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Sami Yousif

@samiyousif.bsky.social
2.7K followers 318 following 88 posts

Asst Prof @ Ohio State. I study how we perceive and represent the (spatial) world. More here: spatialcognitionlab.org

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Reposted by Sami Yousif
tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Out today in Cognition (@cognitionjournal.bsky.social)! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
MindCORE is awesome for many reasons, especially for those with interdisciplinary interests. Because of that fellowship, I met Sam Clarke, a philosopher and fellow mindCORE postdoc at the time, who has become my closest collaborator. This dramatically reshaped my career (for the better!).
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Two special things about this project: (1) This is our first project using a live, interactive game. (2) This is our first (hopefully not last!) collab. with @dorsaamir.bsky.social who was so awesome to work with. Thanks @chazfirestone.bsky.social for letting us borrow @talboger.bsky.social!
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The open-ended tasks helped us to generate hypotheses that we were able to tested in more traditional, rigid psychophysics experiments. One counterintuitive finding worth highlighting: The creation of certain structures (e.g., holes) actually REDUCES perceived complexity.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
As in some other recent work, we opted for some maximally open-ended paradigms -- giving participants freedom to 'build' and 'destroy' block structures at their whim. It turns out people have pretty systematic intuitions about what topological structures are more/less complex.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
My lab has been really interested in topological perception the past two years. In a new paper, we ask: How does a topological perspective (re-)shape our understanding of visual complexity? Work led by one of our many wonderful undergraduate students, Ashna Shah! link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com
Topological structure and the creation of visual complexity - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
What does it mean for something to be complex? Fundamentally, complexity is a cue that something is less easily represented by our minds. With this fact in view, complexity becomes a tool: By understa...
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Really cannot say enough about how proud I am of this work and the team that put it together. Another special fact about this paper is that it includes two undergraduate authors, one from UNC where the work began and one from OSU.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Days after Mahwish stepped on campus as an undergrad two years ago, I recruited her into my lab, and we started talking about pursuing what, at the time, was the most ambitious project of my career - to study geometric representation through drawing. It was a great joy to work with her on this!
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
For anyone who enjoys thinking about the formats of mental representation: I found this paper from Rodrigo Garro-Rivero to be thought-provoking! philpapers.org/rec/GARACA-19
philpapers.org
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This paper started from a desire to combine philosophical treatments of cognitive maps (and other representational mediums, like the 'language of thought') with ideas in cognitive neuroscience. Hopefully we've managed to do both areas justice (or, at least, provoke some new ideas).
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
We also wanted to connect these ideas with contemporary cognitive neuroscience. We consider known neural mechanisms that may mediate this interface — Dynamic mechanisms such as replay, theta sequences, and vector computation.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
But how do maps and LoT relate to each other? We argue that this interface problem is an important and underappreciated one. We speculate that this interface may invoke the same operations that are used to convert cognitive maps into route-like representations during navigation.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Recently, the ‘language of thought’ has been described as the 'best' format of thought. Whether true or not, we think maps are a distinct medium worth taking seriously. In our view, maps sit somewhere between unstructured representations (e.g., pictures) and structured ones (e.g., as in LoT).
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
As a starting point: There is a lot of recent work in psychology and neuroscience that suggests that cognitive maps can represent both spatial and nonspatial knowledge, and, in this way, might serve as a vehicle for thought. But how?
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Excited about a new paper (w @russellepstein.bsky.social): "Cognitive maps as a medium for thought", in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! We discuss how maps are an important 'middle ground' rep. medium, and how they may interact with a 'language of thought'. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Cognitive maps as a medium for thought
Cognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whethe…
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Efficient coding makes and breaks Weber's law
Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
PS: I have not made loads of cash, because -- surprise! -- studies aren't actually paying nearly as much as Prolific's dynamic pricing would indicate.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The bottom line here is that Prolific hosts very different kind of studies, but I worry that they are all being binned together in a way that is misleading. As a researcher, though, it feels important to me to be aware of what I am actually competing against on the platform.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Of course, I don't know what the full distribution of studies on Prolific looks like. Since I have completed very few studies on the platform, I may not be getting offered certain kinds of tasks. (My own lab only invites people who have completed 100+ studies, for instance.)
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
So when Prolific uses dynamic pricing, they are comparing my experimental study (which takes nothing but task-relevant data from participants) with a study that is harvesting extremely personal information. These are obviously not the same sorts of things.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
What both of these kinds of studies have in common is the fact that you are being paid a premium because you are offering more than your labor/time -- you are also giving up your data, your voice, and your likeness, presumably to train AI models.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
As a participant, I am overwhelmingly (95%+ of the time) offered two kinds of studies: 1. I can provide my data from social media platforms. OR 2. I can speak (on video) about a certain topic.
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
There's been discussion about Prolific's dynamic pricing model here on bluesky. To learn more about this (and to make loads of cash, apparently!) I decided to become an actual Prolific participant. See thread below, but TLDR: What's happening on Prolific is not what I expected!👇
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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
BBS recently published a great piece by @mdubova.bsky.social & @sabinasloman.bsky.social on “Excess capacity learning”. I argue D&S’s framework overlooks a special kind of representation that encodes information both minimally and perfectly: lossless compression. philpapers.org/archive/BOGC...
Figure for my BBS commentary ("Compression without compromise") on Dubova & Sloman's target article ("Excess capacity learning")
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Gabe Waterhouse @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Now out in JEP:G (w/ samiyousif.bsky.social)! Here, we explore what quantities (e.g., number, area, size) are perceived most automatically (and spoiler: it’s more complicated than we thought!). psycnet.apa.org/record/2028-...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Now out in an issue! Children find it easier to represent uncertainty about *what* an object is than *where* an object is, with interesting implications for both early possibility reasoning and object representations ~~ Check it out 👉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”
Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
🫨
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
There are many reasons I'm excited about this project. One is just the sheer amount of data involved. There are 13 different experiments included here -- a lab record! -- including several unique paradigms and data from adults and children.
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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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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Sadly I will not be at VSS this year, but here's what our lab is up to! (In solidarity with many VSS attendees, however, I may be foregoing many hours of sleep -- not for long walks on the beach but due to the anticipated arrival of a second child any day now...)
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Joey Saito @jsaito25.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Brynn Sherman @brynnsherman.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr
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Brynn Sherman @brynnsherman.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx
osf.io
OSF
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
😡
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience? These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.
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Lauren Aulet @laurenaulet.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
We plan to hire a post doc to start in Fall 2026 (flexible), in the Aulet Lab at UMass Amherst, funded for two years. The postdoc will help establish our developmental fMRI research program studying symbolic number acquisition in 4-8 year old children (among other things!).
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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
A few years ago, my favorite website (@puddingviz.bsky.social) put out this great piece analyzing a study of how randomizing ability changes with age. It includes demos where readers produce sequences of random coin flips, dice rolls, and locations in a 3x3 grid. pudding.cool/2022/04/rand...
pudding.cool
We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it.
Are 25 year olds really more random than 60 year olds?
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Definitely very interesting! I’m glad I’ve learned about the concept!
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Great! We hoped you would. Obviously many of these ideas stem from your work!
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
I've also put up a separate page on the lab website where you can see some of these illusions more easily via improved, dynamic versions of the figures: spatialcognitionlab.org/spacetime
spatialcognitionlab.org
SpaceTime — Spatial Cognition Lab @ OSU
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo
rdcu.be
Distortions of space and time in and around objects and events
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
I feel like I remember being a pilot subject ~5 years ago, wow
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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
Very proud that this is finally out! Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..
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Lauren Aulet @laurenaulet.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
I am very grateful to Nessa and Maggie of Thoughtscape for all the energy they put into this project. In addition to being happy with the end result, I also greatly enjoyed the processed of brainstorming with them over many months. I highly recommend them!!
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Sami Yousif @samiyousif.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Over the past several months, I've been working (in collaboration with www.thoughtscape.com) to rebrand my lab and improve our website. This new version better captures our core interests/ideas. I'm really, really thrilled with how things turned out: spatialcognitionlab.org
spatialcognitionlab.org
Spatial Cognition Lab @ OSU
The Spatial Cognition Lab studies how we perceive, represent, and interact with the spatial world around us — all in the service of understanding how the mind works in general. We're also interested i...
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Brynn Sherman @brynnsherman.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
How Prediction of the Future Affects Encoding of the Present: Cooperation or Competition?
Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...
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Gabe Waterhouse @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The “Crowd Size Illusion” and the Relativity of Number Perception
When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set...
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