Social structure as a form of collective intelligence: a new framework Abstract. Collective intelligence arises when group-level cognition exceeds the capabilities of individual members, enabling more effective learning, decis

Social structure as a form of collective intelligence

In our framework, we argue that social structure is a form of collective intelligence shaped by and shaping individual decision-making

Out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org w/ J Brooker, E van Leeuwen royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Chimpanzees spontaneously prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities, and collective context strengthens this behaviour Abstract. In both humans and non-human animals, collectives can sometimes overcome individual cognitive biases or shortcomings to execute more rational beh

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

I am excited to share my first publication in Behavior Research Methods! 🚀

We’ve released ChildLens: 109 hours of open-access, annotated egocentric video/audio from children (ages 3–5).

Paper: rdcu.be/fdfAI

Reading the room: Children integrate multiple social factors to predict and interpret objects' locations Abstract. Adults infer social information from objects' locations by integrating multiple causal factors, which is often challenging for children. To test

New paper in Child Development!

When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way!
academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

nice 'journal club' piece from @rtompkins.bsky.social in this month's Nature Reviews Psych, on one of my fave social cognition findings (and not just because i'm married to the person who came up with it)

Please share!

The Rijeka Cognitive Sciences Symposium 2026 is open for registrations and talk/poster submissions by Masters and PhD students!

13 and 14 July - This year's topic is Social Cognition

The event is free!

potest flags against the lex CEU lying on the floor

more protest flags on the floor of a hallway

in 2017, we were painting protest signs in the department hallway because the orbán government was kicking our university out of the country. so many lives made so much worse under this illiberal regime. finally, finally, finally it's done. 🇭🇺❤️‍🔥

Glad we have a comprehensive article on the intra-community split in the Ngogo chimpanzees. It was shocking to see chimps that once had close, intimate friendships become violent, lethal enemies within just a couple of years!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

What a beautiful moment.

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

Plural Causes Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because

(a) There was cilantro in the soup

*and*

(b) Amy is allergic to cilantro

Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social!

Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity We quantitatively document a sperm whale birth event, revealing collective support behaviors across kinship lines. Using high-resolution drone footage, computer vision, and multiscale network analysis...

a female family member led birth assistance and that after delivery, all individuals oriented toward and helped lift the newborn, taking turns in a coordinated, cross-kin effort. Despite historically observed foraging segregation, kinship barriers dissolved as all unit members contributed”

How do people search for information to make efficient decisions?

Our new theory, now out in Psychological Review, suggests that an efficient search rule is (at the core of) the answer. And eye-tracking data support our theory.

Check out here (it's open access): psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123

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

Calibrated deference: Children's evaluations of responses to disagreement across knowledge gaps Declaring that you are right or wrong is not merely a factual matter, but often a deeply social decision about when to own up to the limits of your kn…

New paper with Ben Morris and Alex Shaw out last week in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We find that children are sensitive to who has better evidence when evaluating how people behave in disagreements.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/3

Set-up of experiment 2. The tool giver was placed in enclosure 3 (middle), whereas the tool recipient was placed in enclosure 4 (right). The illustration depicts the configuration in which the social and nonsocial apparatuses for both individuals were baited with high-value rewards.

Far too long in the making.. but finally out in #AnimalBehaviour @asab.org:
Orang-utans and chimpanzees #cooperate strategically based on the partner’s incentives.
doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
w/ @elisafelsche.bsky.social , Josep Call & @federicorossano.bsky.social

Not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow: Children are more open to possibility in the future than the past Abstract. Previous research finds that children are surprisingly closed to the possibility of unlikely events. Two studies with 5-to-8-year-old children (N

Not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow: Children are more open to possibility in the future than the past

🚨Work by Umang Khan & Christina Starmans

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...

Ding-dong! The Dutch Fish Doorbell needs you to help migrating fish A Dutch lock is closed for the spring, and its employees want you to tell them when migrating fish come knocking by ringing a digital doorbell

Well, in more pleasant news, the Fish Doorbell is back... 🧪

Do Great Apes Know Each Other's Names? Probing Great Ape Comprehension of Social Vocal Labels — Animal Behavior and Cognition

New article out exploring great ape name recognition! We find partial evidence that zoo-living chimps & bonobos know each other's names 👀 Huge thanks to Animal Behavior and Cognition (a great open-access journal) & co-authors for your collaboration!🎉🐵

unsvr1.com/web/abc/work...

Maternal information sampling targets children's knowledge gaps According to recent computational approaches, when children are presented with information by knowledgeable others, children can make the pedagogical …

New @sfb1528.bsky.social and @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social publication. We show that mothers are worthy of the pedagogical assumption: they preferentially sample information that fills their child's knowledge gaps and children learn best from maternal sampling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inferences When encountering a novel word, adults and children as young as 12 months old often reason that it refers to a novel object rather than one with an ex…

Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

MB8 Screen Use

ManyBabies8: Screen Use 📱

MB8 aims to document early screen use across diverse cultural contexts & examine links to language & socio-emotional development in children under 3.

We’re inviting you to join!

Interested?
🔗 Fill out our short survey: forms.gle/7ASVadD7LT4j...

More: manybabies.org/MB8/

Language learning as ontogenetic adaptation

Opinion by Manuel Bohn (@elmanubohn.bsky.social) & Marisa Casillas
tinyurl.com/48pdbv5b

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

When something doesn't work properly, can your dog tell if the object is broken or if you just don't know how to use it?

I'm pleased to share my group @jhu.edu's first study with pet dogs (!!), now out in @plosone.org

Led by Amalia Bastos: Do dog rationally infer the causes of failed actions? 1/4