Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Bria Long @brialong.bsky.social · 2d

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

Bria Long @brialong.bsky.social · Nov 18

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab!

Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org

Home | The Visual Learning Lab at UCSD

Lab webpage for the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD, lead by Dr. Bria Long, Ph.D. Launching in July 2024!

www.vislearnlab.org

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Jennifer Hu @ COLM (recruiting PhDs and postdocs!) @jennhu.bsky.social · 2d

At #COLM2025 and would love to chat all things cogsci, LMs, & interpretability 🍁🥯 I'm also recruiting!

👉 I'm presenting at two workshops (PragLM, Visions) on Fri

👉 Also check out "Language Models Fail to Introspect About Their Knowledge of Language" (presented by @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue 11-1)

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 23d

A first blogpost from the LEVANTE team, introducing our global project perspective.

A good intro if you're interested in learning more about cross-cultural developmental data collection using LEVANTE.

levante-network.org/global-colla...

Global Collaboration to Capture Variability in Child Development - Levante

Ensuring that children around the world can flourish is one of the most important goals of our time. Developmental science has made major strides in understanding how children grow, learn, and thrive ...

levante-network.org

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Steven Scholte @neurosteven.bsky.social · Sep 8

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · Aug 19

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text.

In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech.

Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · Aug 1

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

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Natalia Vélez @natvelali.bsky.social · Aug 1

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

Sketchnote of Nora Newcombe's Rumelhart Prize Talk, posing three questions and case studies for cognitive science: (1) innateness (with the geometric module as a case study), (2) representations (featuring cognitive maps vs. graphs), and (3) embodiment (featuring mental rotation)

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Nils Petras @nilspetras.bsky.social · Jul 14

1/5 For upcoming work I lately read some articles on handling mistakes in science. They share an important consensus I think everyone should know:

Mistakes are a failure of systems, not people. In a working system, making a mistake is normal, but inconsequential. 🧵

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Shiry Ginosar @shiryginosar.bsky.social · Jul 15

🧠How “old” is your model?

Put it to the test with the KiVA Challenge: a new benchmark for abstract visual reasoning, grounded in real developmental data from children and adults.

🏆 Prizes:
🥇$1K to the top model
🥈🥉$500
📅 Deadline: 10/7/25
🔗 kiva-challenge.github.io
@iccv.bsky.social

KiVA Challenge @ ICCV 2025

kiva-challenge.github.io

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Vlad Ayzenberg @vayzenb.bsky.social · Jul 2

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children

The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

doi.org

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Jul 2

🎈 Out now: 🎈

"The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination"

(by Balaban & me)

of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Bria Long @brialong.bsky.social · Jul 2

Amazing resource that I now use myself in teaching graduate methods at UCSD! Highly recommended.

Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · Jul 1

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · Jul 1

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

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Tatiana Engel @engeltatiana.bsky.social · Jun 25

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.bsky.social · Jun 4

Trump’s NIH cuts aren’t just numbers. They are delayed cures, abandoned treatments, futures stolen, lives that will be lost. This is why we Stand Up For Science.

#StandUpForScience
#SummerFightForScience

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · Jun 4

“I would like to cure brain cancer. I think that's not particularly controversial.” Be that as it may, the NIH terminated that scientist's grant. Here's a huge survey of the 2,500 grants that NIH has killed or delayed...so far. Gift link: nyti.ms/43Jz1yJ

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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · May 31

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · May 30

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

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Jeni Kubota @jenikubota.bsky.social · May 23

I feel grateful and fortunate to have international students in my lab, as well as numerous international collaborators and colleagues. You all make my science better. It pains me to think of the anxiety this causes all of you. I hope that universities come together and fight for what is right.

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Gc Rox @gcrox.bsky.social · May 23

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

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Kevin Gardner @nmrkaygee.bsky.social · May 23

Outstanding presentation of the devastating cuts at NSF and their impact across multiple areas of scientific research and training. Angry at the impact now and in the long-term to US research. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article)

The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

www.nytimes.com

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Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social · May 20

Word learning is usually about what a word does refer to. But can toddlers learn from what it doesn’t?

Our new Cognition paper shows 20-month-olds use negative evidence to infer novel word meanings, reshaping theories of language development.

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

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ari ☀️ @khoudary.bsky.social · May 20

super excited that the first paper from my PhD is now out! we develop a "philosophical toolkit" for computational cognitive modeling & use it to conceptually re-analyze a long-standing debate about evidence accumulation models of decision making 🧠📈 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model

The appropriate form of the drift diffusion model depends on how one wishes to reason about their target with the model. If the goal is to parsimoniously explain the speed-accuracy tradeoff, the appr...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Rodney Tompkins @rtompkins.bsky.social · May 21

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · May 20

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

We are seeking a Research Scientist for a large-scale project on developmental data collection with children ages 2-12 called LEVANTE (Learning Variability Network Exchange). LEVANTE is a global research network to improve our understanding of variability in learning and development through coordinated data collection. The project is funded by the Jacobs Foundation; learn more at http://levante-network.org.

This position is a mix of scientific work and work with a software development team: we are looking for someone to act as the interface between the scientific goals of the project and our team of ~6 software engineers who work to implement different aspects of our web platform including researcher management, tasks and surveys, and data processing. We expect the role to be ideal for someone with technical experience from their scientific work and an interest in building good tools for other scientists through software development.

This position is appropriate for recent PhD grads and candidates with postdoctoral experience; exact title and compensation will be relative to experience post-PhD. The RS will contribute to – and have the opportunity to lead on – research products including papers and presentations. The LEVANTE team is a large and lively group pushing the boundaries of cross-cultural developmental measurement through a combination of technical innovation and psychometrics. The RS will also be part of the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford, a broad interdisciplinary group interested in using data to understand human development.

Requirements for the position include:
- some kind of scientific software development experience (examples include developing experiments, computational models, or complex data analyses)
- theoretical knowledge of psychology or a related discipline (e.g., cognitive science, neuroscience), ideally doing behavioral measurements of some kind
- project management experience on a technical or scientific project with multiple participants

Additional optional qualifications include:
- experience with modern database-backed web applications
- experience with measure development or psychometrics
- R data analysis experience

Applicants should submit a current CV, a short (~1 page) coverletter stating their qualifications for the position, and a link to a github account (preferred) or other code sample.

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Elizabeth Bonawitz @ebonawitz.bsky.social · May 15

Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions.

Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though.

We will persist.

a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " .

Alt: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " .

media.tenor.com

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