The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st.

Please share, thank you 🙏

Skills in Claude Code are versions of Marvin Mnisky's frames that actually work

what a time to be alive

Neural networks ended up making Mnisky's dreams come true

I wonder if he's rolling over in his grave

Last week to apply for a 3yr postdoc with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself. Deadline is March 15th hmc-lab.com/TAMPostdoc.h...

A reinforcement learning and sequential sampling model constrained by gaze data Author summary When people are deciding between options they have encountered in the past, their preferences are largely based on their memory of past experiences with those options. However, simply l...

"The present study shows how constraining an RL-SSM with eye gaze data can further enhance its predictive ability." dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Pretty excited for tomorrow's lab meeting of unsolicited research advice

There are nearly 100 events across NYC this weekend hosted by neighbors, for neighbors, to protect each other from ICE and organize in our communities.

Art builds, ICE-out parties, park play dates, DJ events, town halls. You name it—there’s something for everyone. Find an event near you here:

"if your toy statistical model predicts a certain curve under “ideal” research practices, and you find a different curve, it’s possible that the curve derived from undergraduate probability has nothing to do with scientific practice"

😂

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)

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety.

Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment.

1

SWC is the best place to do neuroscience in the world

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

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...

Learning Abstractions for Hierarchical Planning in Program-Synthesis Agents Humans learn abstractions and use them to plan efficiently to quickly generalize across tasks -- an ability that remains challenging for state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) agents and deep rei...

A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics:
arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929

🪰 How do dozens of tiny fly muscles cooperate to move a leg?

We’re excited to share the first 3D, data-driven musculoskeletal model of Drosophila legs based on Hill-type muscles, running in OpenSim and MuJoCo simulation environments.

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06426

An experimental finding sure to shock: white evangelicals are especially attuned to slights against Christians, but significantly less likely to view same actions as discriminatory when against a religious out-group. And this double-standard is unique to white evangelicals. doi.org/10.1111/jssr...

Jobs | City University of New York

I'm very excited to announce that the Psychology Department at Brooklyn College of CUNY is hiring a tenure-track line in Cognitive Neuroscience. Applications are being accepted now, and review will begin on or after February 23rd, please repost!

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

cuny.jobs/brooklyn-ny/...

claude code with Opus 4.5

this will unfortunately probably only fly at non-U.S. institutions :(

will this article convince anybody who doesn't already see the value in writing?

Children leverage predictive representations for flexible, value-guided choice By harnessing a mental model of how the world works, learners can make flexible choices in changing environments. However, while children and adolesce…

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !!

We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

📣 We’re currently reviewing applications for this postdoctoral position. Next review date: Jan 26. Feel free to reach out with any questions! recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03027

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!

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.

Gentle reminder for the RL folks out there:

RLC 2026 → Montreal 🇨🇦 (Aug 16–19)

Abstract: Mar 1 | Submission: Mar 5 (AOE) | rl-conference.cc/callforpaper...

Looking forward to receiving your submission!

vibecoded a little chrome extension to fix a perpetual bugbear with reading pdfs: being sent on search expeditions to figure out where a particular parameter was introduced.
Instead, just type in the latex expression and get back unicode that you can ctrl/cmd+F easily
github.com/apoorvalal/m...

codebases almost always have to be rewritten. maybe build initial prototypes with AI, then study the structute and choices and design the final output?

the fast prototyping can be very useful and is almost always wrong in important ways

Hi RL Enthusiasts!

RLC is coming to Montreal, Quebec, in the summer: Aug 16–19, 2026!

Call for Papers is up now:
Abstract: Mar 1 (AOE)
Submission: Mar 5 (AOE)

Excited to see what you’ve been up to - Submit your best work!
rl-conference.cc/callforpaper...

Please share widely!

can you tell us more about why mean field is good for scale? I have a naive mental model that it relies on local averages of populations which feels intuitively wrong? but I'm naive

Elephants Don't Pack Groceries: Robot Task Planning for Low Entropy Belief States Recent advances in computational perception have significantly improved the ability of autonomous robots to perform state estimation with low entropy. Such advances motivate a reconsideration of robot...

This week's #PaperILike is "Elephants Don't Pack Groceries: Robot Task Planning for Low Entropy Belief States" (Adu-Bredu, RAL 2022).

Love the focus on planning with "low entropy beliefs" -- not full-fledged POMDPs, but also not full observability.

PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2011.09105

I think it's great as a productivity tool.

I'm talking about getting social support like treating it like a friend or romantic partner (which is shockingly common)