Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

It's time for my favorite manuscript submission ritual! Scrolling through every single ManuscriptCentral login I've ever used in my career in a futile, fifteen-minute attempt to gain entry before I inevitably give up & reset my password to a new one which will also be lost to the sands of time.

Meet @dorsaamir.bsky.social, director of the Mind & Culture Lab at Duke University & 2026 APS Spence Award recipient! #Psychology

Learn about her research, her career, & her advice for the upcoming generation of psychological scientists: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

So elaborate! Stephens was also among the first to suggest that these hairstyles were not wigs, as previously assumed, but often braided hair that was sown into these configurations with needle and thread.

Hyperfixation of the week: there is apparently a field called “forensic hairdressing” where people try to reconstruct ancient hair techniques. Below is one from Ancient Rome ca. 120 AD. The leading figure is a hairstylist-turned-archaeologist named Janet Stephens who also does video tutorials. Cool!

I will never forgive AI for taking the em-dash away from me. I was — gratuitously — using it first!

Yep! They passed the beta Prolific checks AND the Qualtrics checks.

White font text that told them to ignore previous instructions and type in a specific phrase instead.

Yep, same here. We also caught some bots that made it past their checks, which does not inspire confidence.

Technical Assistant I (Lab Manager - Cognitive Construction Lab) - Amherst, Massachusetts, United States Title: Technical Assistant I (Lab Manager - Cognitive Construction Lab) Executive Area: Academic Affairs College/School/MBU: College of Natural Sciences Department: Psychology and Brain Sci Work Locat...

The Cognitive Construction Lab is hiring a full-time lab manager! Come work with me at UMass Amherst, starting this Fall. Apply here: tinyurl.com/3dpz5m3j

Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide?

Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures.

Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops.

New preprint: Top of the World

osf.io/preprints/so...

Thread:

So cool! Thanks for sharing.

And just in case you can’t access the paper, here’s a link to the preprint: 41b0d2e6-435c-465c-b32a-535b7d25ad01.usrfiles.com/ugd/41b0d2_0...

We then apply the framework to a few case studies in cognitive science — visual illusions, large exact number abilities, & spatial–numerical associations — to demonstrate its utility for recontextualizing debates, and offering new predictions. We hope it’s a useful thinking tool for the field!

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?

In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

What does it mean for culture to ‘shape’ cognition? Human culture and cognition vary widely across groups, but how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition remains underspecified. In this review, we outline four qualitatively different pathways by which cult...

"...it remains unclear how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition. The study outlines four pathways: culture can privilege one cognitive process over another, prune out disfavored processes, produce new processes, or have no effect on cognition."
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

We did actually write that ourselves, though this making me rethink my prose 😅

Good catch! I did not follow your instructions. That DOI wasn't just inaccurate, it was completely fabricated. And honestly? That's a huge problem. Do you want me to compile a list of other errors I've introduced into your workflow?

Quite honored to be included in this amazing cohort of 2026 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recipients. Grateful to APS for the recognition, and to the mentors & collaborators & friends who make it all possible.

Congratulations to the 2026 APS Spence Award recipients: Dorsa Amir, William Brady, Emily Finn, Daniel Yon, Yuan Chang Leong, Andrew Grotzinger.

Congratulations to the 2026 APS Spence Award Recipients! @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @williambrady.bsky.social, @esfinn.bsky.social, @andrewgrotzinger.bsky.social, @ycleong.bsky.social, @danieljamesyon.bsky.social,

www.psychologicalscience.org/members/awar...

Fascinating research by @dorsaamir.bsky.social et al finds marked variation in 4 cooperative behaviours—fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty—among children aged 5-13 in five societies, which converges toward the societal norms in middle childhood:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

People form beliefs not only as individual agents, but as members of social groups.

Children (4-6 years old) who belonged to a group were more convinced by evidence that supported their ingroup’s belief (and were less convinced by evidence that opposed their ingroup): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It also can’t be overstated how different our ancestors’ experience of the cosmos likely was compared to ours — in the absence of light pollution, you can just SEE the galactic center every night for months at a time.

Fun etymology fact (which is maybe obvious but I just learned!)—

The word “galaxy” comes from the Greek “galaksias” meaning “milk” (same root as “lactose”).

The Greeks thought our galaxy looked like a ring of spilled milk, which is also why we (& others) call it the Milky Way, but metaphors vary!

Our lab has the capacity to test ~500 uni students each semester
If you’re a researcher in cognitive psychology or metascience and need data collection support, we’d love to collaborate. We can help collect high-quality data from a large student sample.
Get in touch to discuss potential projects!

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

Such cool work!

The emergence of cooperative behaviors, norms, and strategies across five diverse societies Children’s cooperative behaviors and norms develop along distinct cultural pathways shaped by local norms.

No matter where they live, kids cooperate according to their community’s social norms by middle childhood.

Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4r0Rxga

Overall, we think this integrative assessment allows us to better understand how cooperation gets off the ground & underscores the importance of cultural contextualization. Thanks to all the families, collaborators, and my wonderful mentor @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social who made this possible! (5/5)

We also looked at the relationship between behaviors and identified 3 distinct strategies, with maximization being the most popular strategy early on. Interestingly, this bottom-up approach also seemed to capture the underlying subsistence structure, which we recover quite nicely here. (4/5)