Exploring a cave by firelight, it's easy to "see things" in the walls. Bulges and cracks become bison or deer. Could pareidolia have inspired some of our earliest figurative art?
Just one of the topics discussed in our latest episode, w/ @izzywisher.bsky.social!
Listen: disi.org/illuminating...
Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501
Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively?
Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social!
And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!
Do you research social interactions and collective behavior?
IIMAS-UNAM is hiring an Associate Researcher "C". PhD in psychology, anthropology or sociology + publications required. Women encouraged to apply. Maximum age 39 (♀️) and 37 (♂️).
📅 Deadline: June 1, 2026
📄 tinyurl.com/3dzc5nz4
How do people decide whether it’s wrong to harm a pig? A chimp? A baby?
In the West, these judgments are based more on *experience* (being able to feel) than on *agency* (being able to think and act)
New study finds that same pattern across other cultures
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
How do you align AI in a world of plural, conflicting, and evolving human values?
A starting point is human society itself.
@sydneylevine.bsky.social and I are hiring a postdoc at NYU to combine insights from cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety.
Please share widely!1/
New episode!! 🎙️🎉
A chat w/ @izzywisher.bsky.social about Paleolithic art.
The questions surrounding cave art are old: Who made it? What did it mean to them? But with new methods and frameworks, scholars are starting to see these enigmatic works in a new light.
Listen: disi.org/illuminating...
The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii). A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).
This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017). This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.
New paper out in Adaptive Behavior!
On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
New open access publication in Topoi! @kristinandrews.bsky.social and I explore the ethics of AI animal translation projects. 🖥️🐬Before we build it, we need to take stock of the ethical implications.
rdcu.be/fbZwv 🧵👇1/13
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!!
Title page for working paper: "The Varieties of Cultural Selection"
I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes.
osf.io/preprints/so...
Many of us are worried about AI. Many are also interested in what it can tell us about the human mind. Can we separate out our concerns and our scientific curiosity?
A topic discussed in our latest episode, w/ @glupyan.bsky.social & @mcxfrank.bsky.social!
Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...
'Philosophers of Many Minds': A selection of our interviews with philosophers!! 🎙️🎙️
Now on Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/6UZ...
“Flexible rhythm perception underpins human music, dance & speech. We show that bees form robust abstract rhythm representations. Results suggest an insect brain can encode & generalize arbitrary complex temporal patterns, pointing to deep evolutionary roots for domain‐general rhythm cognition.”😲
🐝🧪
Last call, friends!!
Our (short, anonymous) audience survey is still live for a brief while longer. We would be ever grateful if you could take a few minutes to let us know what you think!
forms.gle/6uUacGZuvfxd...
By DISI alum @norabradford.bsky.social!
Flyer advertising special collection of stories for Frontiers for Young Minds. We invite expressions of interest for a curated collection of short articles on animal behavior to be published in Frontiers for Young Minds, an open-access journal for readers ages 8–15. This international collection, developed in collaboration with the Animal Behavior Society, will introduce young readers to how scientists explain behavior using Tinbergen’s four questions. Each article will be co-authored by a researcher and an undergraduate, with an emphasis on clear, engaging communication. Articles will be ~1,500 words and designed for a broad student and classroom audience. Contributors will work with an undergraduate co-author and participate in iterative editorial development prior to submission. We anticipate selecting approximately 10–12 articles, depending on the strength and diversity of submissions.
Do you love animal behavior & want to share that joy with younger folks?
Write a short article on animal behavior for Frontiers for Young Minds (ages 8–15), co-authored with an undergrad! Part of an international ABS collection. Expression of interest due April 30.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
As LLMs acquire language, they also develop an understanding of space, math, causality, and more.
What does this tell us about where our own abilities come from?
Just one of the topics discussed in our latest episode, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @glupyan.bsky.social!
Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...
What a fun conversation! @mcxfrank.bsky.social @kensycoop.bsky.social !
New episode!! 🎙️🎉
A conversation w/ @glupyan.bsky.social & @mcxfrank.bsky.social.
Questions swirl about what AI will mean for work, education, and society. But cognitive scientists can't help but also wonder: What will AI mean for our understanding of the mind?
Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...
The Experimental Humanities Lab led by Fritz Breithaupt seeks a postdoc to help launch a research hub at the intersection of narrative, empathy, cognition, & AI.
PhDs in lit studies, cog sci, psych,+ who combine narrative insight w/empirical skills encouraged to apply: apply.interfolio.com/183656
New paper in press at Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts w/ @aaronhertzmann.com interrogating the information bottlenecks that make the drawing of objects & scenes from observation so difficult. This was a really fun paper to write together--we hope it'll be a fun read, too!
Keeping cats once made good practical sense: they helped manage rodent populations. But cats rarely serve this purpose today. Might they be providing other, less tangible benefits?
Just one of the topics discussed in our latest episode, with Rob Dunn!
Listen: disi.org/mutualisms-a...
The image features the profile of a white robotic figure with intricate detailing, set against a light background. Text on the left reads: "What Isn't Intelligence? Patrick House on Blaise Agüera y Arcas's 'What Is Intelligence?' Read the article in the LA Review of Books." The Templeton World Charity Foundation logo is at the bottom left.
What is – and isn’t – intelligence?
Patrick House, a @divintelligence.bsky.social alumnus, published a review of the new book “What is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds” by @blaiseaguera.bsky.social.
👉 Article: https://bit.ly/4lFNDrm
👉 DISI: https://bit.ly/479359x
Update: we've extended our timeline! Review of applications will now begin March 24. Still plenty of time to put together an app!
disi.org/apply/
Our podcast (@manymindspod.bsky.social) is conducting a (short) audience survey. Even if you are only an occasional listener, it would be great to have your input!
Thanks in advance!
forms.gle/6uUacGZuvfxd...
New episode!! 🎉🎙️
A conversation w/ Rob Dunn about mutualisms.
Predation, parasitism, and other negative interactions garner a lot of attention. But interspecies cooperation may be just as common—and it has profoundly shaped our species and our world.
Listen: disi.org/mutualisms-a...
New paper alert with Stephan Kaufhold, Mia Borzello and David Kirsh!
How well does cognition studied in the lab reflect cognition in the real world?
Much of what we think we know about cognition rests on methodological assumptions that have become so established that they often go unexamined.
Our podcast (@manymindspod.bsky.social) is conducting a (short) audience survey. Even if you are only an occasional listener, it would be great to have your input!
Thanks in advance!
forms.gle/6uUacGZuvfxd...
