Many claim memory biases toward percepts reflect corruption in sensory signals. We challenge this view by showing that ppl adapt their integration rationally w/ experience. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social

Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history | osf.io/preprints/ps...

Taking a New Look at the Mind: Jerome Bruner Podcast Episode · The Cognition Project · January 28 · 37m

I recommend this episode of the Cognition Project Podcast by Tom Griffiths featuring Jerome Bruner. An intimate historical & personal account of the wildly interdisciplinary shaping of the cognitive revolution, intellectual currents that refused behaviorism, & the new science of the mind.

Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks? Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought of in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks—and the artificial intelligence systems built upon them—exhibit similar abilities. This potentially undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic. We consider possible interpretations of these results—that modern neural networks implement symbolic systems, or that they approximate them subsymbolically—and the theoretical consequences of these two possibilities for explanations of human cognition at different levels of analysis. This consideration leads us to offer a new agenda for research on the symbolic basis of the mind.

Online Now: Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?

Still hiring for PhD candidates who are *specifically* excited in building and deploying RL systems for self-driving vehicles and other multi-agent planning settings. Shoot me an email if you think this is you and please help spread the word!

Can I see yours as the "right answer rubric"? Haha

I felt scared that I made the wrong choices of the 6...

Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself:

If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

How do we represent maps of social relationships in the mind & brain? To find out, we tracked 1st-year university students’ friendships, as well as students’ *beliefs* about who was friends with whom in their network.

Yang breaks down what we found in the quoted thread 👇🏻

Broader context below:

Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment Determining whether AI systems process information similarly to humans is central to cognitive science and trustworthy AI. While modern AI models can match human accuracy on standard tasks, such parit...

Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by
@binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL)
🤖🧵👇
Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462
🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1

New preprint! 🧠
How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli?

By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis

"From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

Modulation of feature attention by reward prediction error explains value learning behavior www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.

Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions

Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.

New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com, with @ycleong.bsky.social, Marc Berman, and @joshcjackson.bsky.social! Two-sentence summary: Political pundits often talk as if partisans are divided in how they feel about political issues, as in “Democrats love abortion” or “Republicans hate immigrants.” 1/2

Really excited about our new work on aphasia! Even in fairly profound aphasia, we can recover semantic maps through visual stimuli and use them to decode language. This is a big step! Language BCIs in aphasia might be possible!

Our latest findings: bringing together the core insights so far from our NWO-funded project on "Externally driven internal attention", led by @annavanharmelen.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Using time-resolved EEG/MEG decoding?🧠 Here’s a new approach!
No feature engineering (decode from raw signals), but capturing info that standard decoding often misses (oscillatory/aperiodic activity, connectivity).
Lightweight, INTERPRETABLE, and easy to use. (1/6)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Protect Academic Life in Iran We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.

Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...

#IranWar

CAMP Lab | about The CAMP Lab at the University of Iowa uses computational, neuroimaging, pharmacological, and neuromodulation approaches to understand motivation, affect, and decision-making — and how these processes...

I'm SO pleased to announce that I'll be starting as an Asst Prof at @psychiowa.bsky.social this August.

The lab will focus on neural & computational mechanisms of motivation, affect, & decision-making, with the aspirational goal of translation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 🧠
yeelabneuro.com

Throat singing for them

JOB ALERT: PhD opening in my lab!

@cimecunitrento.bsky.social
in Italy, as part of an Italian FIS3 starting grant.

The project will use advanced analysis methods of MEG data to investigate how our world's naturalistic hierarchical structure facilitates predictive neural processing.

Saving SBE Starts Before the Bill Is Written The FY2027 NSF budget request is alarming, but Congress has not made it law. That means there is still time for researchers and universities to act.

I wrote this article to explain in plain English what is happening with the proposed 2027 NSF budget & why so many social psychologists are alarmed.

THE GOOD NEWS: Congress has not finalized this yet. We have time to change Republican politicians’ minds.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/saving...

The NSF is being proposed to be cut by the amount necessary to brutalize the people of Iran for around 4-8 days. They want to give up global competitiveness in the sciences so they can... commit war crimes!

I always got the sense that it was something he was very _not_ psyched about. Like cosmic horror we've wrought ourselves.

A neural mechanism for online discovery of latent contexts www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Human exploration strategically balances approaching and avoiding uncertainty Strategic avoidance of uncertainty emerges under high cognitive demands, enabling faster decisions without impairing learning.

This is finally out as Version of Record 🎉

Read to find out how and when humans strategically switch between approaching and avoiding uncertainty

with Michael Shadlen and Daphna Shohamy

elifesciences.org/articles/94231

🧵:

Das Licht ist sehr freundlich btw.

You ever get those headaches where you have to keep your eyes closed, but when you do you see a deep purple glowing light and you have a thought stream that's just broken German from your college days?

Just me?

A favorite podcast episode of mine talks about how people really only *get* a piece math after their second encounter and if someone looks ahead in the class it's because they encountered it before!