New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending
osf.io/ucxra_v1
New out in Language: an experimental and theoretical study of the pragmatics of spatial loci with Dorothy Ahn and Annemarie Kocab. Maybe you're not supposed to have favorite collaborations, but I'll just say I feel a deep gratitude for the opportunity to work with these two! doi.org/10.1017/S009...
📣 📣 I am beyond excited to announce I will be joining the Yale Dept. of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in July 2027!
Deepest gratitude to my colleagues and mentors, without whom this would not have been possible.
More to come—I'll be recruiting students and hiring staff this coming year!
Our new paper on causal judgment is now out! Led by Can Konuk, with Salvador Mascarenhas.
We study how causes that feature several variables (`A and B caused E') are represented in the human mind.
direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
New paper in Memory and Language in collaboration with the Language Comprehension Lab (lcl.ceu.edu)
"Remembering times ahead: The effect of linguistic framing on representational momentum in state-change events"
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
(I'm 3rd author, but the only one on bsky)
1/5
Really cool stuff!
Maybe we could debate whether this would have happened on twitter too, or bluesky uniquely lacks a sense of humor? !!!JOKING YOU FOOLS!!!
In fact I wonder how double negation elimination works:
If I am "saying no to saying no to LLMs" does that make me a conservative or a progressive and why
Is "yelling stop" a useful notion of conservatism, or just a Buckleyism?
Buckley wanted to change what he thought was a "liberal status quo" which (I hope) does not make him a progressive. Evaluating this based on "frequency of saying no" without asking "to what and why?" just result in silly.
New preprint! We investigate the risk of algorithmic bias (across race/ethnicity, gender, and their intersection) in machine learning models predicting suicide attempts across 3 clinical settings in over 1.2 million patients.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Very proud that this is finally out!
Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..
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....
Yale will be hosting the Formal Languages and Neural Networks (FLaNN) workshop, a real world instantiation of the virtual seminar flannseminars.github.io. There will be invited talks and submitted poster presentations (submission deadline: February 12). For more info, see flann.cs.yale.edu
We are hiring next year in semantics- one year positions of course less exciting and good for the field than straight up tenure track postings, but on the other hand hiring in something that isn’t computational feels like a win anymore in linguistics. Come bring some innovative takes on meaning!
Imagination in bonobos!
I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org
We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative
youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here:
forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...
💥New paper alert! Dyadic Decisions About Effort: How Caregivers Shape Young Children’s Persistence (with @reutshachnai.bsky.social)
One of my favorites! If you’re curious about what we’ve been up to in @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social, take a look!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
We're hiring! The Computational Clinical Science Lab @ Yale is seeking a full-time lab manager/research coordinator to start in early summer 2026.
For more information about the position and to apply: forms.gle/LtQwVgPUfaGk...
Please share widely & consider applying!
It was a very disappointing take. The idea there is a 'shared conservativism' behind opposition to MOOCs and LLMs is claiming that an opposition to vaccines and to covid are driven by a 'shared desire' for things not entering our body. It is different people+different values
A train (on purpose) numbered 4-6
It is not indeterminate it is just culturally determined (pic from Budapest)
It could be a corrupted version of "universal listener" too
Applications still open until February 4!
Important note for US applicants: We do consider applicants with only a bachelor's degree and some research experience! You don't need a masters.
#CogSci #PsychSciSky
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/...
@xphilosopher.bsky.social and I tried to study what beliefs do (or at least, what people think they do).
Across hundreds of participant generated beliefs and first/third party ratings, we found they express identity and/or represent facts, in the pattern described in this post.
1/
In this new paper, we look at some different dimensions on which beliefs vary:
- Is the belief deeply important to your identity?
- Would you change your mind if you got evidence against it?
- Is it best described in terms of credences (“pretty sure”), or is it more yes/no?
1/
Many things in the world move, and can even move behind other things. When will the cat reappear? To predict this, remembering the cat’s speed will likely help. But... how do people remember something like speed, which is defined by displacement over both (🤯) space and time? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵1/n
I dont know anything that directly relates to epistemics but even older children feel that all sorts of sentences with two modals are contradictory (e.g. Staniszewski et al.: www.lingref.com/bucld/47/BUC...)