iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by David Levari

Dr Anna Leshinskaya @annaleshinskaya.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I am recruiting graduate students for UCI's PhD in Cognitive Sciences - www.cogsci.uci.edu/graduate/pro... The lab's focus is on how relational structure and combinatorial reasoning is implemented in human brains and large language models--and if they are similar.

cogsci.uci.edu

GRADUATE PROGRAM

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

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David Dunning @daviddunning6.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

New video: A public talk on my lab's work on trust. Trusting other people is essential, but deeply mysterious. Major behavioral science theories say you shouldn't do it, but in our studies people trust complete strangers--and they can't tell you why. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsH7...

youtube.com

Exploring the Mind | Who Do You Trust? Trust at the Personal, Community, & Society Level (Dunning)

YouTube video by Ann Arbor District Library

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David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🚨New WP: Protecting users from AI persuasion🚨 🔸A 1-paragraph AI literacy treatment (explaining AIs can be told to pursue non-accuracy goals/to persuade) cuts AI dialogue political persuasion by ~half! 🔸No sig effect on general genAI trust arxiv.org/abs/2609.16432 w/ @rorchinik.bsky.social

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Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla... It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline

as.cornell.edu

Klarman Fellowships

The Klarman Fellowships in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kin...

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

*looking up the number of horses currently alive in the United States* "Why yes, I do consider my research 'interdisciplinary'."

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Emir Efendić @emire.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Just used this to download my stuff from OSF and worked great. Can recommend!

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Very much looking forward to welcoming a new colleague! We're hiring at both ranks — the senior (Associate/Full) search is open too, applications due Oct 15: apply.interfolio.com/190696

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Here is a clunky but decently functional script to make a local copy of all your private and public OSF projects. You'll have to decide where to keep them. Maybe a flash drive under your mattress? levarilab.com/osf-backup-t...

levarilab.com

OSF Backup Tool — Levari Lab

An R script to make a local copy of projects in your OSF account.

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Reposted by David Levari

Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

We're recruiting postdoc fellows in computational neuroscience for Brown's NIH T32 Training Program — brain & cognitive modeling from biophysics to AI, with connections to mental health & psychiatry. US citizens/PRs. Review begins Sept 1. @carneyinstitute @browncopsy apply.interfolio.com/190111

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

levarilab.com

OSF Backup Tool — Levari Lab

An R script to make a local copy of projects in your OSF account.

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Reposted by David Levari

Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Forms of body motion synchrony. A) Motion quantity synchrony – synchrony in the amount of motion (orange) people engage in over time. This form of synchrony is agnostic to the direction of this movement, may be positive or negative, occurs at varying time lags, and is not specific to matched body parts across members of the dyad. B) Pseudo-synchrony – motion quantity synchrony between people who are not actually interacting. That is, members of different conversations engaging in similar amounts of motion at similar points in the conversation relative to its initiation. And C) directional synchrony – people moving the same body parts in the same direction (or along the same axis in the opposite direction) at the same time (or at some specific time lag).

Mechanisms of synchrony. A) Turn-taking, which causes increases in motion around the time of speaker role exchanges, as participants gesture to hand over or take over the floor. B) Conservation of motion in which one participant moves less when the other moves more, holding the total motion quantity relatively constant over time (note that the total amount of motion across the dyad is similar in the two panels, because one person reduces their motion to balance out the increase in the other’s motion). C) Entrainment, in which mutual following of the same conversational script leads to synchronized movement among people who are not directly interacting (i.e. pseudo-synchrony). Greeting gestures such as the handshakes depicted are one acute manifestation of this entrainment. D) Station-keeping, which maintains proxemic distance and eye level between members of the dyad. This mechanism accounts for directional synchrony, particularly between strangers who feel uncomfortable within each other’s personal space.

Motion quantity synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Friends displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 2.5 s) and B) this effect generalized across the majority of body part pairs (each line represents one pair). For example, one series of points might represent the synchrony between the amount of motion in one participant’s left hand and the other’s right foot. C) Strangers displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 1 s) and significant negative total motion quantity synchrony at longer time lags (2.5 – 16.6 s). D) Again, this effect generalized to most body part pairs.

Directional synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Among friends, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in only two body parts (nose and eye) and only in the vertical axis. B) Among strangers, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in a large number of body parts in the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes.

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

📢 We're recruiting! 18-month postdoc in civic science & AI-human interaction @BrownUniversity, hosted by ARIA (NSF AI Institute). Bridge computational brain science with community engagement & public impact. Apply by Aug 1: apply.interfolio.com/188112

apply.interfolio.com

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

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

Two images, one of a finger pressed a key, another of a hand on a chess piece

Screenshot of first page of paper, "Response duration tracks confidence"

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Hayley Dorfman @hayleydorfman.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Ambiguity and confirmatory reward learning

We tend to interpret feedback in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Such confirmatory tendencies are often viewed as cognitive flaws, but mig…

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Reposted by David Levari

Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

osf.io

OSF

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Rasha Kardosh @rasharasha.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Pointing out that “everyone else is already doing it!” is a classic way to motivate prosocial behavior. But how can we encourage actions which aren't popular yet? In a new paper in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social, Mike Norton and I had a lot of fun testing a method using "collective streaks." (1/5)

Screenshot of the title and abstract of the article "Levari, D. E., & Norton, M. I. (2026). Collective streaks motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 126, 104941."

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

"I notice that your survey sends bots to an endless purgatory of link redirects. To properly assess potential risks, in your revised protocol please provide a list of all URLs, and clarify whether LLM survey participants are conscious and capable of experiencing psychological anguish."

404media.co

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

You have to admire how Duolingo has leaned into making the owl incredibly annoying, at this point it's like a pro wrestling villain. I bet their metrics say all the "personal streak" reminders really work. Lots of recent research about this sort of thing, e.g. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

The motivating power of streaks: Increasing persistence is as easy as 1, 2, 3

Organizations often use financial incentives to boost employees’ commitment to work-relevant goals in an effort to increase persistence and goal achie…

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

As The West Wing explained, some sports have exciting moments when "everything's on the line." Likewise, when 90% of people have donated, your contribution can feel marginal, not to mention anonymous. But your decision to break a streak or keep it going has impact on other potential donors. (4/5)

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Why were collective streaks effective? You might imagine that feelings of obligation or superstition (e.g. “it's bad luck to break a streak”) could play a role, but we only found one consistent factor at work: streaks increased feelings of *personal impact* towards future donors. (3/5)

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

The idea is simple: instead of pointing out when “X% of people” donated to charity, we told people that “the last X people in a row” donated, and gave them a chance to keep the streak going. This worked surprisingly well as a way to encourage donations! (2/5)

Left panel: diagram of streak- and percentage-based messages to encourage donation, using cartoon figures (A decides whether to donate, and B/C/D are potential future donors who can either be part of a streak with three past donors or of part of a large percentage (80%). Upper right panel: A bar graph showing three conditions on the x-axis (Control/High Percentage/Short streak) and the donation rate (%) on the y-axis. The high percentage bar (center) is not significantly higher than the control bar, but the short streak bar is significantly higher than both other bars. Lower right panel: similar pattern and plot, but for three conditions labeled Control, No Streak, and Streak, respectively.

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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Complex and simple stimuli across a variety of domains. Even though these stimuli are complex for different reasons, we suggest the mind unifies them by their complexity. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p9xe3_v1

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Rahul Bhui @rbhui.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Yang Teoh @yyangteoh.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

pnas.org

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS

Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

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Ashwini Ashokkumar @ashwinia.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Pre-doc Researcher/Lab Manager! 🚨🚨 Full-time pre-doc research opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026). Review begins April 10 Apply: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive... Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇

jobs.smartrecruiters.com

Research Assistant II

Company Description: By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds...

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 19/03/2026

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

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Xiuyuan Flora Zhang @flora-xy-zhang.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Come by to check out our symposium on *Evaluating and predicting performance and learning* this Saturday at #SPSP2026! We have a fun lineup of speakers @stavatir.bsky.social y.social, Evan Weingarten, and @davidlevari.bsky.social

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

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David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?" We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity) 📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps 📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok 📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Please contact Nina if you're interested in working with us! Much of this work is also with @dgrand.bsky.social & @tomcostello.bsky.social, and others! Very fun collaborative environment. And Nina is wonderful to work with!! (She is also the coolest among us, FWIW)

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Bria Long @brialong.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

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browncopsy.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

🎉 Congratulations to our very own David Badre on being elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society! This prestigious honor recognizes his sustained and impactful contributions to cognitive science. Read more here: tinyurl.com/5n8rdrsm

tinyurl.com

David Badre Elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

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