Sam Cheyette
@samcheyette.bsky.social
I study thinking. Postdoc in the CoCoSci lab at MIT.
are you a puzzle-enjoyer, or would you like to become one? try out a game or two at mitpuzzles.com! we're trying to figure out the factors that separate novice from expert problem solving, and what changes with experience, using self-motivated puzzle solving
MIT Puzzles
MIT researchers study human cognition through logic puzzles
mitpuzzles.com
Very excited to share a new preprint that’s been brewing for a long time! This work was led by the exceptional @traceym.bsky.social, and made possible by a developmental + comparative + computational dream team. osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
New work with @samcheyette.bsky.social & Susan Carey testing the memory architecture used when learning/producing center-embedded sequences. Adults don't use Push-Down Stacks as is often assumed, instead they rely on a Queue-like memory architecture onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Do Humans Use Push‐Down Stacks When Learning or Producing Center‐Embedded Sequences?
Complex sequences are ubiquitous in human mental life, structuring representations within many different cognitive domains—natural language, music, mathematics, and logic, to name a few. However, the....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions. Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though. We will persist.
a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " .
Alt: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " .
media.tenor.com
There are so many ways one could provide context for this data. For example, in the last five years universities have received 52-55% of their research funding from the federal government. That's the lowest percentage since the 1950s. 1/x ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/high...
How Universities Became So Dependent on the Federal Government
For decades, universities got billions in federal dollars for research. The relationship was mutually beneficial, until President Trump decided it wasn’t.
nytimes.com
1. Quick—which of these shapes is different from the others?
For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...
The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled
Federal scientists warn that Americans could feel the effects of the new administration's devastating cuts for decades to come
technologyreview.com
I am proud to report that humans still have the upper hand on palindromes
Come join the Cognitive Origins Lab at UW-Madison! We are hiring two full time lab managers to start this summer! One specializing in child development and one in non-human primate cognition. Application links below.
Human behavior is hierarchically structured. But what determines *which* hierarchies people use? In a preprint, we run an experiment where people create programs that correspond to hierarchies, finding that people prefer structures with more reuse. arxiv.org/abs/2311.18644 1/7
