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Zsuzsa Kaldy @zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social · 1d

Faculty colleagues, please let your students know about our PhD program in Developmental and Brain Sciences at UMass Boston! Online info session coming up on 10/22 at 4.30 pm. Applications are due 12/1/25
www.umb.edu/academics/pr...
#devpsych #devsky #AcademicSky

Developmental & Brain Sciences PhD

UMass Boston's Developmental and Brain Sciences (DBS) PhD is a research-intensive program focused on understanding cognition, perception, and behavior when underlying neural and hormonal mechanisms ar...

www.umb.edu

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Dawei Bai @daweibai.bsky.social · 8d

New paper: the ‘Double Ring Illusion’!
Does the visual system integrate *intuitive physics*? This new illusion developed by Brent Strickland and I offers a straightforward demonstration – one that you can experience yourselves!
Demos in thread👇
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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · 5d

Interested in understanding how young humans think about social relationships? I am reading PhD applications this year! **Please note**, that Harvard now requires the GRE. More information here: www.ashleyjthomas.com/workwithme

WANT TO WORK WITH ME? | Mysite

www.ashleyjthomas.com

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 4d

this is fun! I absolutely "kanizsa" the gapped ring into a full one. I see it passing through the gaps, but the experience is somehow very surprising? I dont how completion relates to solidity and physics in your framework, but I feel like both predictions could have been warranted

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 5d

To clarify: you are a muddlehead only if you think _every_ ”verbal disagreement “ comes down to a ‘matter of semantics’ (and not to a matter of fact for instance).

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 5d

He too! Thats the point.

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Kate Davidson @kathryndavidson.bsky.social · 11d

New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too

Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 11d

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh?

We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think any means no

Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but...

doi.org

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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 11d

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh?

We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think any means no

Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but...

doi.org

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Vlad Chituc @vladchituc.bsky.social · 13d

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 19d

New publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article.

We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)

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bergelsonlab @bergelsonlab.bsky.social · Sep 11

really enjoyed this. h/t to @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social for the pointer.

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · Aug 27

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

I Am An AI Hater

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

anthonymoser.github.io

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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · Sep 3

📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year!

Links below:

Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903
Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989
Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Sep 1

makes perfect sense: both are based on questioning/problematizing things that seem very natural and taken for granted otherwise
🙃

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Sep 1

I feel that having an “if you wouldnt have X you also wouldnt have Y” part is a critical for having a functional explanation

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Sep 1

Wait, so whatever X correlates with is X-s function? Here is another intuition: when you see contrails, the plane is pretty high or in other words you cannot fly very high if you dont generate some contrails.

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Jonathan F. Kominsky @jfkominsky.bsky.social · Aug 31

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

🧵(1/22)

Causal Perception(s)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Aug 19

Such a cool way to go about this question, this study is a beauty! I am still unsure about "real-world size". In our paper (in JEP:G) we found that the very same picture (even with the same rotation) could generate different interpretations and size estimates: funky if effect is driven by IRLsize

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Aug 8

I’m okay with this as long as we are all doing Hungarian as it “wears its LF on its sleeve” (according to Hungarians).

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Shota Momma @shotamomma.bsky.social · Aug 3

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out

(1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object.

(2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers.

nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

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Alex Wenzel @alexwenzel.bsky.social · Jul 30

Returning science to the status quo is inadequate. They’ll print the harms of funding cuts while it gets clicks, but if their wealth is on the line, they’ll mangle our work as badly as RFK Jr does.

This is what “depoliticized” science looks like. We should politicize science as much as possible.

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · Aug 20

My favorite WaPo fact-check is the one where they gave Bernie three Pinocchios for accurately citing a study.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/201...

Sanders’s flawed statistic: 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year

Debtors were asked whether medical expenses, or loss of work related to illness, contributed to their bankruptcies. Of those who responded, 66.5 percent said at least one of those factors contributed “somewhat” or “very much.”

When we asked Himmelstein whether Sanders was quoting his study accurately, he said yes.

Himmelstein wrote: “37 percent of filers said medical bills ‘very much’ contributed to their bankruptcy. Even if you use that restricted definition, then Sanders’s statement is accurate — or an underestimate. There are about 700,000 bankruptcy filings each year. Many filings are joint husband/wife filings, and based on our past research, we estimate that on average 2.71 persons reside in each debtor’s household. So the total number of persons who undergo bankruptcy is about 1.9 million annually.

This is a classic case of cherry-picking a number from a scientific study and twisting it to make a political point.

Three Pinocchios

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The Verge @theverge.com · Jul 30

Substack is back in the news again for the wrong reason: this time, the platform sent a push notification to a neo-Nazi newsletter featuring a swastika logo. Here's Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best on Decoder two years ago struggling to answer a question about moderating hate speech.

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · Jul 27

it works incredibly well for me... and this difference can be only explained by a culture-specific variation of tridents/pitchfork motifs in the environment. There is absolutely no other way

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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · Jul 24

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Homepage of the Action, Computation, & Thinking (ACT) Lab, Yale department of psychology

actcompthink.org

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · Jul 21

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · Jul 19

Come see my lab at the Cognitive Science Society Conference #cogsci2025

Poster that feature talks from the Thomas Lab at the Cognitive Science Society. The Thomas Lab
at CogSci 2025

July 31st
Brandon woo
Social Engagement Leads Infants to Represent People as Individuals
Oral Talk Session: Development of Social Cognition 1
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: Salon 6

Denise Lopez Flores
Preliminary Evidence that Infants and Children Use Accents to Inform
Relational Expectations
Poster Session 1: (PL1-L-118)
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Location: Salon 8

Friday August 1st
Emma Yu
Children Expect Emotional Consolation to Occur in Close Relationships
Oral Talk Session: Development of
Social Cognition 2
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Location: Nob Hill B

Min Feldman
Do children use action frequency to infer social closeness?
Poster Session 2: (P2-F-55)
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: Salon 8

Christina Steele
Navigating Family Ties: Young Children's Cognitive Representations of the Family Network
Oral Talk Session: Learning and
Development 3
Time: 4:00PM - 5:30PM
Location: Nob Hill D

Hannah Hok Kim
Written in Stone: Lay intuitions about the emergence and impact of formal rules
Poster Session 2: (P2-H-77)
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: Salon 8

Saturday August 2

Lizette Pizza
Do People Value Plants Over Non-Living Entities? Moral Considerations in Adults and Young Children
Poster Session 3: (P3-P-158)
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Location: Salon 8

Megan Richardson
Children's Expectations of Emotional Intimacy in Close Relationships
Poster Session 3: (P3-R-165)
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Location: Salon 8

Mack Briscoe
When to speak up: How children reason about group dynamics
Poster Session 3: (P3-B-18)
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Location: Salon 8

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