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Tobias Gerstenberg

@tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
3.5K followers 698 following 189 posts

Tea drinking associate professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford. cicl.stanford.edu

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Amazing!! Huge congratulations @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant' 🥳🎉 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/a...
nytimes.com
MacArthur Foundation Announces 2026 ‘Genius Grant’ Winners (Gift Article)
The 20 fellowship recipients across the arts, humanities and sciences will each receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached stipend for their work.
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I'm so grateful for the continued support from my lab, and for everyone who helped along the way, now as an associate professor with tenure at Stanford 🧑‍🏫🥂🌲
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Excited and grateful to be part of this initiative by the Toyota Research Institute 🙏 Together with Thomas Icard, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social, and @yangxiang.bsky.social our team will explore what role responsibility plays in supporting effective collaboration. 📃 www.tri.global/news/elevati...
tri.global
Elevating Human Growth: Human-AI Kaizen Initiative | Toyota Research Institute
By Matthew Lee, Program Director, Human-AI Kaizen Initiative Today, Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announces the proposals selected for the Human-AI Kaizen Initiative, a multi-year collaboration with...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The Stanford Psychology Department is having a search for a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Application deadline is 10/15. More infos here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...
facultypositions.stanford.edu
Assistant Professor, Psychology - Stanford University, California, United States
The Department of Psychology at Stanford University is seeking applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. In addition ...
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Simon Stephan @simonstephan.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
(1/7) New paper in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Manipulating Prior Causal Beliefs Affects the Formation of Apparent Causal Illusions" Why do people sometimes "see" causal links in zero-contingency data? We tested if this is rational updating, not bias. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Manipulating prior causal beliefs affects the formation of apparent causal illusions
Non-contingent learning data can produce an apparent “illusory” or “false” perception of causality (“causal illusion”), especially if a potential caus…
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Verona Teo @veronateo.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Deciding when to jump in and help someone—and when to hold back and let them work through it—is something humans navigate constantly. How do AI assistants handle this tradeoff? We introduce Int-Bench, a framework for evaluating interventions during problem-solving tasks.
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Wonderful keynote by @hyogweon.bsky.social at #cogsci2026 on "Distinctively human intelligence: Thinking, learning, and communicating about the self". Hyo argues that better understanding how people think about the self is a key ingredient for uncovering what makes us intelligent.
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Yay @judithfan.bsky.social! Congrats on the Gleitman Prize at #cogsci2026!
Judy Fan image at CogSci!
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #CogSci2026 🇧🇷
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Erik Brockbank @erikbrockbank.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
When you meet someone new, what kind of questions do you ask? It’s tempting to think that *really* getting to know people is just a matter of asking the right questions. Excited to share the next chapter in ongoing work on what makes a *deep question* with amazing collaborators...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Very proud Doktorvater moment from a few weeks back. Pictured with Dr Sarah Wu and Dr David Rose (and with a large hat thanks to University College London's regalia). Sarah will postdoc with @tomerullman.bsky.social. David with @shaunnichols.bsky.social and @davidpierce.xyz. I will miss you!! ♥️
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Tania Lombrozo @tanialombrozo.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.
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Hanqi Zhou @hanqizhou.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Most models of learning ask what you can represent. We think the real bottleneck is what you can afford to find, since searching for a good representation is itself expensive. New preprint w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social, Peter Dayan & @thecharleywu.bsky.social 🧵👇
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Andrew Shtulman @andrewshtulman.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.
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languagemit.bsky.social @languagemit.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
New paper in Cognitive Psychology on how people combine visual 👀, auditory 👂, and haptic information 🖐️ to make causal judgments. Led by Elyse Chase (www.elysechase.com), with Kevin Smith, and Sean Follmer. 📜 authors.elsevier.com/a/1nHnI2Hxok...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
It was such an honor and so much fun to participate in Phil Johnson-Laird's 90th birthday conference. Thank you @ruthbyrne.bsky.social and Sunny Khemlani for organizing the event, and the folks at NYU for hosting it. Here is Phil asking whether people are smarter than logic. Phil certainly is!
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Congratulations to Dr. Dr. David Rose! 🥳 David (davdrose.github.io) first got a PhD in Philosophy, and now added another one in Psychology.
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Congratulations Dr. Sarah Wu 🎓🎉 (sarahawu.github.io)
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Justin Yang @justintheyang.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Factive mindreading reflects the optimal use of limited cognitive resources
Abstract. The capacity to represent the mental states of other individuals, known as ‘mindreading’ or ‘theory of mind’, is key to successful social predict
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Looking forward to it!! Thank you for organizing 🙏
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Some notes from the wonderful celebration of John Flavell's life and work at #CDS2026. "Age early and get it over with." (John on his looks not having changed in many years.) "Use the simplest word to get the idea across." "If I could only step into a child's mind even if just for a moment."
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Excited (and cold) for my first ever #CDS2026! I'll be presenting work by the 'Dropping Things' dream team in the workshop on "Counterfactual thinking: What is it good for?" Paper sneak peek: cicl.stanford.edu/papers/rose2...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
The 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 🙏
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition By Samuel Johnson @amirhkarimi.bsky.social @yoshuabengio.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social @sydneylevine.bsky.social @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @iyadrahwan.bsky.social @igi.bsky.social and more tinyurl.com/36yc6ant
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!! cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍 📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
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Charley Wu @thecharleywu.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏
hmc-lab.com
Postdoc position -- Social Learning and Cultural Evolution
Postdoc position -- Social Learning and Cultural Evolution posted on March 2, 2026 We are currently seeking a highly motivated individual...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Thank you Yoonseo Zoh (zohyos7.github.io) for sharing your work with us on "Intuitive Theories in Moral Cognition". Intuitive theories structure how people represent dilemmas, how they generalize to new contexts, and how they switch between representations based on resource-rational constraints.
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Igor Grossmann, PhD @igi.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
1/3 AI is getting smarter, but is it getting wiser? 🤔 Thrilled to share our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social paper on building wise machines, co-authored with Sam Johnson, @amirhkarimi.bsky.social, @yoshuabengio.bsky.social , @sydneylevine.bsky.social , @melaniemitchell.bsky.social, & more!
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Thanks @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on "Using the information bottleneck to study social cognition". Max develops resource-rational models that elegantly unify existing theories for various phenomena such as stereotyping and ToM development. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Fred Callaway @fredcallaway.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic.

text: 
The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources
Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
I'm very sad to have learned today that Joe Halpern passed away. Joe was a giant who knew no scientific boundaries. He loved science with a contagious, child-like enthusiasm. He was wonderful and I'm so grateful that I got to learn from him. Thank you Joe 🙏 www.bangsfuneralhome.com/obituaries/j...
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Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 13/02/2026
Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
academic.oup.com
Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky
Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Thanks @katenuss.bsky.social for sharing your work with us! Kate studies how people learn about the world through external exploration (acting) and internal exploration (imagining). Modeling & experiments reveal that people learn by simulating counterfactuals! 📃 elifesciences.org/articles/84260
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
Thank you @ltreiman.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on how people act differently when they know that their behavior is used to train AI. In the ultimatum game, people are more likely to reject disadvantageous offers when an AI is watching and learning. 📃 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Chris Krupenye @chriskrupenye.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
youtu.be
Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine
YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
This July, we are holding a virtual hackathon to explore LEVANTE data! If you're interested in data analysis, development, and cross-cultural variability, please join us! First week is open, second week is by application with mentorship on group projects. levante-hackathon-2026.github.io
Hackathon page screenshot
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Thanks @miriam-hauptman.bsky.social for sharing your work with us! How people learn about the visual world from language is mediated through causal models. Both sighted and blind people infer how many colors an object has based on how color ➡️ function. 📃 m-hauptman.github.io/files/Hauptm...
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Thank you Aniket Vashishtha (aniketvashishtha.github.io) for sharing your work on counterfactual reasoning in LLMs with us! Most current benchmarks don't assess genuine counterfactual reasoning. Aniket's work does, showing that LLMs struggle and what to do about that. 📃 arxiv.org/abs/2510.015...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
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Hyowon (Hyo) Gweon @hyogweon.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
annualreviews.org
Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds
The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Excited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉 David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops. 📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...
github.com
GitHub - davdrose/cause_burn_development: Materials for the paper "How children map causal verbs to different causes across development" by David Rose, Siying Zhang, Shaun Nichols, Ellen Markman and T...
Materials for the paper "How children map causal verbs to different causes across development" by David Rose, Siying Zhang, Shaun Nichols, Ellen Markman and Tobias Gerstenberg. - davdrose...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
The Harvard Gazette has a nice story on my student @yangxiang.bsky.social and her work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
news.harvard.edu
Cracking the code of why, when some choose to ‘self-handicap’ — Harvard Gazette
New research also offers hints for devising ways to stop students from creating obstacles to success.
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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!
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tyler bonnen @tylerbonnen.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊
a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fallthe Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees
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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
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