Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.

Our paper “Confidence is detection-like in high-dimensional spaces” is now published in Open Mind, led by @wiktoriakozyra.bsky.social and @kevingoneill.github.io direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Confidence Is Detection-Like in High-Dimensional Spaces

Abstract. Confidence estimates are often “detection-like”—driven by positive evidence in favour of a decision. This empirical observation has been interpreted as showing that human metacognition is li...

direct.mit.edu

psychologists love to call one second '1000 ms'

After years of analyzing thousands of drawings from hundreds of adults and children, I am excited to share my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social )! Using a simple drawing task, we show how topological structure is represented in the mind and its importance in spatial memory.

We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...

A lot of experimental philosophers are people who use their philosophical expertise to make contributions to psychology. It's analogous to how there are people in math departments using their math expertise to contribute to biology and physics; noone asks if their work is 'really mathematics'.

Ethan Landes@ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2w ago

Thanks to everyone who commiserated and shared their experiences of being boundary-policed in philosophy. The DN comments were so mind bogglingly frustrating, I decided to write a follow-up that dissects why "this isn't philosophy" is such a dumb thing to say ethanlandes.com/posts/2026/0...

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 · 5mo 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...

(1/7) New paper in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Manipulating Prior Causal Beliefs Affects the Formation of Apparent Causal Illusions" Why do people sometimes "see" causal links in zero-contingency data? We tested if this is rational updating, not bias. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Manipulating prior causal beliefs affects the formation of apparent causal illusions

Non-contingent learning data can produce an apparent “illusory” or “false” perception of causality (“causal illusion”), especially if a potential caus…

sciencedirect.com

new preprint! in my final grad school project led by @kmiceli.bsky.social & @ninavanrooy.bsky.social w/@felipedebrigard.bsky.social, we challenge ~20yrs of causal cognition research by finding a context in which people's causal judgments are completely *unaffected* by norms! osf.io/preprints/ps...

My paper 'Desire, decoupling, and factive mentalizing' is forthcoming at Mind and Language! Attributing desire requires the complicated stuff for attributing belief, but empirical work suggests it's easier to do. What gives? Check out more here: philpapers.org/rec/DEADDA-5

Fascinating application of resource-rationality to evolutionary modeling:

Max Taylor-Davies@maxtaylordavies.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🍄 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🍄 I, and others, have previously drawn a comparison between the classic “cost-avoidance” argument for social learning and the central idea of resource rationality... (1/8)

Interested in learning about Causal Models? The slides for the summer school course that @bonan.bsky.social and I taught at Tsinghua are now online: quillienlab.github.io/summer_school/

We had a great audience for our #CogSci2026 tutorial on Autocorrelated Sampling in Cognition. Led by @lcastillo.bsky.social, with talks by @neilbramley.bsky.social, Bob Rehder, Stella Qian, and me. If you were not in Rio, the tutorial materials are here: lucas-castillo.github.io/mcmc-workshop/

Just arrived in Rio for #CogSci2026! I will be participating in poster sessions 1 & 4 (P1-C-19, P4-C-13) to talk about Bayesian models of social cognition. Happy to chat and connect :)

This paper is so beautiful There's a complex debate on this topic that pits @tadegquillien.bsky.social's causal model theory vs. Carlotta Pavese, Paul Henne & Bob Beddor's know-how theory vs. @orifriedman.bsky.social's probability-based theory .... and the papers on all sides are just so, so good

Open Mind@openmindjournal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

You roll a fair die, hoping to get a 6. If you are successful, did you *intentionally* roll a 6? In a new paper, I explain why people hesitate to call lucky outcomes intentional:🧵 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Time for #CogSci2026 @cogscisociety.bsky.social! Excited to chat about the latest work from my wonderful collaborators - we’ve been thinking about library learning, social learning, and their interaction with resource rationality. Drop a message, or just stop me if you see me!

I'm extremely stoked to go to #CogSci2026 next week! Will talk about our project on how children choose informative observations that allow them to learn about features of agents. Happening Friday afternoon in the "Development of social cognition" session. See you in Rio (or online) :)

Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

Research by @mariusmercier.bsky.social et al suggests people can predict, with broad accuracy, from the (rarity of) conspiracy theories someone endorses/rejects what other conspiracy theories they would endorse/reject, and infer related personality traits: buff.ly/kAkhRl2

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

I've seen attempts to rehabilitate BF Skinner, arguing that he was unfairly maligned (most famously by Chomsky), that he was caricatured by cognitive scientists. I was surprised to hear even Josh Tenenbaum say that Skinner wasn't so bad. So I picked up "Science and Human Behavior" to see for myself.

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

—— 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

—— 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

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

Barbu Revencu@barbu-revencu.bsky.social · 2y ago

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8

I last published in a Frontiers journal in 2012, when I thought their publishing model was bad. It's SO much worse now, but also such a stark consequences of the pathology of publications-as-currency plaguing academia.

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

New paper accepted as a proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society: "Inferring arithmetic skills from speed and accuracy”! We tested whether people were optimal in their inference of others' math skills. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Congratulations to the winners of the #HBES2026 Don Symons Adaptationism Award: Michael Barlev & Steven Neuberg, for “Rational Reasons for Irrational Beliefs” (2025) psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

Congratulations to our #HBES2026 Early Career Award winners: Daniel Conroy-Beam and Anne Pisor! 🎓

A lot of research suggests that social cognition involves representations of Welfare-Tradeoff Ratios (WTRs), an index of how much someone values someone else. Here we find evidence for such representations in children, who make queries that are maximally informative about a partner's WTR.

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

New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵