Leyla Isik

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.

High-dimensional structure underlying individual differences in naturalistic visual experience Han and Bonner reveal that individual visual experience arises from high-dimensional neural geometry distributed across multiple representational scales. By characterizing the full dimensional spectru...

Human visual cortex representations may be much higher-dimensional than earlier work suggested, but are these higher dimensions of cortical activity actually relevant to behavior? Our new paper tackles this by studying how different people experience the same movies. 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fall

the Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees

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 😊

How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Student Spotlight: Yash Mehta on Summer Opportunities | Cognitive Science Cognitive Science PhD student Yash Mehta had quite a busy summer. Yash, a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience & Deep Learning Group here at JHU, led by Professor Mick Bonner, spent the summer far fro...

✨🔦✨ This month's JHU Cog Sci Student Spotlight features PhD student Yash Mehta @yashsmehta.bsky.social

Read about Yash's research and exciting summer🔗👇

cogsci.jhu.edu/2025/11/10/s...

Simple 3D Pose Features Support Human and Machine Social Scene Understanding Humans can quickly and effortlessly extract a variety of information about others' social interactions from visual input, ranging from visuospatial cues like whether two people are facing each other t...

Why do AI models struggle with social scenes? 🧐 Our new preprint with @lisik.bsky.social reveals a fundamental gap: most AI vision models lack explicit 3D pose information that humans rely on for social judgments.

Read the full work: arxiv.org/abs/2511.03988

My lab at Boston University has open positions for a postdoc and PhD students. We study visual perception, attention, and decision making with a focus on temporal dynamics. Check out our recent work here sites.bu.edu/denisonlab/ and email me if you're interested in learning more

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

Interested in doing a PhD at the intersection of human and machine cognition? ✨ I'm recruiting students for Fall 2026! ✨

Topics of interest include pragmatics, metacognition, reasoning, & interpretability (in humans and AI).

Check out JHU's mentoring program (due 11/15) for help with your SoP 👇

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

@jhucogsci.bsky.social is now on bluesky 🦋

Give us a follow and check out the info about our PhD program

Call for applications to cognitive science PhD program with QR code to the link above

The department of Cognitive Science @jhu.edu is seeking motivated students interested in joining our interdisciplinary PhD program! Applications due 1 Dec

Our PhD students also run an application mentoring program for prospective students. Mentoring requests due November 15.

tinyurl.com/2nrn4jf9

Check out this new preprint led by @gkathy.bsky.social showing how a new fine-tuning scheme using human similarity judgements can improve existing video models, making them more human-aligned on different social tasks!

arxiv.org/abs/2510.01502

🚨New preprint w/ @lisik.bsky.social!
Aligning Video Models with Human Social Judgments via Behavior-Guided Fine-Tuning

We introduce a ~49k triplet social video dataset, uncover a modality gap (language > video), and close via novel behavior-guided fine-tuning.
🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2510.01502

Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")?

Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior!

shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

My lab at USC is recruiting!
1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829
2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/

New preprint led by @hsmall.bsky.social with @hleemasson.bsky.social, Ericka Wodka and Stewart Mostofsky: Ubiquitous cortical sensitivity to visual information during naturalistic, audiovisual movie viewing

Check out the paper osf.io/b5p4n and Hannah's summary 👇

See the speakers for 2025-26 #KempnerInstitute Seminar Series!
bit.ly/46xphKq

@moiradillon.bsky.social @lisik.bsky.social @profsanjeevarora.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social @scychan.bsky.social @stellaathena.bsky.social @judithfan.bsky.social @engeltatiana.bsky.social @zdeborova.bsky.social

Action-type mapping principles extend beyond evolutionarily conserved actions, even in people born without hands | PNAS How are actions represented in the motor system? Although the sensorimotor system is broadly organized somatotopically, higher-level sensorimotor a...

Excited to share our (Flo Martinez Addiego @yuqiliu1179.bsky.social @culhamari-lab.bsky.social) paper, now published in PNAS!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
(or an easier read on medicine.georgetown.edu/news-release... )

What fun to hang out in Amsterdam with former lab members, dear friends, and scientific rock stars @evfedorenko.bsky.social‬ @lisik.bsky.social‬ @apurvaratan.bsky.social‬ @carolinerobertson.bsky.social‬

Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! If you're here, check out the presentations from our lab 👇@qinwenshuo.bsky.social @ziruichen.bsky.social @manasimalik.bsky.social

@cogcompneuro.bsky.social

@ardeeb.bsky.social @shenduqiubai.bsky.social

If you're heading to @cogscisociety.bsky.social, come to our symposium “Perception as a Foundation for Common‑Sense Theories of the World”

📅 August 1 • 9 AM
📍 Salon 2

With
@thiskevinsmith.bsky.social
@shariliu.bsky.social
@judithfan.bsky.social
@ardeeb.bsky.social
— See you there! #CogSci2025

If you're heading to @cogscisociety.bsky.social check out the presentations from our lab

And congratulations again to @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social on her Glushko dissertation prize 🥳

Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions Nature Communications - Abilities to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial actions are crucial for sustaining cooperative systems. Here, the authors show that human newborns with just 5 days...

New paper! Here (in Nature Communications) we (Ale Geraci, Luca Surian, Lucia Gabriella Tina, & I; work led/run by Ale) show that 5-day-old newborns selectively attend to two distinct forms of prosocial over antisocial action: approaching versus avoiding and helping versus hindering.
rdcu.be/evorW

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little is known about the developmental and evolutionary roots ...

New paper from Laura Lewis and Jan Engelmann et al. (including me) with a clever new method. Chimps and kids will forgo reward to get a chance to look at social interactions
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

So good to see you @martinhebart.bsky.social thanks for coming and sharing all your awesome work with us!