Reposted by Manikya AlisterJoe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026What truly grinds my gears is that climate scientist can spend 50 years building data-grounded models and need to frame their findings to avoid being called alarmist. At the same time x-risk cranks and CEOs can just pull P(doom) > 10% out of their ass and be taken seriously. 38518
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAlejandro Fábregas-Tejeda @alejandrofabregastejeda.com · 11/08/2026As simulations grow in complexity, a set of non-trivial issues emerge: diminished identifiability as free parameters become too numerous relative to exp. constraints & difficulties grasping causality. In our new 📄, we point to potential avenues to move #CellBio forward 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2608.06998arxiv.orgSimulating is not always understanding: When model complexity obscures biologyIn cell biology, computational models of biological systems range from minimal representations with a handful of parameters to whole-cell simulations tracking thousands of molecular species across a c... 310635
Manikya Alister @manikyaalister.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Enjoyed working on this! Read below to learn how different types of consensus change in persuasiveness with increased repetitions 📈 020
Reposted by Manikya AlisterKianté @kiante.bsky.social · 09/09/2026A few years ago at MathPsych @singmann.bsky.social and I spoke about making an update. Well here it is new rtdists live on CRAN! 0156
Reposted by Manikya AlisterWilliam J. Brady @williambrady.bsky.social · 29/06/2026In 2023 we showed how engagement-based algorithms exploit human social learning biases, distorting how we learn what's normal, common, or credible from each other ("Algorithm-mediated social learning," Trends in Cognitive Sciences). The obvious follow-up: where does generative AI fit in? 2131
Reposted by Manikya AlisterSam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost. 18934
Reposted by Manikya AlisterGaia Molinaro @gaiamolinaro.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Why do some goals spread across people and generations, while others emerge only transiently? We argue that human goals are both drivers and products of cultural evolution: our individual pursuits are shaped by our cultural environments, and the goals we pursue in turn reshape those environments. 1189
Reposted by Manikya AlisterDrew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Working on a dissertation in American political behavior and need money for survey research? Apply for a grant worth up to $15,000 from the Rapoport Family Foundation. They’re planning on awarding up to 15 grants this cycle. Deadline Oct. 21. www.rapoportfamilyfoundation.com/phdgrantrapoportfamilyfoundation.comRapoport Doctoral Dissertation GrantsSupporting projects for PhD students doing political science research, democracy and social justice. 17790
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMarius Mercier @mariusmercier.bsky.social · 30/03/2026Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6 35825
Reposted by Manikya AlisterPetter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 06/08/2026We keep asking what social media does to voters. The wrong end of the pipe. Platforms don't just distribute politics — they teach political actors what kind of speech pays. So I measured the going rate: what X, Bluesky and Mastodon reward in public speech. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220 311343
Reposted by Manikya AlisterJared Moore @jaredlcm.bsky.social · 06/08/2026Which LLMs tend to facilitate delusion-linked behaviors in realistic multi-turn conversations? We tested 14 models with DelusionEval and found that every evaluated LLM exhibited some of these behaviors, with large differences across categories and model families. 🧵 1136
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMinds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) @mmb-journal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmbdirect.mit.eduMinds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press 223793
Reposted by Manikya AlisterPaul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 30/07/2026A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning. Now out in PNAS, led by the incomparable @apvelilla.bsky.social . We use modeling to explore conditions for the (cultural) evolution of parochial (and anti-parochial) learning biases. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 03917
Reposted by Manikya AlisterARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 22/07/2026The ARC's new grant scheme table, in case you don't want to read through the details (which are here: www.arc.gov.au/system/files...) 24830
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMax Taylor-Davies @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social · 29/07/2026🍄 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🍄 I, and others, have previously drawn a comparison between the classic “cost-avoidance” argument for social learning and the central idea of resource rationality... (1/8) 2177
Reposted by Manikya AlisterRafael M Batista @rafmbatista.bsky.social · 24/07/2026Good morning #CogSci2026! I’ve got a poster to share with you this afternoon Come on by so we can meet and I can tell you about what I’ve working been with on (together w/ Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social ) rafaelmbatista.com/sycophantic-...rafaelmbatista.comA Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AICogSci 2026 | Poster Session 3 0112
Reposted by Manikya AlisterRayna Tang @raynatang.bsky.social · 22/07/2026Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵pnas.orgActive linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNASIn daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke... 39833
Reposted by Manikya AlisterRobert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · 23/07/2026excited for the first #cogsci2026 poster session this afternoon! come by and chat with @ymacci.bsky.social @amirzur.bsky.social @clairebergey.bsky.social 1225
Reposted by Manikya AlisterTobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 20/07/2026The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #CogSci2026 🇧🇷 05814
Reposted by Manikya AlisterErik Brockbank @erikbrockbank.bsky.social · 16/07/2026Check out our preprint and/or come chat at #CogSci2026 next week to learn more! Poster during session 3 (P3-M-124) on Friday July 24. And stay tuned for full manuscript coming soon! 0225
Reposted by Manikya AlisterBeth Clarke @bethclarke.bsky.social · 03/07/2026Very excited to announce that I’ll be joining @zpid.bsky.social in Trier, Germany as a tenure-track Jun.-Prof. in Psychological Metascience in November! 🤸🏻♀️✨ 1812716
Reposted by Manikya AlisterBella Fascendini @bellafascendini.bsky.social · 26/06/2026New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜 619776
Reposted by Manikya AlisterGeorgia Turner @georgiaturner.bsky.social · 25/06/2026🎉 Now published in Nature Communications! 🧠 We develop a novel computational reinforcement learning & habit model of Twitter data, and show that younger people & women are more behaviourally sensitive to 'Likes'. Read the paper: bit.ly/4f1vsKSbit.lyA computational model of reward learning and habits on social media - Nature CommunicationsThe cognitive processes driving social media use could be key to understanding social media’s impact. Here, the authors develop a computational model of real-world social media behaviour, identifying ... 15015
Reposted by Manikya AlisterRandall Munroe @xkcd.com · 24/06/2026Sports Commentary xkcd.com/3262/ 363497455
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · 23/06/2026New paper "To select or not to select: predictively consistent priors instead of model selection" with Anna Elisabeth Riha, Leevi Lindgren, @davidkohns.bsky.social, @paulbuerkner.com arxiv.org/abs/2606.22850 Model selection is not a substitute for building good models in the first place 1/ 110631
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAndrew Perfors @perfors.net · 17/06/2026... which I find heartwarming! But it also makes us vulnerable to deception; the bias is so strong that we have a hard time adjusting our inferences enough even when we have good reason to believe the information provider is being misleading. Kudos to @manikyaalister.bsky.social for awesome work! 071
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAndrew Perfors @perfors.net · 17/06/2026So proud to share this work! A deep dive on how good people are at learning from others when we don't know if they're helpful (with cool models! and several experiments!). tl;dr: It's super hard and even optimal Bayesian models struggle. People have a strong bias to assume others are helpful... 1174
Reposted by Manikya AlisterPer Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 17/06/2026Society works because we assume most people are decent. Society occasionally fails for the same reason. 0134
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMike Le Pelley @mikelepelley.bsky.social · 09/06/2026FIVE academic jobs currently open in the School of Psychology at UNSW Sydney, across a variety of areas; see links below. Please come and join us! It's an outstanding department with excellent people. tinyurl.com/4p6tp2j3 tinyurl.com/yxm565xs tinyurl.com/2u8m77z8 tinyurl.com/3wu9hnb5tinyurl.comLecturer/Senior Lecturer/ Associate Professor - PsychologyA Lecturer (Level B) / Senior Lecturer (Level C) is expected to carry out activities to develop their scholarly research and professional activities both nationally and internationally and to contribu... 01114
Manikya Alister @manikyaalister.bsky.social · 09/06/2026One of the first studies from my PhD is out now in JEP:G 🥳We tested whether people can infer the truth from teachers who were either helpful, misleading, or randomly sampling. With Keith Ransom and @perfors.net psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... 1398
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMarius Mercier @mariusmercier.bsky.social · 04/06/2026New paper accepted as a proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society: "Inferring arithmetic skills from speed and accuracy”! We tested whether people were optimal in their inference of others' math skills. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 22112
Reposted by Manikya AlisterBerna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 25/05/2026that's what we need. anyhow, if i studied this, i'd think more carefully about how to choose a meaningful control group. and try to have a good theory of under what conditions people seek advice, from whom, with what expectations, and when they actually take it. 2224
Reposted by Manikya AlisterKartik Chandra @kartikchandra.bsky.social · 19/05/2026I wrote a tiny LaTeX package that creates a wordcount environment. You can use it to auto-print word counts, when paring down text to meet limits. For example: \begin{wordcount}{\abstractcount} This is my abstract. \end{wordcount} \textbf{Word count:} \abstractcount % prints 4 Source code below… 1279
Reposted by Manikya AlisterCourtney Hilton @courtneybhilton.bsky.social · 12/05/2026Woah! @zotero.org version 9 now has a 'read aloud' feature, where an artificial voice can read articles to you. The premium voices option is actually pretty decent. I can imagine myself using this to listen to articles on the tram in to work. 171
Reposted by Manikya AlisterM. S. AtKisson @igrrrl.bsky.social · 08/05/2026Out in Science. Years ago I recall another paper that said how fields make bigger leaps in the few years after one of the "greats" retires. www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagaz...sciencemagazinedigital.orgScience Magazine - Aging and the narrowing of scientific innovationScientific careers today are marked by growing polarization: A small number of scientists now remain active and influential for longer than ever (1), whereas many others pass through research as... 2349
Reposted by Manikya AlisterBerna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 30/04/2026📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268 15545205
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAndrew Wang @andreww3-wang.bsky.social · 28/04/2026📄 Long overdue paper announcement: Core Vocabulary in Language Representation and Processing was published late last year in Cognitive Science. The work explores novel approaches of quantifying vocabulary centrality and tests them in an empirical task. 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...onlinelibrary.wiley.com 032
Reposted by Manikya AlisterCourtney Hilton @courtneybhilton.bsky.social · 24/04/2026Last week for submissions (deadline April 30th)! If you do work in any part of experimental psych or vision science come join us in Auckland, New Zealand! It's shaping up to be a great conference. 063
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMark Ho @markkho.bsky.social · 24/04/2026Excited that this work with @rachitdubey.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social is finally officially out! 0345
Reposted by Manikya AlisterYounes Strittmatter @younesstrittmatter.bsky.social · 22/04/2026Too many star chefs spoil the broth. In an Overcooked-like task, mixed teams beat uniformly strong players. Fittingly, the project came from an interdisciplinary team: different fields, better recipe. Thanks all! We’ll present at CogSci. See y’all there. www.researchgate.net/publication/...researchgate.net(PDF) When Collaboration Beats Ability: Mixed-Ability Teams Can Outperform High-Ability Teams Under Coordination DemandsPDF | Collective intelligence describes the capacity of groups to achieve levels of performance that cannot be explained by the abilities of their... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on... 091
Reposted by Manikya AlisterJay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 21/04/2026A small fraction of online actors exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and discusses. In a new paper, we trace how social media influencers turn fringe claims into viral narratives by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms & crowds osf.io/preprints/ps... 16424
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMarina Dubova @mdubova.bsky.social · 20/04/2026Ever thought we acquire generalizable knowledge by discarding details and compressing our experiences? In a new BBS paper, @sabinasloman.bsky.social and I argue otherwise, proposing a novel way of studying human learning inspired by double descent in ML. Disagree? Propose a commentary by May 15 :) 1195
Reposted by Manikya AlisterAlison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 16/04/2026New preprint of a paper with Eunice Yiu to appear in Philosophical Transactions A, Special issue: World models, 2026. The theoretical link between empowerment in RL and Bayesian causal models with cool new data. arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230arxiv.orgEmpowerment Gain and Causal Model Construction: Children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventionsLearning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models usin... 1165
Reposted by Manikya AlisterMax Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 14/04/2026I love paying TurboTax a few hundred bucks every year to figure out how much money I owe the government, which the government already knows, but won't tell me because TurboTax pays legislators to keep the government from telling me. 😍 912385530
Reposted by Manikya AlisterSydney Levine @sydneylevine.bsky.social · 14/04/2026@michael.muthukrishna.com and I are hiring a postdoc to join our labs at NYU! We're looking for someone excited to work on one of society's newly emerging and potentially generation-shaping challenges: the multi-agent alignment problem. 12011
Reposted by Manikya AlisterOleg Urminsky @olegurminsky.bsky.social · 09/04/2026The paper, led by Eugina Leung, is here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We document that the human tendency for confirmation bias in question framing (the tendency of people to frame search in terms of their prior beliefs) and algorithms that optimize for relevance combine to impede belief updating.pnas.orgThe narrow search effect and how broadening search promotes belief updating | PNASInformation search platforms, from Google to AI-assisted search engines, have transformed information access but may fail to promote a shared factu... 163
Reposted by Manikya AlisterTobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 03/04/2026The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏 26536
Reposted by Manikya AlisterCarlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 06/04/2026And another Quarto announcement; I've alluded to it before, but we're making it "official". We've started work on Quarto 2. The blog post has an overview: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... We'll share more in future blog posts, but here's what you can expect from the Quarto 2 dev effort: (1/)quarto.orgWhat’s next: Quarto 2 – QuartoWe’ve started working on quarto-dev/q2, a full rewrite of Quarto in Rust. 1019254
Reposted by Manikya AlisterPaul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 02/04/2026I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so... 67024