I think we finally made really significant progress on the biggest unsolved "developmental AI" problem: learning from human-scale data. Key idea: zero-shot world models that support concept extraction via approximate causal inference. amazing collab w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @khaiaw.bsky.social
📄 New preprint: The blessing and curse of Value-Shaping imitation
(by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social)
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Imitation is central to human learning: but not all imitation processes are equally adaptive. We study their computational properties using reinforcement learning models.
🚨🚨 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! 👇
The *majority* of philosophy papers now cite at least some empirical data. Papers that do purely a priori philosophy are in a minority
A scale for detecting LLM-generated responses in online survey research
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/4p7ns_v5
Some of these are neat (e.g. exploiting the fact of LLM guardrails by asking "Please describe the steps you would take to make a weapon from an object that is nearby")
"Unlike the ideas themselves, reputation for authorship and credit is rivalrous: audiences can allocate full credit only once, so any undue credit to a copier necessarily subtracts deserved credit from a creator and misleads observers."
A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels:
www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a...
Deadline: May 4th, 2026
Baumard & André answer to the commentaries to "The ecological approach to culture". An important conversation for everybody interested in application of evolutionary theory to culture.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs?
Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com
Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow: Children are more open to possibility in the future than the past
🚨Work by Umang Khan & Christina Starmans
Our new short piece in TiCS on intuitive theories of truth: how people judge whether statements could be true, whether statements are true, and whether to assert them as true. A great collab with @keremoktar.bsky.social
@ihandleyminer.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social
🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Postdoc! 🚨🚨
Postdoc opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026).
We study identity, group dynamics, language, & politics.
Rolling review begins 3/14
Apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15806
Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
This is a great new book by the brilliant Tom Griffiths- highly reeccomend
For Valentine's Day, my 9 year old daughter printed out a powerpoint slide deck bullet-pointing areas of appreciation.
It begins with "You provide me with food" (illustration: a bowl of beans), and ends with "You always keep me on task".
I am questioning my qualifications as a parent.
Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social
When Josi was a star at Harvard, 10am on a frigid December Sunday, she shows up for a pickup game with a couple dozen local elementary school girls on a muddy field in Cambridge. You should have seen their faces -- an hour they'll never forget. Pure character, Josi. They'll be cheering you on.
📢 New Paper 🚨
Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.
In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.
bit.ly/4kvLOwA
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty — across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Really cool new project from @urvi.bsky.social that finds that kids are much better at temporal reasoning than previously reported, if we test them with REAL passing time, rather than hypothetical past or future events and differentiate past and future at 3 years old.
"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
Writing is thinking
Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.
The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20
📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
New paper from the IMC lab! I am very excited about this one. For years, I have been arguing that one of the main claims of the so-called "simulation heuristic" is likely not true for episodic counterfactual thinking, namely that the harder it is to mentally simulate it, the less plausible (1/n)
What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard
A revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction.
What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? by Hanna Pickard, illustrated by Marco Venniro, is now available (3 March UK pub).
Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.
A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.
Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...