🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation.

We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation.

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Now out in Cognition, work with the great @gershbrain.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social on formalizing self-handicapping as rational signaling!
📃 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lo8f2Hx2-...

At #CogSci2025 and curious about resource-rational models of social cognition? Come to Nob Hill A at 11:14 tomorrow to hear me talk about work with @tadegquillien.bsky.social where we use the information bottleneck to study stereotype use and the outgroup homogeneity bias!

Our latest on the cognitive science of LLMs! To be presented @CogSci‬2025 🎉

LLMs are increasingly involved in human collaborations. How do LLMs assign responsibility and reward to collaborators? Is it similar to how humans do it? 🤖🧑

📃 gershmanlab.com/pubs/XiangBi... (1/4)

Just out in Cognitive Psychology
Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty
By @tadegquillien.bsky.social , me & Chris Lucas

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

We find people's 'best guesses' sneakily encode distribution information that guesser & others can reconstruct later

Ramadan et al. examine how humans deploy hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning strategies given cognitive constraints.

How do laypeople make sense of scientific explanations? This new Article from @cruzf.bsky.social & @tanialombrozo.bsky.social looks at the role of jargon. They find that people find explanations with jargon satisfying, even though jargon reduces understanding.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot:

"Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"

(by Balaban & me)

relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

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!

✨We are organising (again) an online workshop on Theoretical Modeling for PhD candidates and Master students in cognitive science and psychology. Check out the website and the schedule: Registration is open! (closes July 1, spaces are limited) 🧵1/n computationalcognitivescience.github.io/workshop/

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science:
How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

New CogSci paper!

In "Taking others for granted: Balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection" we propose a computational model explaining why people favour self interested behaviour when they believe others to trust them.

📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎 github.com/Vbtesh/takin...

Bridging computation and representation in associative learning:
gershmanlab.com/pubs/Gershma...

How does the human mind understand social relationships? This paper by Wang et al. discovers a universal conceptual structure across modern and ancient cultures, with five major dimensions and three core categories.
https://www.nature.c...

woooooo!

Out in Child Development:

"Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional
Misunderstandings in Children"

paper: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

preprint-pdf: www.tomerullman.org/papers/kids_...

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...