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...
statement we just received from UMass on the Hampshire college closing: UMass will takeover handling Hampshire student records, and Hampshire students can transfer in to UMass without fees
This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab:
Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex
@nature.com
"..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford (cogtoolslab.github.io) is recruiting two new research staff members to join in AY 26-27.
Full-Time Lab Manager: forms.gle/UVwfx5wbY9Km....
IRiSS Predoc Researcher: iriss.stanford.edu/predoc/2026-....
Please share widely in your networks, thank you!!
Come join us! We have two research coordinator positions open with the Stanford IRISS predoctoral program, a program designed to mentor students for graduate study:
LEVANTE: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...
BabyView: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...
(deadline 5/1)
New paper with @cantlonlab.bsky.social out now in Dev Cog Neuro! We scanned 3-5yr olds with fMRI and found that number words activate regions of cortex also involved in visual numerosity perception, even at the earliest stages of counting acquisition doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...
Postdoctoral fellowship in developmental science at Wesleyan University. Joint in H. Barth & R. T. Dubar labs. Particular focus on undergrad research mentoring. 1 year, extendable to 2 years. Share and apply! wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...
New paper with @cantlonlab.bsky.social out now in Dev Cog Neuro! We scanned 3-5yr olds with fMRI and found that number words activate regions of cortex also involved in visual numerosity perception, even at the earliest stages of counting acquisition doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...
We are primarily interested in someone with fMRI experience (no experience working with children required, though it is preferred). Apply here! forms.gle/TKD8iVHsga6m... If there's anything wrong with the form, shoot me an email (email can be found at auletlab.com)
We plan to hire a post doc to start in Fall 2026 (flexible), in the Aulet Lab at UMass Amherst, funded for two years. The postdoc will help establish our developmental fMRI research program studying symbolic number acquisition in 4-8 year old children (among other things!).
Coordinated parieto-frontal neuronal communication is critical for abstract quantity judgments in primates
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
#neuroscience
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
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Cool demonstration that using multiple tasks (diversity is important) may be more informative than resting state for uncovering individual functional connectivity patterns
Anyone want to buy a used bookstore (so to speak)?
Owners seek buyer to keep Amherst Books alive downtown. Longtime booksellers plan to sell store’s inventory and name while hoping a new owner stays in town center - Daily Hampshire Gazette
Scratch two developmental scientists together, and I'd wager you get two different answers about what a mechanism is. Here's a paper I wrote a few years ago to propose and answer for what "developmental mechanisms" are and how one might test them.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reassessing Number-Detector Units in Convolutional Neural Networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
Thanks! I hadn’t seen this so excited to check it out now!
Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
1/7 Academics are facing an April deadline for making our course materials accessible. One big part of this is pdfs of journal articles. Editing them individually+manually in adobe acrobat pro looked painful, so I tried automating it. github.com/laurenaulet/...
7/7 Install with 'pip install accesspdf' and run with 'accesspdf serve' and you should be good to go! Please let me know when things break, if there are important features missing/not working properly, or generally any feedback you have!
6/7 I'm hesistant to share this, partially because of the vibe-coded nature of it, but also because I haven't tested every possible use case. But with the looming deadline, I decided better to make it available sooner rather than later so it will be maximally useful to folks.
a screenshot of a scientific figure of a brain with an AI generated description
5/7 One workaround is that I added the option for the user to provide context either at the pdf-level or individual figure-level, which leads to more accurate LLM-generated alt text. And it does seem to do a much better job in that case
a screenshot of LLM-generated caption of an image of a brain
4/7 And some of the LLM-generated alt text is pretty incorrect/misleading, so best to do human review if not just outright doing the alt text manually. For example, it thought an atypical view of a brain was "a banana superimposed over a slice of melon."
3/7 This tool remedies a lot of structural problems in pdfs including tags, reading direction, etc, and gives you two options for providing alt text for figures: manually or LLM-based. The easiest LLM use so far is running ollama locally. That being said, the LLM alt text is slow to generate...
2/7 To caveat, this is a work in progress, & I'm not a software engineer (or accessibility expert), just someone who knows enough to be dangerous with claude code. I checked outputs with many accessibility checkers & it doesnt fix everything, but it certainly helps (e.g., 21 -> 6 issues flagged)
