Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?
In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
thanks for the recommendation!
oral presentation titled “racial diversity and racial representation in U.S. children’s books” to be presented by Catarina Vales on Friday 8/1 at 1p (Pacific time) during the CogSci 2025 conference.
excited to share this work at #cogsci2025, Fri at 1p!
this is great! here’s another (not browser specific, though slightly more work) way to remove the AI preview from google searches bsky.app/profile/cval...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.
www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
I love—em-dashes.
results of a google search “raising happy children”, with the AI overview at the top.
results of a google search “raising happy children -ai”, with no AI preview.
if (like me) you’d like to remove the AI preview when doing a google search, adding “-ai” to your search should do the trick!
IU has the oldest Folklore Department in the country--no longer a major. Cognitive Science? gone! PhD programs also sacrificed. Full list here: www.in.gov/che/files/In...
Or here's a thought--maybe we could hire more actual human teachers, pay them better, make class sizes smaller, build in more paid prep time, and generally just invest in education instead of investing in AI.
“It is destabilizing, frustrating and enraging to feel like my daughter, who wasn’t even 18 months old, has done more for public health than some people who are now currently in charge of it”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
I wrote a piece for @sciam.bsky.social about why White parents should be talking to their kids about race and racism. It was so great to work with @megha.bsky.social on this piece! Please share! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...
Developmental psychologists and statisticians team up to investigate the accuracy and reliability of research tools used to assess how children learn. Read more about how CMU researchers statistically evaluate spatial arrangement tasks with nontraditional data in this featured article! #research
we appreciate you!!
Fellow academics, I know that it can feel like capitulation to think about focusing on your work in the face of so many attacks on us right now.
Remember that knowledge is the enemy of ignorance & ignorance is the tool of tyranny.
Doing our work is now a form of rebellion. Keep rebelling.
Don’t fall into the trap of normalizing any of this with this sort of language that we’ve seen from so many universities, falsely equating the current situation with other presidential transitions
This is unprecedented, unconscionable, and deliberately disruptive.
Have the backbone to say that.
New lab paper just dropped! Led by Roberto Vargas, we looked at how a person’s geometry of concept relations aligns to their group identity and how this is impacted by information sources.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
A 🧵 1/9
one thing that helps me figure out which books to read is to look up suggestions for books similar to titles i enjoyed. i’m lucky to have access to a great catalog at our local library, i find reading on an e-reader much more convenient (as much as i love the experience of reading a physical book).
getting back to reading for fun was my resolution for 2024 and i read 50 books this year! i did: an app to track my progress (StoryGraph); a kindle case with a strap for comfortable holding; and downloading more than 1 book at a time (so i could switch if i didn’t get into a book).
We tend to think of anti-vaxxers as affluent, White, crunchy granola-type moms. But that stereotype ignores how precarity creates vulnerability to anti-vaxx messaging.
Take Tara, whose daughter had a sudden shift in temperament not long after a routine vaccine. 🧵1/
open.substack.com/pub/jesscala...
all data and code are openly available on OSF!
… — replicating results from tasks that not not measure intended constructs does little to advance theory & failures to replicate may be due to the tasks lacking reliability (and not to the underlying hypotheses being incorrect).
in the discussion, we connect these results to the larger discussions in the field about replicability and open science.
we argue that the current standard of not examining psychometrics of cognitive tasks is a threat to developmental science…
we additionally did some (even cooler!) permutation analyses to see whether the results could be explained by participants randomly placing items on the board — spoiler alert, that seems unlikely!
we then used this measure to assess the psychometrics of the task, which showed appropriate construct validity (β = 0.40), internal consistency (r2 = 0.20), and test–retest reliability (r2 = 0.41; ICC = 0.56).
to capture the structure of a child’s arrangement, we developed this (very cool!) measure that captures the number of clusters, the homogeneity of the clusters, and how well differentiated they are.
(note: our focus was on semantic structure, though the method can in principle be used to assess similarity across other dimensions — e.g. Woodard, Zettersten, Pollak (2022) used it to assess emotion knowledge in children).
we analyzed data across 200 U.S. children aged 4-9 to evaluate the construct validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability of this task. children are asked to organize items on a board with distance proportional to similarity.
