Kudos to @science.org for this self-analysis of the peer review process. These kind of data are never shared and don't have to be. Wildly refreshing to see it out in the open. Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Analyses of deidentified data reveal complex interactions that quantify success at elite general science journals.

science.org

Presenting our work today at #CogSci2026 🎉 Our findings reveal interesting similarities, and important differences, in how humans and modern AI systems explore causal structures. If you're at the conference, come by and say hello! Today 5:30–7:00pm Reasoning session, P3-L-104

Mandana Samiei@mandanas.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We recently investigated how humans and AI reason through causal rules: arxiv.org/abs/2606.06464 Accepted at #CogSci2026. We gave adults and LLMs agency to actively experiment using a Blicket causal game, breaking down their process into the iterative loop shown in the following figure:

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to innovate at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. 📍Munich 📅Flexible start: 10/2026–03/2027 ⏳Full consideration by 14/08/2026 💼Funded for 2 years, extension possible Discover, grow, collaborate, eat cake.

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

After my lecture at the FENS-CHEN Cambridge summer school, I shared this coding tutorial (pytorch): It shows how to fit RNN (and spiking RNN) to electrophy to predict optogenetic perturbation from cortical recordings. github.com/guillaumeBel...

GitHub - guillaumeBellec/perturbation_testing_tutorial

Contribute to guillaumeBellec/perturbation_testing_tutorial development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

🚨 Paper Alert 🚨 Searching for concepts 🦓⚽ in memory 💭 is fundamental to our cognition. But how exactly do we represent 🗺️ and navigate 🏃‍♀️through concept spaces? osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/adwzp

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

Both brains and RNNs can re-use components of computation across similar tasks or contexts. But what exactly are those “shared components”? How can they be used to solve several tasks? We address these questions in a new preprint with @avm.bsky.social! Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Interpretable compositional computation with recurrent neural networks

Flexible cognition utilizes reusable components to enable rapid adaptation of behavior to different contexts or tasks. Analysis of artificial neural networks trained on multiple tasks suggested that t...

biorxiv.org

How can the brain learn the hidden hierarchical structure from high dimensional data? In our latest work, we use synthetic datasets to analyze two classes of bio-plausible learning rules: variants of Direct Feedback Alignment, and local self-supervised learning. We find only the latter succeeds.

Just in time for the start of next week's Braitenberg 100 symposium, I'm excited to share "Dopamine: From prediction to error," a site I built to better understand where the dopamine RPE hypothesis came from and where it might be headed. efharkin.com/s/dopamine-h... 1/3

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

I have had wonderful experiences with Open Mind so far. Fair reviews. Speedy. Thoughtful editorial assessment. No pressure to oversell claims or enhance "narrative" for the sake of splash and sparkle (looking at you, vanity journals). Solid science and solid community. Will keep sending stuff there!

—— 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

Fun paper though direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Merits of Curiosity: A Simulation Study

Abstract. ‘Why are we curious?’ has been among the central puzzles of neuroscience and psychology in the past decades. A popular hypothesis is that curiosity is driven by intrinsically generated rewar...

direct.mit.edu

We recently investigated how humans and AI reason through causal rules: arxiv.org/abs/2606.06464 Accepted at #CogSci2026. We gave adults and LLMs agency to actively experiment using a Blicket causal game, breaking down their process into the iterative loop shown in the following figure:

Can we match self-supervised backpropagation using local learning rules? We show it is possible in our new paper accepted by ICML. We achieve: 1. theoretical equivalence to BP in a controlled setup 2. new SOTA for local learning across image datasets 3. same performance as BP on multiple datasets

Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏

NEW PAPER. Why do larger networks train better? "Because they contain more candidate *sub*networks that can learn the task" → lottery tickets This popular explanation uses an appealing but misleading metaphor🧵 We propose an intuitive alternative grounded in theory: escape dimensions

Only one week left until our PhD application deadline @mpicybernetics.bsky.social. If you’re interested in the intersection of RL, RNNs, and analyses of neural & behavioral data from novel, cross-species foraging experiments, make sure to submit your application by June 15! #NeuroJobs More info👇

Roxana Zeraati@roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 3mo ago

If these research directions resonate with you and you're interested in joining our team, we now have 2 open PhD positions! More information about the positions: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... More information about our research: www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/906930/natur... #NeuroJobs

New meta-analysis of 100 studies in which people evaluated immigrant profiles finds that “one of the most important factors explaining immigrant preference is an irregular entry.” BSky authors: @mamalik.bsky.social, @mfroman.bsky.social Open Access: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

How do we predict what’s going to happen next? In a new paper, we @arikahn.bsky.social @licezhang.bsky.social @nathanieldaw.bsky.social @catehartley.bsky.social ask how kids, teens, and adults solve this problem. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Developmental Change in Structure Learning Reflects a Shift From Recency‐Based to Relational Prediction

Children are adept statistical learners, capable of parsing streams of structured input into meaningful units, but the cognitive processes they engage during learning may differ from those of adults...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

A first review on the #somatosensory MMN—the brain’s surprise signal for #touch. We outline how S1/S2 track probabilities, generate mismatch responses, and that sMMN appears altered across disorders and aging. A window into how the brain learns from #predictive touch. #neuroskyence #neuroscience

The Somatosensory Mismatch Negativity

The somatosensory mismatch negativity (sMMN) is a neural signature of automatic deviance detection, reflecting predictive processing in touch. This review synthesizes human, animal, and computational...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

🔥 Our latest work is state of the art 3D pose estimation, with video analysis from a single camera! 🎥 Just train with 3D data, and then only 1 camera is needed! 🖤 Presented this week at #CVPR2026 by lead author Ti Wang! Please repost🩵🙏🏼 xiu-cs.github.io/FMPose3D/ arxiv.org/abs/2602.05755

Our book is officially out and there is even an audiobook version! Unfortunately, it’s not narrated by us, so you’ll miss out on our lovely Italian/French accents (a tragic loss for audiobook history). Apparently, Amazon.fr has only three copies left: THANK YOU! www.amazon.fr/Decision-Mak...

Incredibly grateful to @cmiehl.bsky.social and @gjorjulijana.bsky.social for their thoughtful and spot-on Preview "Novelty beyond counting" of our recent work in Neuron with @modirshanechi.bsky.social and @gerstnerlab.bsky.social! 🧠✨ It's a real honor 🙏 www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

🎉 My PhD work has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com! How do we learn who caused what - and how much control we had - when outcomes depend on multiple people? We studied how humans do so using a new social learning task, computational modelling and fMRI. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Very insightful short essay by Petra Schwer ( mathstodon.xyz/@PetraSchwer ): ‘The meaning of doing mathematics’ “(Can AI solve all math? What do we actually mean by doing mathematics? How do we communicate mathematics? What is mathematics beyond problem solving?)” arxiv.org/abs/2509.15998

The meaning of doing mathematics

Can AI solve all math? What do we actually mean by doing mathematics? How do we communicate mathematics? What is mathematics beyond problem solving? This essay is my attempt to answer these question...

arxiv.org

“Basic neuroscience hasn’t produced new drugs.” 💊 Not true - zuranolone (PPD), suzetrigine (pain), gepants (migraine), and more... were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. I wrote a Perspective on why this matters. @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...

How basic neuroscience has paved the path to new drugs

A growing list of medications—such as zuranolone for postpartum depression, suzetrigine for pain, and the gepants class of migraine medicines—exist because of insights from basic research.

thetransmitter.org

Awesome results from @fluketc.bsky.social @dudman.bsky.social and team, both for dopamine field and for all that train animals in tasks www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reward magnitude determines reinforcement learning efficiency

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

science.org

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky