The Friendship Paradox states that your friends have more friends than you do.  "common friends" tend to be the hubs of social networks. A friend who is connected to 2-3 randomly sampled people is likely to be a highly connected "hub" of the social network. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

This is now out in Perspectives on Psych Science: doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Social-Information Seeking in Development: The Child as Experimental Psychologist - Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz, Azzurra Ruggeri, 2026

Research has established that children are “naive psychologists,” adept at understanding and navigating the social world from an early age. However, most of thi...

doi.org

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

New preprint: "Social-information seeking in development: The child as experimental psychologist" (w/ Azzurra Ruggeri). osf.io/preprints/ps... We review literature on how children use their information-seeking and hypothesis-testing skills to learn about other agents, & ask whether...

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years. A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD) $2.5B in 2023 alone. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci

Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some ...

arxiv.org

How does the brain continually adapt? Fresh in @natureportfolio.nature.com our super exciting collaboration with @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social showing that the cerebellum contextualises cortical dynamics enable multi-task learning: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Granule cells reorient cortical trajectories to separate contexts - Nature

Simultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells...

nature.com

new paper out: *~*~*~*~ "Revisiting the 5- to 7-Y ear Shift: The Age of Metacognitive Control?" (by Brod @garvinbrod.bsky.social , McAuliffe @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social , Ullman) *~*~*~*~ sharable paper link: bit.ly/5to7_2026 free pdf draft: www.tomerullman.org/papers/5to7s...

Revisiting the 5- to 7-year shift: The age of metacognitive control?

Abstract. The term 5- to 7-year shift refers to the marked changes in behavior observed as children transition from preschool age to school age. In 1996, a

bit.ly

This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very proud to share this new work led by the amazing Marlou Rasenberg (not on here), with Joel Fischer and me doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We use #EMCA methods to study empirically how LLM users shoulder the burden of solving sequential trouble and end up restructuring their own aims & activities

My main PhD paper is finally out in Nature Human Behaviour! The question: what cognitive strategies do people use when they teach, and can we nudge them toward a better one? Work with my PhD mentors @yaelniv.bsky.social, @markkho.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social. 1/5

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · 7d ago

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

Excited about new work from my CCN keynote (38m): youtu.be/v3J-vJfxhOE?... We often choose between Bayesian and neural net models of behavior. But what if there's a spectrum, and combining both makes better predictions? Introducing BBT w @akjagadish.bsky.social & Guangyuan arxiv.org/abs/2608.22154

The myth of the lone genius still dominates how we talk about science. But modern science now runs on large, coordinated teams. Big teams make big scientific breakthroughs. In a new piece for @APS I share 4 lessons for making big-team science work: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Four Insights to Guide Big-Team Science Projects

APS Fellow Jay Van Bavel describes four principles for building effective large-scale collaborations.

psychologicalscience.org

Modeling the mind as an optimal system reveals how human cognition is precisely tuned to the statistical demands of our environment. Rational Analysis by John R. Anderson https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.b3b3e5e7 #CognitiveScience

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02540-2Harootonian et al. find that people switch between effortful, tailored teaching and easier, simple shortcuts, favouring shortcuts even when unhelpful. Prompting participants to reflect on learners’ limitations restores effective, personalized instruction.

dlvr.it

How to approach an unknown language in the ocean? Here’s one of the first cases of AI interpretability leading to a scientific discovery -- in whales.

Fall 2026 version of Invitation to Formal Semantics now out! Extensively revised throughout, with new final chapter unifying events, tense, aspect & modality. eecoppock.info/bootcamp/sem...

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... I found this paper relevant to understand society's tolerance or lack of it, for people who are unable to work for reasons of poor mental health.

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation | PNAS

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation

pnas.org

🎉 New paper (and data) on editorial & peer review at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. With a wonderful team! @samzhang.bsky.social, @nicklaberge.bsky.social, Quinten and @aaronclauset.bsky.social. 1/ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Our paper "Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands" is finally out in Nature Communications! We combined bilateral PFC recordings, modeling and human data to ask: How do the hemispheres work together to store information?1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands - Nature Communications

Neural mechanisms underlying spatial working memory are not fully understood. In this manuscript, simultaneous bilateral monkey recordings and attractor networks show how weakly coupled, redundant pre...

nature.com

⚠️ Preprint alert ⚠️ How does the brain's fixed anatomy support flexible function? We explore this using recurrent neural networks with increasing levels of brain-like constraints, comparing them to empirical fMRI activity. (1/8) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Geometric constraints and cognitive inputs jointly shape emergent brain dynamics and topology

How the brain's physical geometry gives rise to its flexible functional repertoire remains a central question in neuroscience. Here, we trained three classes of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on a w...

biorxiv.org

Excited to share our new preprint on how the cerebellum specializes for language even in the absence of contralateral neocortical inputs, with @aniladmello.bsky.social and our collaborators @evfedorenko.bsky.social, @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

🚨Job Search announcement 🚨 @psychillinois.bsky.social is searching for an assistant prof in cognitive neuroscience. Come join us! Pls RT 🙏 Full ad: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #neuroimaging

People think we should be giving far less help to the rich and far more help to the mentally ill, poor, elderly, sick, young, retired, and socially disadvantaged in society. Our failure to do so is driving social discontent and conflict in society: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interested by a corpus of 19th/early 20th c. French for your research? Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo! 📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597 📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178

📣 New study out today! We show that the brain's language network stays remarkably stable with age — same topography, lateralization, selectivity and connectivity as in younger adults — while the domain-general multiple demand network showed altered activity patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains - Nature Communications

Here, the authors show that aging affects brain networks differently, with neural changes mirroring the preservation or decline of the cognitive functions they support. The multiple demand network exh...

nature.com

Our new paper is now out in @pnas.org! How does the (baby) brain extract regularities from sequences from what-follows-what up to large-scale network structure? What if it all came from a single mechanism? www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

A 2025 Science paper reported that bonobos combine calls to create new meanings. We analyzed its stats and then reanalysed the data. --> The claim did not hold up. Our paper (open access): doi.org/10.7717/peer... With @johanlind.bsky.social @annajonand.bsky.social

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

New preprint! Taking inspiration from ML where train-test split is critical to show that an agent is generalizing rather than just memorizing, we did some experiments that suggest mice have an inductive bias towards generalization. Led by an amazing graduate student Ningjing Xia. See what you think!

An inductive bias for generalization in mouse olfactory learning

Animals must generalize from limited experience, yet behavioral experiments in the laboratory setting rarely assess whether or how rapidly they generalize. This contrasts with machine learning systems...

biorxiv.org

New from me and Jessica Applin! We find that infants' behavior in a cracker choice task is impacted by an agent’s partial knowledge of object quantity: infants choose based on the agent's (inaccurate) representation rather than their own 🤯 Now in press at JECP, preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Bringing analytic rigor to agentic AI for science: The Brain Researcher platform for neuroimaging data analysis arxiv.org/abs/2608.19902 - our group's latest work, led by Zijiao Chen, on an agentic harness for neuroimaging analysis that aims to promote analytic rigor.

Bringing analytic rigor to agentic AI for science: The Brain Researcher platform for neuroimaging data analysis

AI agents can execute scientific analyses, but an analytic output becomes a defensible claim only after alternatives are weighed and the claim is limited to what the evidence supports. Agents may repr...

arxiv.org

Reasoning evolved not as a solitary quest for truth, but as a specialized social tool for evaluating and producing arguments with others. Reasoning and Argumentation by Hugo Mercier https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.96cf440a #CognitiveScience