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Rachel Ryskin

@ryskin.bsky.social
557 followers 390 following 30 posts

Cognitive scientist @ University of California, Merced | raryskin.github.io PI of Language, Interaction, & Cognition (LInC) lab | linclab0.github.io

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Reposted by Rachel Ryskin
Ben Fulcher @bendfulcher.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Today I'm releasing the "1000×1000 collection": a unified place to learn about dynamical structure. 1000 simulated time series (1000 samples each) spanning 133 dynamical processes. Have a play? 🐛 #timeseries #dynamicalsystems #complexity #opendata dynamicsandneuralsystems.github.io/1000x1000/
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Michelle Greene @mgreenephd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🚨New paper alert! 🚨 The visual system tunes itself to the statistics of its input. How do individual experiences differently tune vision? In this work, @bjbalas.bsky.social and I examined how one individual difference—height—changes the visual diet and how this affects perception. 1/
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Dirk Gütlin @gutlin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
📣📣📣 Preprint Alert! 📣📣📣 Do predictive processes shape brain representations during learning? We investigated the effect of Predictive Coding by training identical recurrent networks with different optimization procedures and then comparing them to human EEG under the same visual learning task.
Overview figure of our learning paradigm, architecture, and analysis procedure.
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Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science bot @oecs-bot.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Converting abstract thoughts into fluent speech requires a rapid, subconscious orchestration of syntactic structure, word choice, and motor planning. Language Production by Zenzi M. Griffin doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.b076f599 #CognitiveScience
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: "Language Production" by Zenzi M. Griffin. Speakers are typically aware of the ideas they want to express but not the steps involved in getting from those ideas to a series of motor movements. Consider describing an image with the sentence, “B
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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
since I'm getting many pokes about grad school applications, I wanted to re-up some previous public advice on grad school applications. looking back at it a year on, I still think all this is right, but let me update the 'research statement' part to include a bit on genAI:
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Ken Paller @paller.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Announcing two tenure-track faculty openings in the Psych Dept at Northwestern University: Cognitive/Affective Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology psychology.northwestern.edu/people/facul...
psychology.northwestern.edu
Job Opportunities: Department of Psychology - Northwestern University
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Simon Kirby @simonkirby.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
We uncovered spontaneous evolution of new languages in populations of AI agents. This creates extraordinary scientific opportunities but also safety risks. New blog post with about how we created a platform for studying this safely. www.schmidtsciences.org/glossogen/
schmidtsciences.org
AI Agents Evolve Their Own Languages
Schmidt Sciences’ new AI Agents Evolving Communication and Coordination pilot program works toward advancing foundational research on multi-agent communication and coordination, and building an open-s...
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Federico Rossano @federicorossano.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
UCSD Cognitive Science Department is hiring an Assistant Professor incorporating novel computational approaches in the study of biological and/or artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working in this department for 10 years and the intellectual environment really is unique. 1/3
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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Deadline Nov 9: Asst prof (tenure track), cognitive science: "foundational issues in cognitive science, incorporating modern computational approaches, to deepen our understanding of biological and/or artificial minds and intelligences", U California San Diego apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04633
apol-recruit.ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!
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Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate? Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch. arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵
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Cogan Lab @coganlab.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
How does a speech plan become fluent movement? In Nature Human Behaviour, led by Kumar Duraivel: Intracranial recordings reveal how hierarchical speech plans become continuous motor sequences across planning, articulation, and monitoring networks. doi.org/10.1038/s415... 1/5
doi.org
Distinct neural processes link speech planning and execution - Nature Human Behaviour
Direct recordings from the human brain reveal a hierarchy in planning to speak, with neural activity organizing whole syllables before the individual sounds that compose them are sequenced.
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Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.eurosky.social · 10/09/2026
How does the architecture of a city shape the way we think, talk, and draw space? And how do spatial conventions travel across cultural generations? New paper in Open Mind, spearheaded by Z Alinam (w J Nölle, C Vesper, K Tylén & me): doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.380 🧵 1/
doi.org
When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization
Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...
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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646
apol-recruit.ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor in High-level Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!
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Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?
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Andrea de Varda @andreadevarda.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
New preprint! 🧠👀🤖 Behavioral and brain responses to language reflect different levels of linguistic representation w/ @whylikethis.bsky.social , @evfedorenko.bsky.social , and @rplevy.bsky.social (1/10)
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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 (The result of an 8-year project!) LLMs seem very different from symbolic systems. Yet LLMs excel in symbolic domains (e.g., language/code/math). How do they do it? Our finding: LLM representations have implicit symbolic structure! Link in thread ⬇️ 1/n
Overview of the paper. 
Title: The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Tom McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen, Paul Smolensky
Left: Neural networks encode information in vectors (there is then an image of a vector), yet they excel at tasks long thought to require symbolic structure (there is then an image of a symbolic representation, specifically a syntax tree). How do LLMs do it?
Right: We find that LLM representations can be closely approximated with symbolic structures. This approximation lets us edit the structure of an LLM’s output by editing the structure of its internal representations, as shown. There is then an image of two edits to LLMs. In the first one, the original input is 3 + 6 * 8, with an answer of 51. But if we swap the positions of the 3 and the 6, the output becomes 30. In the second one, the original input is a Python command repeating the list [Z, U] three times, producing [Z, U, Z, U, Z, U]. But if we edit the input in a way that adds a Q at the end of the input, the output becomes [Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q].
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If 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.
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Veera Ruuskanen @veerahelmisofia.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Super excited to see our review out in TiCS! Here me & @cogsci.nl present the first comprehensive framework of the mechanisms driving relationships between spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior 👀🧠👩🏻‍💻 Spoiler: arousal is only one of at least four 😶‍🌫️ doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
doi.org
Redirecting
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Federico Rossano @federicorossano.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Chimpanzees usually fail a simple pointing task that human infants and dogs pass. In our new iScience paper, we provide a possible explanation: once their attention is engaged, chimpanzees use human pointing to find hidden food 73% of the time. Attention may be the missing piece.
Figure 2. Three photos showing the experimental conditions. Left: the experimenter points toward the baited container while calling the chimpanzee’s name and making food grunts. Center: he points without vocal attention-getting cues. Right: he provides gaze and food grunts but does not point. Chimpanzees succeeded only when attention-getting cues and pointing were combined.
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Neurosynth @neurosynth.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Exciting update! You can run Image Based Meta-Analyses (IBMA) on our platform 🚀 We've known for ~TWO decades that images are better than coordinates, but data has never been shared/organized properly to make that an accessible reality. We did it, enjoy: compose.neurosynth.org
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Amanda Van Horne @telllab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
careers.udel.edu/cw/en-us/job... My lab is hiring a postdoc to help wrap up a clinical trial (data wrangling/data sharing/stats and and analytics /publications related to child psycholinguistics). Position begins immediately. #rstats #slpeeps #childlanguage #DLD please reach out if interested!
careers.udel.edu
University of Delaware - Details - Post Doctoral Researcher, College of Health Sciences
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Rachel Ryskin @ryskin.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Very clear demonstration of the remarkable preservation of the language network in the brains of older adults (in contrast to the MD network)! 🧠 👵
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Caterina Gratton @caterinagratton.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
🚨Job Search announcement 🚨 @psychillinois.bsky.social is searching for an assistant prof in cognitive neuroscience. Come join us! Pls RT 🙏 Full ad: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #neuroimaging
illinois.csod.com
Assistant Professor- Psychology - College of LAS
Duties & Responsibilities
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Rachel Ryskin @ryskin.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
@salonisameernaik.bsky.social did a fantastic job leading this—impressive since she isn't even in grad school yet (applying this fall!). Super fun to collab w/ @tylermarghetis.bsky.social on the role of perceptual processes in seemingly abstract math reasoning. See thread & preprint for details!👇
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Damián Blasi @damianblasi.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Join us in Barcelona for a postdoc! We are looking for candidates with a strong NLP/ML/AI background and an interest in linguistic diversity and human and machine cognition: dub.sh/blasi_nlp_po...
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Tianyuan Teng @tyteng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
You'd think people prefer the simplest explanation of an uncertain world — Occam's razor. Our data says no, across 2 modalities, 2 tasks, 8 experiments: people often perceive illusory structure that isn't there and prefer moderate complexity. Out now in Nature Comms! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Human learning of probability distributions is biased toward moderate structural complexity - Nature Communications
Humans build internal models from online observations to adapt to new environments. Here, the authors show that individuals are biased towards building models with moderate structural complexity, rega...
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Jenni Rodd @jennirodd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
A (somewhat self-indulgent) preprint summarising what I think connectionism/LLMs can tell psychologists about what word meanings might be. I'd really appreciate feedback and comments. osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
First, I want to stress that the method is dead simple and the results are pretty robust to design variations. If you apply matrix decomposition to individualized fMRI timecourse data, one of the resulting components will probably be a language network. 4/
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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Now out in @natcomms.nature.com w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social: across many people (>1k) and tasks (>300), the the brain's language network reliably shows up in the functional connectome (correlated activity in fMRI). 1/
Screen capture of abstract of published article.

Title: A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of 1199 human brains doing arbitrary tasks

Abstract: A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement about language and its component processes, and (b) intrinsic inter-individual variability in the topography of language areas. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of small numbers of intensively scanned individuals have argued that a language-selective brain network emerges bottom-up from correlations (individualized functional connectomics, iFC) in task-free (e.g., rest) or task-regressed activation timecourses. Here we tested this hypothesis at scale and evaluated its practical utility for task-agnostic language localization: we apply iFC separately to each of 1,957 (fMRI) scanning sessions (1...
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Iban Dlank (b↔︎d) @ibandlank.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
New resource: intro workshop on contextual embeddings in Language Models! Free, standalone Google Colab notebook with lots of explanations. Built for psycholing/cogsci folks (and anyone curious about LM internals). No coding required! Just edit-and-run. 🧵 github.com/idanblank/LM...
github.com
LM-embedding-workshop-data/LM_embedding_workshop_notebook_public.ipynb at main · idanblank/LM-embedding-workshop-data
Data for a workshop on using LM contextual embeddings - idanblank/LM-embedding-workshop-data
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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Open until filled (🚨🚨apply now!🚨🚨): Postdoc, speech acoustics and major depressive disorder, with me!, Northwestern Linguistics (working with folks in Psychology and Psychiatry). faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/matt-goldric...
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Seungju Kim (he/him) @follhim.net · 11/08/2026
Did you know: you can anonymize a GitHub repo for peer review? A real alternative for OSF anonymous.4open.science
anonymous.4open.science
Anonymous Github
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Matan Mazor @matanmazor.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
This is amazing from a cognitive science perspective. The new intelligences are here.
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Nature Reviews Psychology @natrevpsychol.nature.com · 03/08/2026
Prediction in language comprehension across the lifespan Review by Kara D. Federmeier, Hui-Sun Chiu, Cynthia L. Fisher & Yukun Yu go.nature.com/4w4Mn4G #psychscisky
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Be kind to the academics in your life and try to help them pretend it's still July
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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Deadline Dec 1: Asst prof (tenure track), open area, ‼️NU Linguistics‼️ "an integrated approach to the scientific study of language, utilizing experimental, computational, and/or data-intensive approaches to inform linguistic theory and its applications" linguistics.northwestern.edu/about/open-p...
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Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) @mmb-journal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Hello 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/mmb
direct.mit.edu
Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
I'm just now reading @randomwalker.bsky.social's writeup of his ICML keynote. It is very insightful. Everyone thinking about the future of work in the age of AI should read this. www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...
normaltech.ai
What will be left for us to work on?
My keynote at ICML 2026
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Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science bot @oecs-bot.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Human social interaction relies on a universal, biologically rooted engine that enables rapid communication long before children master the… The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.e3df24b2 #CognitiveScience
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: "The Interaction Engine" by Stephen C. Levinson. The interaction engine is a label for the specialized capacities involved in human social interaction. The interaction engine comprises a suite of specific abilities that enable communication, for exa
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Alana Darcher @alanadarcher.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵
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Iban Dlank (b↔︎d) @ibandlank.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Do language models know who did what to whom? Led by grad student @josephdenning.bsky.social, and Hannah Guo (when she was the first undergrad RA in the lab!)
direct.mit.edu
Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?
Abstract. Language models (LMs) are commonly criticized for not “understanding” language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. H...
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Laurel Brehm @drlearnasaurus.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
CAMP[9] announcement! November 6-9 at UCSB. camp9ucsb.github.io/conference/
camp9ucsb.github.io
CAMP[9]🏕️
CAMP[9] is organized by Laurel Brehm and Simon Todd. It is made possible by a grant from the University of California Office of the President. CAMP is meta-organized by Jesse Harris (UCLA) and Elsi Ka...
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Damián Blasi @damianblasi.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....
science.org
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...
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Iban Dlank (b↔︎d) @ibandlank.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Open Mind
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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Alpha rhythm determines speech perception rate? And speeding it up makes unintelligibly fast speech comprehensible? This is nuts! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
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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Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab @cocoscilab.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
If you are heading to the Cognitive Science Society conference next week, you might enjoy the most recent episodes of the Cognition Project podcast: Donald Norman, Eleanor Rosch, and George Lakoff talk about the first time the conference was held (among many other things!)
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 18/07/2026
I've posted a preprint of a philosophical paper I've written on the relationships between understanding, prediction, and compression, based on a talk I gave at SPAN 2025. Now in press at Synthese. philarchive.org/archive/POLUPA
philarchive.org
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 16/07/2026
calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!
I am writing on behalf of the leadership of jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection used in experiments and surveys from many labs worldwide.

It has been difficult for us to figure out how widespread jsPsych usage is, because the software is freely available online and we do not collect any information about downloads, users, experiments posted online, etc. While the software has been cited in thousands of articles, jsPsych usage is likely more widespread than those citations imply, because not every project using jsPsych leads to a citation, and because there are also often substantial delays between actual jsPsych usage and a publication. As such, we are conducting a very brief census of jsPsych users.

If you collect data from humans using jsPsych or any other type of software, we would appreciate your filling out a very brief survey (<1 min) at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census. This will help us to understand how many people, labs, and institutions are current or former users of jsPsych, information that will help support the long-term sustainability of the jsPsych ecosystem.

We would also appreciate it if you could circulate this message to your lab, your department listserv, and your collaborators, to help ensure that it reaches as many members of the research community as possible. The survey is being distributed by Josh de Leeuw, Melissa Kline Struhl, and myself. Please contact me (sam@auckland.ac.nz) off-list if you have any questions about it.
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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Hey #CogSci2026! I'm so honored to be receiving this year's Elman Prize! Please join @m2b2.bsky.social and me Friday 2-3:30pm in Gavea A for two joint talks: "Multilingualism in Cognitive Science" and "Multilingualism for Cognitive Science and Society" 1/4 @cogscisociety.bsky.social
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Marlene Cohen @marlenecohen.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
One of the first things we found was that visual feature representations became progressively less independent, even before detectable damage in visual cortex. Information about one feature (say, curvature) started influencing another (say, contrast). We call this neuronal feature confusion. 5/
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