What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

Just wrote a new blogpost trying to summarize my thoughts on the question of how and whether to use AI for research in psychology and cognitive science: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/usin...

Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!!

cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...

title line

screenshots from the nine tasks

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵

Great post!

Congrats!!!

Congrats Emalie!!

Hello bluesky world :) excited to share a new paper on data visualization literacy 📈 🧠 w/ @judithfan.bsky.social, @arnavverma.bsky.social, Holly Huey, Hannah Lloyd, @lacepadilla.bsky.social!

📝 preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
💻 code: github.com/cogtoolslab/...

👀📊🧠

Table 1 from paper: recognition and reference evidence for perception of different types of visual media by infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Do children understand all types of visual media in the same way?

"Cross-contextual diversity in children’s early understanding of visual media" - a new review paper led by Rebecca Zhu: osf.io/preprints/ps...

There are many people I’ve seen on here asking about how we go forward in the current moment

We don’t have all the answers, but in the guide below my co-authors and I discuss building and sustaining academic communities dedicated to antiraicm

Now at Collabra: Psychology
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Happy CogSci evening to those who celebrate
May your figure axis labels be large and visible

Why does Western paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often abbreviations? Our new #eSymb preprint (osf.io/preprints/ps... w Pagnotta, Psujek, Mendoza Straffon and Tylén ) challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices based on cogsci experiments. 1/

Same

I’m still recruiting for this position — please get in touch if you’re interested in working together!

Amazing title

We have extended the deadline for this position to January 31st. Also, the start date is pretty flexible; if you're graduating next spring/summer and interested in the role, apply!

Wonderful! Thank you!

Chiming in with others to say how awesome this sounds, Jen! Would also love to see the slides/materials!

Find Out Why Health Insurance Denied Your Claim You likely have the right to access records that explain why your insurer denied your claim or prior authorization request. Use ProPublica’s free tool to generate a letter requesting your claim file f...

I don't know who needs to know this, but Pro Publica has an online thing that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial. (which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases)

projects.propublica.org/claimfile/

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵

bsky.app/profile/laur...

It’s been striking to me how much of recent air travel related issues in the northeast are due to severe air traffic controller shortages www.usnews.com/news/top-new...

Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models The recent advancements in auto-regressive multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising progress for vision-language tasks. While there exists a variety of studies investigatin...

📄👀: cross-modal information flow in multimodal large language models

neat interpretability work on how visual and linguistic information is integrated in MLLMs: "the model first transfers the more general visual features of the whole image into the representations of (linguistic) question tokens."

Belongs framed on a wall much like many City Lights posters

Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models? While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of t...

Our new paper “Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?” was just presented at #EMNLP2024! This is work led by Steven Feng, with Noah Goodman.
arxiv.org/abs/2408.03617

A conversation with a luminary #1: Jenny Saffran

Not only are we back with a new episode but with a brand new series called "A conversation with a luminary", where we chat with a trailblazing developmental cognitive scientist. We're kicking things off with a conversation with the Rubinstein Professor Jenny Saffran! Enjoy!

itsinnate.fireside.fm/21

Okay the people requested one so here is an attempt at a Computational Cognitive Science starter pack -- with apologies to everyone I've missed! LMK if there's anyone I should add!

go.bsky.app/KDTg6pv

This is wonderful, thank you! Would love to be added if I haven’t missed the wave ✨

Assistant Professor, Computational Approaches to Language - Cluster Hire - Madison, Wisconsin, United States Job Summary: This position is a full-time, tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant Professor level in the Department of Psychology at UW-Madison. The search is for a job candidate whose exper...

UW-Madison Psychology is hiring a new assistant professor in the area of computational approaches to language (broadly construed). Please share with interested parties! jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...