Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Razia Sahi @raziasahi.bsky.social · 14h

Managing emotions is not easy - we often get by with a little help. In the NEW Social Interaction and Emotion Lab at Rutgers-Newark, we’ll study how social interactions regulate emotion using experiments, naturalistic data, and multi-modal approaches. ✨ Now recruiting! ✨🙌 Learn more: raziasahi.com

12 13

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 16h

Early evidence that AI agents in a guessing game develop emergent coordination and specialized roles, especially when assigned personas & prompted to consider other agents’ actions. There was no significant increase in accuracy but higher goal-directed behavior & teamwork. arxiv.org/abs/2510.05174

2 5 31

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

annecollins.bsky.social @annecollins.bsky.social · 14h

@jennifersenta.bsky.social's paper is now published!
Check it out here!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Dual process impairments in reinforcement learning and working memory systems underlie learning deficits in physiological anxiety

Author summary Individuals with anxiety may have difficulties with learning, memory, and attentional control. Computational studies investigating the specific learning processes that are impaired in a...

journals.plos.org

2 6

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Hahrie Han @hahrie.bsky.social · 16h

Totally, completely flabbergasted. #MacFellow

hub.jhu.edu/2025/10/08/h...

Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han receives MacArthur genius grant

Han, who studies political organizing and collective action and who has led the university's SNF Agora Institute since 2019, among 22 individuals to receive coveted MacArthur Foundation recognition

hub.jhu.edu

89 140 1.7K

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 19h

sign and share and join AAUP actionnetwork.org/petitions/tr...

Trump Higher Ed Compact 2025

We stand for education—for science, for students and for freedom—and against this backward, anti-American policy. We call on university leaders, faculty, staff and students to unite in rejecting the T...

actionnetwork.org

9 17

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Joshua Conrad Jackson @joshcjackson.bsky.social · 1d

🚨Historical Psych Pre-Conference🚨

We have a great lineup of speakers for the #SPSP2026 edition!

Submit your poster or data blitz abstract by Oct. 23 (link below!). Open to folks from any career stage

Any research on psychological change or historical context of social psych is welcome!

2 4 16

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Kyle Mahowald (COLM 2025) @kmahowald.bsky.social · 1d

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘

UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language

sites.utexas.edu

1 17 28

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Brandon Woo @brandonwoo.bsky.social · 1d

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Developing Intuitions That Close Friends Know the Content of Each Other’s Minds

Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

direct.mit.edu

1 10 31

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 1d

Great piece in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social on why AI won't solve the loneliness epidemic:

"presenting AI as a scalable solution to the loneliness epidemic risks overlooking the structural and societal roots of the problem and may allow us to abdicate our responsibility as a society."

Can AI really help solve the loneliness epidemic?

Advances in artificial intelligence offer an enticing solution to a global problem: perhaps interacting with large language models (LLMs) can help all…

www.sciencedirect.com

10 18

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 1d

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?

Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social)

Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

23 53

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 1d

I wanted to share my reasons why I think it is of paramount importance to attend a No King’s protest on October 18, and to make the case to everyone you know to do the same.
a thread...
www.nokings.org

No Kings

As the president escalates his authoritarian power grab, the NO KINGS non-violent movement continues to rise stronger. We are united once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power ...

www.nokings.org

1 8 23

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Seema Jayachandran @seema.bsky.social · 1d

We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving."

Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.

Event study coefficients that show that men's earnings rise more than women's among couples following a cross-commuting zone move (left panels). The pattern is muted or reverses among single men and single women (right panels).

3 75 240

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Hannes Mehrer @hannesmehrer.bsky.social · 1d

🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684

🧵

1 13 24

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 1d

The AAUP and other labor groups sue the administration over its plan to charge $100,000 for every new H-1B. The AAU is not party to the suit, even though though its members among the largest employers of foreign academics. We’re seeing which groups are willing to let others take the heat.

Higher ed groups sue over Trump administration’s $100K H-1B visa fee

The surprise policy rolled out last month could cause “catastrophic setbacks” to research in the U.S., the lawsuit alleges.

www.highereddive.com

11 16

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 1d

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications

Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

www.nature.com

1 21 71

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 2d

solid language journalism here www.science.org/content/arti...

China bolsters controversial claim to Pacific languages with new museum

Nationalist narrative holds that Austronesian language and culture originated in China, not Taiwan

www.science.org

1 5 8

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · 1d

We are excited to announce 4 outstanding papers 🏆🏆🏆🏆 --> 🧵

1 4 9

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Julia M. Smith @julia-m-smith.bsky.social · 2d

If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after?
The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵

1 6 23

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 1d

Dense longitudinal neuroimaging reveals individual brain change trajectories: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Dense longitudinal neuroimaging reveals individual brain change trajectories

Longitudinal measurements of brain structure and function are critical for understanding how humans change over time. Traditional longitudinal approaches sample sparsely across large windows of time t...

www.cell.com

11 32

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · 2d

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

1 10 15

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Luke Herrine @lookheron.bsky.social · 2d

In which I explore how changes in state-level public higher ed governance during the neoliberal era opened space for more recent authoritarian crackdowns.

lpeproject.org/blog/the-neo...

The Neoliberal Foundation of the Authoritarian Turn in Higher Education

Recent authoritarian attacks on higher education mark a significant shift from the neoliberal era, which celebrated institutional independence from the state, the role of education in boosting worker…

lpeproject.org

11 22

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Nick Jourjine @nickjourjine.bsky.social · 2d

Had a blast writing about this new @currentbiology.bsky.social study from @leo-perrier.bsky.social, Lény Lego et al. on African striped mice

The paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Dispatch with some context about why it's so cool: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luVG3QW8S...

#bioacoustics
#neuroskyence

Nicolas Mathevon @nicolasmathevon.bsky.social · 26d

Ultrasonic signals support a large-scale communication landscape in wild mice. 👇 New paper by the ENES Bioacoustics Research Team in @currentbiology.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/a/1llMH3QW8S...

authors.elsevier.com

1 7 24

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Kanishka Misra 🌊 @kanishka.bsky.social · 2d

Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁

Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit:

1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models

Language models (LMs) tend to show human-like preferences on a number of syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which these are attributable to direct exposure to the phenomena or more general propert...

arxiv.org

1 5 13

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 2d

Which do you think lasts longer, a spade or an hourglass symbol?

Excited to share a new preprint from my lab, with some interesting and surprising results. 🧵 follows

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

1 3 6

Reposted by Robert Hawkins

Jessy Li @jessyjli.bsky.social · 2d

On my way to #COLM2025 🍁

Check out jessyli.com/colm2025

QUDsim: Discourse templates in LLM stories arxiv.org/abs/2504.09373

EvalAgent: retrieval-based eval targeting implicit criteria arxiv.org/abs/2504.15219

RoboInstruct: code generation for robotics with simulators arxiv.org/abs/2405.20179

4 12