1)

New Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Curiosity shapes brain-like architectures and functions

How does complex cognition emerge from simpler underlying processes? We show that two components are sufficient: infant-like curiosity and brain-like biophysical constraints jointly drive the emergenc...

biorxiv.org

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

tinyurl.com

Pride month is over but #CogSci2026 is coming up - if you identify as LGBTQ* and are heading to Rio, join our Queer in CogSci affinity group meetup! cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-affin...

CogSci AFFINITY & DISCUSSION GROUPS - Cognitive Science Society

cognitivesciencesociety.org

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

NEW PAPER with Bethany Lassetter, @nataliehutchins.bsky.social, & @andreicimpian.bsky.social out now in Cognition! Open access link (free until late August): authors.elsevier.com/a/1nNS02Hx32... Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? 🧵 🧵 🧵 below:

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Abstract. Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex…

direct.mit.edu

🚨 Officially out at Child Development! A few years ago in Science, Ashley Thomas (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and colleagues argued that saliva could be a cue infants use to infer the strength of social relationships. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

An associative learning account of how saliva becomes a cue for comfort

Abstract. A recent study by Thomas et al. (2022) showed that 8.5- to 10-month-olds use saliva sharing as an indicator of relationship closeness: infants ex

academic.oup.com

—— 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

New paper in Cognitive Psychology on how people combine visual 👀, auditory 👂, and haptic information 🖐️ to make causal judgments. Led by Elyse Chase (www.elysechase.com), with Kevin Smith, and Sean Follmer. 📜 authors.elsevier.com/a/1nHnI2Hxok...

1/16 Do other species understand death? In this study with cockatoos, we approach this question from its foundation, by studying one of its central components: sensitivity to the permanent loss of a function. I will explain it in this thread (with videos) (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

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

🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.

Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations

We argue that intentionalist accounts of ostensive-inferential communication fail to adequately explain the role of external representations in human communication. We propose that the contents of a ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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