Leyla Isik

@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!

This framing is all wrong

Our international students are not a “crucial funding source”

They are our STUDENTS

They are the reason we EXIST

We teach STUDENTS

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year!

I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

SO excited about this new paper by @talboger.bsky.social! How does your mind separate the *content* of an image from the *manner* in which it is depicted? And how can we study this using tools from perception research? Find out in Tal's new @nathumbehav.nature.com paper 👇

You can hear @yuanfangzhao.bsky.social present this work @vssmtg.bsky.social on Tuesday morning (poster 53.420)
#VSS2025

osf.io/preprints/ps...

These results replicated across two separate datasets, appear specific to multi-person interactions, and are not due to overall motion 



3/n

voxelwise maps and video labels for two components

We found distinct neural signatures for physical interactions (eg fighting, dancing) and communicative interactions along posterior to anterior regions of the recently proposed lateral pathway. A distinction that has been difficult to find with hypothesis-driven experiments

2/n

Humans are sensitive to many different types of social interactions, but it has been difficult to isolate these differences in the human brain

In this new preprint @yuanfangzhao.bsky.social w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social applied data-driven methods to two fMRI video datasets to address this

1/n

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

We just announced the PIVOT and BRIDGE award funds, as well as enhanced university services to help researchers at Hopkins in these difficult times.

On and forward!

Read about these here: research.jhu.edu/jhu-research...

AI still can't beat humans at reading social cues Despite rapid advancement, AI models still struggle at identifying how people interact with each other.

Anytime you want an AI system to interact with humans, you want to be able to know what those humans are doing and what groups of humans are doing with each other,” says @lisik.bsky.social. “This really highlights how a lot of these models fall short on those tasks.” www.popsci.com/technology/a...

📢 Excited to announce our paper at #ICLR2025: “Modeling dynamic social vision highlights gaps between deep learning and humans”! w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social, Colin Conwell, Mick Bonner, @lisik.bsky.social
‬

‪📆 Thur, Apr, 24: 3:00-5:30 - Poster session 2 (#64) ‬
‪📄 bit.ly/4jISKES%E2%8... [1/6]

Shown is an example image that participants viewed either in EEG, fMRI, and a behavioral annotation task. There is also a schematic of a regression procedure for jointly predicting fMRI responses from stimulus features and EEG activity.

I am excited to share our recent preprint and the last paper of my PhD! Here, @imelizabeth.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, Mick Bonner, and I investigate the spatiotemporal hierarchy of social interactions in the lateral visual stream using EEG-fMRI.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

#CogSci #EEG