Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 2d

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

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Templeton World Charity Foundation @templetonworld.bsky.social · 9d

A bonobo named Kanzi has shown that apes can mentally keep track of multiple familiar humans at once through hide-and-seek experiments.

This research from @jhu.edu, led by @chriskrupenye.bsky.social, can help us understand more about how animals keep track of their groupmates.

bit.ly/4nIp5h9

For Apes, Out of Sight Isn't Out of Mind: New Findings from a Study at Johns Hopkins University

Bonobos can mentally track multiple members of their social circle, new study finds.

www.templetonworldcharity.org

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Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · 20d

1. BREAKING

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration.

Tom Homan was investigated for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. Trump's DOJ shut it down.

The FBI and Justice officials closed the investigation, which a Justice Department appointee had called a “deep state” probe in early 2025.

bit.ly

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 20d

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research.

And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech

The Trump administration said on Friday it would ask companies to pay $100,000 per year for H-1B worker visas, prompting some big tech companies to warn visa holders to stay in the U.S. or quickly return.

www.reuters.com

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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 21d

currently at record-high search interest for canceling disney plus. pulling kimmel is a bigger deal to the company's bottom line than any of the "woke" scandals of the past 5 years. i think news & entertainment corp execs need put more work into understanding their audience, & get off twitter

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 20d

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion.

The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion.

Our problem isn't a lack of resources.

Our problem is ever-expanding inequality.

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 20d

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

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Andrea Sommese @asommese.bsky.social · 23d

Excited to share the latest (but still not the last!) study I had the chance to work on with the Family Dog Project 🐶🇭🇺

We found that Gifted Word Learner dogs' talent goes beyond what we expected; they can generalise words based on function, not just looks.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Dogs extend verbal labels for functional classification of objects

The relationship between language and human thought is an ongoing debate,1 and it has been proposed that language shapes object categorization.2 Words…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · 23d

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

Let’s be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel

Trump’s most brazen attack on free speech yet.

www.yahoo.com

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 25d

“It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,” [John Cohen] added. “It is the job of law enforcement to prevent acts of violence and criminal activity.”

White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups

www.nytimes.com

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Simon Hedges @simonhedges.bsky.social · 28d

Analysis of habitat connectivity and aggregation suggested that more than half of global #forests have become more fragmented over the past two decades, painting a picture of widespread forest degradation beyond the direct effects of #habitat loss

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fragmentation increased in over half of global forests from 2000 to 2020

Habitat fragmentation, in which contiguous forests are broken into smaller, isolated patches, threatens biodiversity by disrupting species movement, shrinking populations, and altering ecosystem dynam...

www.science.org

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aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · Sep 11

Come work with us! UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is looking for a new Assistant Professor to join our team: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

I'm not on the committee, but happy to talk if you're interested.

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ap.uci.edu

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Amitai Shenhav @ashenhav.bsky.social · 29d

Update: the deadline for the Biological Basis of Behavior has been extended to Sept 18th! ✨

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054

Please reach out to Linda Wilbrecht if you have any questions about the position.

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Gavin Foster🦧 @gibbonitathought.bsky.social · Sep 10

Really excited to share my first ever published paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology: "From Monkeys to Infants: The Empirical Challenges Facing Mental Fictionalism"

It's open-access, which I'm really happy about.

Brief 🧵 on what it's all about!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Sep 6

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · Sep 7

Our neuroscience department is hiring an Assistant Professor of Computational Neuroscience who works in "areas such as artificial intelligence, convolutional neural networks, reinforcement learning, decision making, memory, computational modeling, cognitive and neural processing".

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...

american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

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Dr. Katherine Haenschen @drkath.bsky.social · Sep 6

There is, as of right now, no coverage of this protest on the WaPo website or in their @washingtonpost.com feed.

So, if you (you reading this) want people to SEE this protest, you must share it.

Free DC @freedcproject.bsky.social · Sep 6

People from all over are showing up for DC. This is not a moment. It’s a movement. We are united in our demands. We are all DC! #FreeDC

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Brokoslaw Laschowski @drlaschowski.bsky.social · Sep 5

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Professor - Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

jobs.utoronto.ca

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · Sep 3

Ooh we've opened our call for small research grants. £10k for any humanities or social sciences research. Open to independent scholars. We use partial randomisation to allocate the funding: random allocation between all that meet the quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/ba-l...

British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants

The BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are available to support primary research in the humanities and social sciences. These awards, up to £10,000 in value and tenable for up to 24 months, are provi...

www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk

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Kristin Andrews 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @kristinandrews.bsky.social · Sep 4

As a Fellow in CIFAR's Future Flourishing Program, I've seen the real impact of the Global Scholar program for ECRs. New call for GS in:

Child & Brain Development
Multiscale Human
Future Flourishing
Humanity’s Urban Future
Learning in Machines & Brains
Quantum Materials

cifar.ca/global-scholars

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Emma Tecwyn @emmatecwyn.bsky.social · Sep 4

Looking forward to discussing open methods in comparative cognition, including the challenge of 'species fair' task design as part of the ManyManys webinar series 🤩

🐒🦜🐜🐕👶🦎🐐🐟

📅 September 12, 11:00 a.m. (ET) on Zoom

🔗Registration: airtable.com/app0bcw8jYPv...

#openscience #bigteamscience

Flyer for Open Methods in Comparative Cognition Research webinar

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Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · Sep 2

Perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration: The guy suing Harvard for alleged antisemitism is a straight-up Hitler-admiring Nazi.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...

A DOJ lawyer accused Harvard of ‘indifference to antisemitism.’ As a Harvard undergrad he wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective. - The Boston Globe

Michael Velchik once also told a peer that "Mein Kampf" was among his favorite recent reads.

www.bostonglobe.com

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Aug 20

My dept at the University of Auckland (NZ) will be hiring in social psych at the junior level this cycle. Official ad to follow

It's a big research-active dept with fun colleagues, plus you can commute to uni on a boat, paired with a pleasant walk thru Albert Park (this pic from heading home today)

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · Sep 1

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.

Apply by: 10 Oct

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

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Lusine Grigoryan @grigolus.bsky.social · Aug 30

One week left to apply.

Lusine Grigoryan @grigolus.bsky.social · Jul 24

Our department @yorkpsychology.bsky.social has 2 open lecturer positions (=tenure-track Assistant Prof). Social psych is one of the priority areas, so consider applying if you study social behavior, incl. intergroup relations, culture, environmental or media psych.

jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

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