Now out in an issue! Children find it easier to represent uncertainty about *what* an object is than *where* an object is, with interesting implications for both early possibility reasoning and object representations ~~ Check it out 👉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

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 li...

direct.mit.edu

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük@esranur.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

🫨

tal boger@talboger.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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...

There are many reasons I'm excited about this project. One is just the sheer amount of data involved. There are 13 different experiments included here -- a lab record! -- including several unique paradigms and data from adults and children.

Gabe Waterhouse@gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When you look at a complex scene, you perceive various ensembles — sets of items of various sizes, numbers, etc. Are some more salient than others? In a new paper (w/ samiyousif.bsky.social), we provide an answer to this question! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sadly I will not be at VSS this year, but here's what our lab is up to! (In solidarity with many VSS attendees, however, I may be foregoing many hours of sleep -- not for long walks on the beach but due to the anticipated arrival of a second child any day now...)

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

Sami Yousif@samiyousif.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience? These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience? These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.

We plan to hire a post doc to start in Fall 2026 (flexible), in the Aulet Lab at UMass Amherst, funded for two years. The postdoc will help establish our developmental fMRI research program studying symbolic number acquisition in 4-8 year old children (among other things!).

A few years ago, my favorite website (@puddingviz.bsky.social) put out this great piece analyzing a study of how randomizing ability changes with age. It includes demos where readers produce sequences of random coin flips, dice rolls, and locations in a 3x3 grid. pudding.cool/2022/04/rand...

We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it.

Are 25 year olds really more random than 60 year olds?

pudding.cool

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo

Very proud that this is finally out! Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · 6mo ago

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Counting Training Creates Number-Biased Representations in Deep Neural Networks: https://osf.io/356xd

Over the past several months, I've been working (in collaboration with www.thoughtscape.com) to rebrand my lab and improve our website. This new version better captures our core interests/ideas. I'm really, really thrilled with how things turned out: spatialcognitionlab.org

Spatial Cognition Lab @ OSU

The Spatial Cognition Lab studies how we perceive, represent, and interact with the spatial world around us — all in the service of understanding how the mind works in general. We're also interested i...

spatialcognitionlab.org

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

How Prediction of the Future Affects Encoding of the Present: Cooperation or Competition?

Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...

direct.mit.edu

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The “Crowd Size Illusion” and the Relativity of Number Perception

When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Gabe Waterhouse@gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · last yr.

I am excited to announce my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social ) about a new illusion of *number*: the “Crowd Size Illusion”. osf.io/preprints/ps...

This dispute will have to be settled 'on the field' next semester. Looking forward to it. 👋

Brynn Sherman@brynnsherman.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Note that my lab won 2 Jenga games in a row, so by the *raw* score, the labs are actually tied 👀

Last night, we hosted the inaugural momentslab.org vs. spatialcognitionlab.org competition. After going down early following a disappointing Jenga loss, our team rallied to a 2-1 victory, winning in Codenames and pool. Proud to have won against such tough competition! 🏆

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time

Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

sciencedirect.com

There’s a deep difference between sentences like: (1) Jane caused the glass to break. vs. (2) Jane broke the glass. A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2) [Thread]

Are OSF view-only links broken? A journal keeps un-submitting our paper because the link doesn't work, but (a) it did work, just before the update, and (b) it says it should be working as usual in the OSF interface. Anyone else having this problem, or know of a solution?

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

arxiv.org

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org

Moments Lab

momentslab.org

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain

The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

biorxiv.org

smh the bots are just repeating themselves at this point

tal boger@talboger.bsky.social · 11mo ago

sami is such a creative, thoughtful, and fun mentor. anyone who gets to work with him is so lucky!

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org

PCDL @ OSU

cogdevlab.org

Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below: mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...