This work began at @divintelligence.bsky.social
and is in collaboration w/ Rasmus Overmark, @nedcpr.bsky.social Beba Cibralic, Nick Haber, and @camrobjones.bsky.social
We also received valuable comments from colleagues at #CogSci2025 and @colmweb.org
Screenshot of the paper. Teaser figure: five-panel teaser showing a shift from block-by-block to abstract tower descriptions. Panel 1 shows the first L-shaped tower made from three LEGO blocks (blue base, two red blocks stacked). A speech bubble says Put a blue block on the front side of the grid, with a hand precisely placing an imaginary block on a two-by-two grid. Panel 2 shows a speech bubble saying a red block on top of the blue, on the left side, with a hand holding an imaginary block vertically above the previous position. Panel 3 shows a speech bubble saying then another red block on top of that, with the right hand stacking another imaginary block. Panel 4 shows a speech bubble saying like an L shape. Two hands depict an L-shape gesture representing tower shape without position or orientation. The final panel shows the same tower in a different position and orientation, with a speech bubble reading Put a backward L-shape tower on the back of the grid and a hand indicating the back row of the grid.
If you saw @judithfan.bsky.social present our poster at #CogSci2025, the full paper will appear at #CHI2026:
“Gesturing Toward Abstraction: Multimodal Convention Formation in Collaborative Physical Tasks”
🔗 multimodal-conventions.github.io
📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08914
@princetonhci.bsky.social
4/4
Enjoyed giving a keynote at CogSci 2025! 🧠 🖥️ 🌉@cogscisociety.bsky.social #CogSci2025 #philsci #philsky #HPS
If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵
1/n
Who owns new creations? with @jfkominsky.bsky.social & @heintz-c.bsky.social is out in #cogsci2025 proceedings!
escholarship.org/content/qt4m...
Person standing next to poster titled "When Empowerment Disempowers"
Still catching up on my notes after my first #cogsci2025, but I'm so grateful for all the conversations and new friends and connections! I presented my poster "When Empowerment Disempowers" -- if we didn't get the chance to chat or you would like to chat more, please reach out!
Kiley gesturing to academic poster on CS teacher interviews while discussing research with conference participant.
Kiley stands in green blazer and brown pants next to academic poster about a transfer assessment for student transiting from Scratch to Python.
Kiley stands behind podium giving a talk, on the screen it shows “Mental Rotation Strategies” and has two Shepard and Metzler block figures.
Kiley stands next to a fellow conference participant.
Had a great time at #CogSci2025! Got to catch up with friends, see great research talks, and present some of my grad student work as well as some work from my internship at WestEd. Looking forward to the next one!
Given the widespread interest in AI at #cogsci2025 it's interesting to note that exactly zero music AI tools emulate the uniquely human systems of music perception studied in this paper
Job announcement 📢
@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!
Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!
apply.interfolio.com/165809
Another fun #cogsci2025 in the books! Thanks to everyone who stopped by the CO-Lab grad student posters! Alessanda Silva on Number-Space mappings & @elijahtramm.bsky.social on Hierarchical grammar learning in monkeys (and humans). Posters still available through Cog. Sci. or reach out for a copy.
This year we attended #cogsci2025 with a talk and a poster!
Our alumni Demet Özer gave a talk on her recent work with Tilbe Göksun @tilbegoksun.bsky.social and our graduate student Can Ceylan @scanceylan.bsky.social presented his poster on the relationship between gestures and emotions!
What a fantastic #CogSci2025! Somehow I've missed the last 6! And what a joy to see old and new cogsci friends in one place! There's a feeling of real scientific progress and a deep Connectionist<-->Bayesian merger afoot.
#cogsci2025 was a blast! Many excellent conversations about inner speech and categorical representation!
Representing @vassar.bsky.social at #cogsci2025. My favorite part of the conference was catching up with all these amazing alums!
Brilliant keynote by @laurennross.bsky.social at #cogsci2025 on cognitive science and its philosophy. Lauren pointed out the myriad ways in which cogsci and philosophy support and benefit one another, using explanation and causal reasoning as case studies. Thank you for a great talk!! 🙏
Happening today after lunch! Stop by W-213 (conveniently placed at the very entrance of the salon, near fresh air!) to hear about positivity biases across individual and social learning #cogsci2025
(1/3) Presenting at #CogSci2025 TODAY (Aug 2; Poster P3-W-211): "Expanded Information Capacity in Neural Networks Predicts the Cognitive Evolution Towards Uniquely Human Abstraction":
Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints:
🧵
A bar chart showing frequencies of answers to the question "Is the mind composed of innate, domain-specialized modules?" with N=197. The most prominent bars are no response (~60), yes (~30) and yo (~30). The rest of the entries are funny, e.g. "I hope so."
Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…
@laurennross.bsky.social is giving an important reminder of the importance of philosophy of science in cognitive science at the #cogsci2025 keynote, which I really appreciate in the current moment.
CogSci 2025 talk by Rebekah Gelpí: "Resource-rational belief revision can amplify or mitigate polarization"
Good morning #cogsci2025! Join me at Salon 3 today at 14:15 PDT if you're interested in learning how resource-rational models can help us to capture when and why people become polarized.
Last day at #cogsci2025 and over half the claimed books at the @mitpress.bsky.social booth have already been picked up. Don't forget to stop by and get yours!
Antara Bhattacharya in her CogSci #cogsci2025 debut, presenting on The Humorous Hill and doing a smashing job
(seen in pic: Antara also printed examples of model outputs for people to chuckle at, or not)
Group selfie at the Nintendo store. From left-to-right: Me, Ruoqing Yao, Pikachu, Subhekshya Shrestha, Tovah Irwin
5 important cognitive scientists
@cogscisociety.bsky.social #CogSci2025
