Prediction in language comprehension across the lifespan Review by Kara D. Federmeier, Hui-Sun Chiu, Cynthia L. Fisher & Yukun Yu go.nature.com/4w4Mn4G #psychscisky

Be kind to the academics in your life and try to help them pretend it's still July

Deadline Dec 1: Asst prof (tenure track), open area, ‼️NU Linguistics‼️ "an integrated approach to the scientific study of language, utilizing experimental, computational, and/or data-intensive approaches to inform linguistic theory and its applications" linguistics.northwestern.edu/about/open-p...

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

I'm just now reading @randomwalker.bsky.social's writeup of his ICML keynote. It is very insightful. Everyone thinking about the future of work in the age of AI should read this. www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...

What will be left for us to work on?

My keynote at ICML 2026

normaltech.ai

Human social interaction relies on a universal, biologically rooted engine that enables rapid communication long before children master the… The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.e3df24b2 #CognitiveScience

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

Do language models know who did what to whom? Led by grad student @josephdenning.bsky.social, and Hannah Guo (when she was the first undergrad RA in the lab!)

Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?

Abstract. Language models (LMs) are commonly criticized for not “understanding” language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. H...

direct.mit.edu

CAMP[9] announcement! November 6-9 at UCSB. camp9ucsb.github.io/conference/

How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

Open Mind

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino.bsky.social · 2w ago

Academics: What's a journal in your field that's great? I feel like they are a dwindling breed. Criteria: (1) No APC. Supports green or diamond OA. (2) High-quality and relatively fast peer review. (3) Editors who provide real curational value and exercise purposeful agency in the decision process.

Alpha rhythm determines speech perception rate? And speeding it up makes unintelligibly fast speech comprehensible? This is nuts! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

If you are heading to the Cognitive Science Society conference next week, you might enjoy the most recent episodes of the Cognition Project podcast: Donald Norman, Eleanor Rosch, and George Lakoff talk about the first time the conference was held (among many other things!)

I've posted a preprint of a philosophical paper I've written on the relationships between understanding, prediction, and compression, based on a talk I gave at SPAN 2025. Now in press at Synthese. philarchive.org/archive/POLUPA

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

Hey #CogSci2026! I'm so honored to be receiving this year's Elman Prize! Please join @m2b2.bsky.social and me Friday 2-3:30pm in Gavea A for two joint talks: "Multilingualism in Cognitive Science" and "Multilingualism for Cognitive Science and Society" 1/4 @cogscisociety.bsky.social

One of the first things we found was that visual feature representations became progressively less independent, even before detectable damage in visual cortex. Information about one feature (say, curvature) started influencing another (say, contrast). We call this neuronal feature confusion. 5/

The full BBS treatment from me and @futrell.bsky.social on "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the LMs" is now out, with all the commentaries and our response. If you "Save PDF", it will give you the whole target article + commentary + response pdf: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New preprint! Children often beat adults at learning hidden patterns. Using eye-tracking and a method we built in eLife (Hann et al. 2026), we found the edge is not better error detection. It is flexibility: kids update their beliefs, adults cling to old predictions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Flexible belief updating drives the childhood advantage in statistical learning

Children often outperform adults in probabilistic statistical learning tasks, yet the mechanisms underlying this developmental advantage remain poorly understood. Here, we used eye-tracking measures o...

biorxiv.org

And we're live! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16459. come be my postdoc! these positions will be primarily supported by my NIH R01 on infant word learning, with a bit of wiggle for some other projects/new ideas/collabs.

bergelsonlab@bergelsonlab.bsky.social · last mo.

official ad to follow soon but heads up: 1-2 postdocs slots in my lab, hopefully w/fall start! reposts welcome, details to follow. babies! word learning! cognitive & linguistic skills! #CogSciSky #DevPsychSky 🐦🐦 (lab info: bergelsonlab.fas.harvard.edu/prospectives) also recruiting grads this fall!

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

Finally out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. Everything I think I know about word meanings. Particular focus on words that are unfamiliar or ambiguous. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

—— 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 #𝐖𝐢𝐀𝐈𝐑 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐎𝐮𝐭! In the new #WiAIRpodcast episode with @neuranna.bsky.social, we talk about the relationship between language, thought, and intelligence, with insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research. 📷 YouTube: youtu.be/e36ryy0Dsdo

Because the eye’s high-acuity region is so small, where we look serves as a precise, moment-by-moment window into our cognitive goals and intentions. Eye Movements by Mary Hayhoe https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.a42adb11 #CognitiveScience

Audiomotor prediction errors drive speech adaptation even in the absence of overt movement journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... Planned, but not executed, speech-> neat paradigm. Results suggest that prediction errors, rather than corrective motor commands, drive audiomotor adaptation in speech

Audiomotor prediction errors drive speech adaptation even in the absence of overt movement

Speech motor adaptation has been explained either by sensory prediction error learning or by integrating corrective motor commands, but the mechanism remains debated. This study shows that speakers ad...

journals.plos.org

Thanks to the Weber School for inviting me to give a #TEDx talk! I discuss how much people vary in their inner thought — from thinking mainly in words to thinking mostly abstractly — and the implications it has for understanding AI cognition. youtu.be/WAm0XQIRBMw

Do We Think In Words? Does AI? | Anna Ivanova | TEDxWeber School Youth

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

youtu.be

How can we acquire new knowledge and skills on a daily basis while remaining the same person? I'm excited to share our new preprint led by @hyejinjadelee.bsky.social & Ally Dworetsky tackling this question, just in time for #OHBM2026: doi.org/10.64898/202... 🧵👇 #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Functional brain organization is stable within individuals across years

Brain regions exhibit dynamic yet highly coordinated activity patterns that form large-scale functional networks measurable through resting-state correlations. While their association with fluctuating...

doi.org

It is not easy to characterize the features represented by human language cortex. This work is a step toward doing so. Using small, interpretable feature sets, we explain language-network responses and show a shared feature basis across brain regions, with graded variation across individuals.

Michael Lepori@michael-lepori.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨New preprint!🚨 We know that LM representations can be used to predict brain responses to language. But what *features* of these representations underlie this alignment? We use SAEs to find out!

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Factive mindreading reflects the optimal use of limited cognitive resources

Abstract. The capacity to represent the mental states of other individuals, known as ‘mindreading’ or ‘theory of mind’, is key to successful social predict

royalsocietypublishing.org