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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Sep 4

We have an open-rank position in quantitative psychology at Yale! Please apply if this describes you: apply.interfolio.com/171903

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

apply.interfolio.com

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Junyi Chu @junyi.bsky.social · Jun 6

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️!

We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺
🔗 minds-making.github.io

June – July 2024, free & open to the public
(all career stages, all disciplines)

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Laura Simone Lewis @laurasimonelewis.bsky.social · Jun 6

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · Apr 25

Now out in JPSP ‼️

"Inference from social evaluation" with Zach Davis, Kelsey Allen, @maxkw.bsky.social, and @julianje.bsky.social

📃 (paper): psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
📜 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · Feb 27

My new piece in @theguardian.com

Techno-optimism is human pessimism.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett

Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways

www.theguardian.com

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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · Feb 13

New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele,
@alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here:

www.amacad.org/daedalus

Daedalus Home

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

www.amacad.org

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · Feb 10

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us!

careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc...
and
careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

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Charley Wu | hiring PhDs/Postdocs @thecharleywu.bsky.social · Feb 10

🚨 Finally out! My new @annualreviews.bsky.social in Psychology paper:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵

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Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz @laurasn.bsky.social · Jan 31

New paper in Open Mind! What does it mean to help? What is the goal of a helping action? We wanted to probe infants' & preschoolers' helping concept - specifically, whether they think helpers reduce others' action costs. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

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Julia Marshall @juliamarshall.bsky.social · Jan 24

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to [email protected] by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · Jan 23

🔊 New paper just accepted in JPSP 🥳

In "Inference from social evaluation", we explore how people use social evaluations, such as judgments of blame or praise, to figure out what happened.

📜 osf.io/preprints/ps...

📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

1/6

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Shirley Wang @shirleybwang.bsky.social · Jan 7

I'm hoping to hire a postdoc this year to join our growing lab at Yale! Looking for someone interested in EMA/digital phenotyping, formal theories, complex systems, & computational psychiatry.

If this sounds like you, please reach out! Official ad coming soon.

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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 19

Oooh I just skimmed that and looks cool! Will read carefully soon!

Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 18

This is work with Paula Rubio-Fernández and @marleneberke.bsky.social

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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 18

But we think this is possible (and easy!) because we’re using lightweight mentalistic representations that don’t look like what people think about when they think about ToM (big propositional attitudes), but they fit nicely with advances in computational models of ToM!

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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 18

This paper might seem radical to some. We think there’s so much ToM happening in language all the time. Otherwise, we’d struggle with the most basic things like how to use adjectives, definites (a/the), and demonstratives (this/that).

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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 18

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me

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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · Dec 9

Six more days to submit a grad application to the Harvard Psychology Department! I'm reading applications this year. My lab studies how people think about social relationships, usually with babies and children!

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Alex Lew @alexlew.bsky.social · Dec 8

If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS!

We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15

Probabilistic and differentiable programming at Yale — fully funded PhD positions starting Fall 2025! Apply by Dec. 15.

Do a PhD at the rich intersection of programming languages and machine learning.

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Paul Bloom @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social · Dec 4

Moral psychology postdoc opportunity at the University of Toronto! Please repost, and pass on to anyone you think might be interested.

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Coraline Rinn Iordan @coralineiordan.bsky.social · Dec 4

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain | PNAS

Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to a...

www.pnas.org

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Mark Ho @markkho.bsky.social · Dec 3

Thrilled that this is now out in Cognition! Really cool (and fun!) project on hierarchical planning led by the amazing @cgcorrea.bsky.social 🎉

Carlos G. Correa @cgcorrea.bsky.social · Dec 3

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉

tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Dec 2

Excited to release what we’ve been working on at Amaranth Foundation, our latest whitepaper, NeuroAI for AI safety! A detailed, ambitious roadmap for how neuroscience research can help build safer AI systems while accelerating both virtual neuroscience and neurotech. 1/N

Different paths toward safe AI at different Marr's levels

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Liuba Papeo @ljubapi.bsky.social · Nov 27

Humans use language to express thoughts primarily built around the basic agent-patient causal structure
*who does what to whom*
Is this a structure of language or a structure of thought? Does it exist outside language? A new wave of exciting papers speak to this question. A 🧵👇

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