New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science!

"Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos"

I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs.

doi.org/10.1177/1745...

What makes adaptive decision-making possible?
New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Research Assistant II Company Description: By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds...

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Pre-doc Researcher/Lab Manager! 🚨🚨

Full-time pre-doc research opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026).

Review begins April 10
Apply: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive...

Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇

Bravo Reed!

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability Abstract. We examined potential processes by which children decide to make hard as opposed to easy choices to accomplish a goal. Five- to 7-year olds (N =

New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...

Come by to check out our symposium on *Evaluating and predicting performance and learning* this Saturday at #SPSP2026! We have a fun lineup of speakers @stavatir.bsky.social y.social, Evan Weingarten, and @davidlevari.bsky.social

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?"
We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity)
📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps
📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok
📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Please contact Nina if you're interested in working with us! Much of this work is also with @dgrand.bsky.social & @tomcostello.bsky.social, and others! Very fun collaborative environment. And Nina is wonderful to work with!! (She is also the coolest among us, FWIW)

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!

Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

🎉 Congratulations to our very own David Badre on being elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society! This prestigious honor recognizes his sustained and impactful contributions to cognitive science. Read more here: tinyurl.com/5n8rdrsm

a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

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/...

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally ...

Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

Pedagogy Recommendations Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

Over the years I've been asked many times for advice on pedagogy, what to read to learn more, etc. I've finally put together a bunch of materials into one blog post: Key Advice • Readings • Neuromyths • For Computer Scientists • Classroom Tips. Enjoy!
parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/ped...

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨

We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait

The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

Fantastic -- bravo!

A replication of Triplett’s ‘social facilitation experiment’ Scientific Reports - A replication of Triplett’s ‘social facilitation experiment’

Arising out of discussions in @csi-research.bsky.social we conducted a Registered Report replicating Triplett’s (1898) experiment with over 400 children, showing children completed the task faster when paired with a coactor, compared to competing the task alone rdcu.be/eQwAE 1/3

Screenshot of news headline: "Jesse Eisenberg Reveals Plan To Donate His Kidney To A Stranger 'In Six Weeks,' But Doesn't 'Know Why'"

Tired: moral dumbfounding
Wired: *moral* dumbfounding

From Groundwork to Graduate School: How a New CoPsy Series Helps Students Explore Clinical Career Paths

Interested in clinical psychology? Check out this recent article showcasing Prof. Elizabeth Thompson’s Clinical Psychology Conversation Series, which helps Brown students explore careers in clinical and applied psychology.
👉 Read the full story here: tinyurl.com/wurw4jzs

Graduate Study Our graduate programs are highly selective, successfully recruiting and retaining excellent students, competing with the top programs in the world. Our doctoral students go on to be scientists and sch...

PhD applications for Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown (@browncopsy.bsky.social) are due on December 1st. We have a great community, so please apply, share with your students, etc. Read more on our fancy new website here: copsy.brown.edu/graduate-study

🧠 Thrilled to share our NeuroView with Ellie Pavlick!

"From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?"

AI foundation models are coming to neuroscience—if scaling laws hold, predictive power will be unprecedented.

But is that enough?

Thread 🧵👇

Last call for applications! Join us in advancing AI and the science of mind at Brown. Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…

Glad to see my first-year project is out!

In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.

1/n

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab!

We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

Slow change blindness from serial dependence Slow change blindness, when attentive observers fail to notice large changes that happen gradually, raises questions about how visual information is combined across time. One plausible integration str...

Slow change blindness from serial dependence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

#AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

New work led by the brilliant @yizhang96.bsky.social:

In lab experiments and naturalistic groups, people generalize perceptions of acceptance and rejection across social network ties.