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...

Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research

Nice one, Mike! I very much agree, and I think you are at least partially tapping into the process/product distinction that I made here. As always, it all depends. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

I really liked that post! I think as an addendum I would say that there are ways that better process can improve products (rather than getting mediocre products more quickly!).

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/

amazing work Riccardo!

My take home: Pure text generation is just the wrong way to use AI as an academic. Don't use it to decrease the quality of the hard thing you do. Instead, try to find ways to use it for making the boring parts of your job easier and increasing the quality and scope of the best parts!

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...

Thanks!

I think we finally made really significant progress on the biggest unsolved "developmental AI" problem: learning from human-scale data. Key idea: zero-shot world models that support concept extraction via approximate causal inference. amazing collab w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @khaiaw.bsky.social

So excited about this work using our data of children’s first-person experiences to train efficient, flexible visual learning models!

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models.

We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

Thanks, Nicole!!!!

Buster Bluth from Arrested Development saying over two panels: 'We have [animal culture]? This [cogsci] is going to be off the hook!' (The words between the square brackets are written over the original quote subtitles, replacing respectively 'unlimited juice' and 'party'.)

Nevermind this one's better

Semantic Network of OECS articles.

Reminder! The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) hosts summaries of what we know vs don't about a host of fascinating issues. All freely available.

What a terrific alternative to doomscrolling: learning about (e.g.) The Mind-Body problem, Delusion, or Free Will.

oecs.mit.edu

The SLL will be at #CDS2026 this week! Catch some of our talks and posters below!

Completely agree. Our job is great overall IMO but sometimes at the end of the day I look back and notice how my overall state is a function of the average of many disconnected meeting impressions.

IRiSS Predoctoral Researcher in School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, California, United States The Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) is seeking Predoctoral Researchers to participate in our 2026-2027 cohort. The...

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)

Prosody

Super thrilled that my article "Prosody" is now available to read in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science!

oecs.mit.edu/pub/1w4cqquc...

Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for the opportunity and for creating such an amazing resource for our community!

From a Baby’s Point of View: How Infants’ Face Diets Shape Their Face Perception - Charisse B. Pickron, Laurie Bayet, 2026 Individual variations in face-perception expertise become apparent by the second year of life. We propose that infants’ “face diet”—the nature and quantity of t...

New paper! Had lots of fun writing this with @lauriebayet.bsky.social There is so much more to say about extrinsic and intrinsic experiences which shape infants' face perception and learning, hopefully this keeps & starts conversations about a topic we love!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

In which we discuss...

- reference and the symbol grounding problem
- LargeLMs vs BabyLMs
- jabberwocky and pattern matching
- the Platonic representations hypothesis
- Quine's topiary
- poverty of the stimulus arguments
- the data efficiency gap between LLMs and human children
- etc.!

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-...

Thanks so much for listening!!

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-...

Loved working on this paper with Kat (lead) and Hyo!

Officially out TODAY in Child Development! It's good to try challenging tasks and explore on your own, but not when it might be too hard and help isn't available. Children get that. w/ Kat Shannon, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Willem Frankenhuis, @mcxfrank.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

A composite image of me from the red carpet at the Hoppers premiere with the Hoppers logo and several hoppers characters.

After about 5 years (!) of keeping secrets, I am so excited that Disney Pixar's Hoppers is finally coming out on March 6th!

Back in 2021, Pixar emailed me asking if I could give a talk about my research to their employees. Then another talk. And another.

📸 Disney/Jesse Grant/Getty Images

Thank you!

Oooh I didn’t get a crossref MCP I did it via raw API. But, to be honest, the issue I ran into was actually that I literally couldn’t get the crossref searches to work in their web interface either…

Screenshot above is just chat window. The adventure in the quoted thread was via a whole project using cursor to access bibliometric apis and write python code to parse.