Sami Yousif

Hey! We discussed this work in a review paper of ours that is currently under review. Great work!

Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

There’s a deep difference between sentences like:

(1) Jane caused the glass to break.

vs.

(2) Jane broke the glass.

A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2)

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Are OSF view-only links broken? A journal keeps un-submitting our paper because the link doesn't work, but (a) it did work, just before the update, and (b) it says it should be working as usual in the OSF interface.

Anyone else having this problem, or know of a solution?

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

smh the bots are just repeating themselves at this point

PCDL @ OSU

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org

Isn't the Filled Duration Illusion usually about filling spaces with other discrete entities (analogous to the visual Oppel-Kundt illusion)? If so, I think those effects are substantively different, personally!

Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below:

mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

I’ll send over the latest draft that we had!

We’ve found the same when we’ve examined adherence to Weber’s law with different sorts of visual stimuli. Sam Clarke and I wrote up a paper recently that’s partly about this, but we haven’t known what to do with it.

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

🧵(1/22)

Maybe! If we're thinking about such low-level explanations, then we'd have to apply the same skepticism to cases like number adaptation -- at which point we'd have to admit we cannot be certain about those cases, either.

I.e., per widely accepted standards, this is bona fide visual adaptation.

I agree it is tempting to think of low-level explanations! As we should for number, causality adaptation, etc.

But what low-level explanation could explain the cross-stimulus effects? We take that as a pretty strong answer to such concerns.

I’m not sure how they do so well so fast — but they do!

There's so much I want to say about why this paper is really exciting, but this is not ideally explained in a short thread. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out the paper for yourself!

Can we “see” value? Spatiotopic “visual” adaptation to an imperceptible dimension In much recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science, repulsive adaptation effects are considered a litmus test — a crucial marker, that distinguis…

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system.

In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Research Associate Screen reader users may encounter difficulty with this site. For assistance with applying, please contact hr-accessibleapplication@osu.edu. If you have questions while submitting an application, pleas...

I'm recruiting a lab manager for my soon-to-be-launched lab at Ohio State! If you know of any recent grads who may be interested both in helping to build the lab and in developing skills in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, please share!

osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

Time Warped: How Repetition Distorts Our Sense of Duration Podcast: This guest's research uncovers a surprising illusion: Repeated experiences, which are more vividly remembered, are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.

In the latest #UndertheCortex, @brynnsherman.bsky.social from @upenn.edu shares that repeated experiences are more vividly remembered and are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.

There’s something funny about saying that someone caused something to happen when they didn’t act intentionally — as if that phrasing assigns unintended agency to them. Why is that?

In this new paper below, we take a linguistic approach to answering this question. Lots of interesting data here!

The first student-led paper from my lab -- from (first-year!!) undergraduate student @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social

This is my favorite kind of project: A neat, visible illusion, with compelling data from multiple paradigms, plus some interesting theoretical implications. Check it out!

I am excited to announce my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social ) about a new illusion of *number*: the “Crowd Size Illusion”. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We will miss NC!!

I have noticed that many cool people are starting labs at Ohio State right now. I've decided to follow their lead.

Soon, my lab will be moving to Ohio State as well.

You can learn more about our recent and upcoming work here: www.cogdevlab.org

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

New preprint! How do we integrate new information into prior knowledge? We find that existing knowledge enables rapid new learning but that interleaved replay during sleep promotes integration of new and old information. Modeling suggests a sleep context suppression mechanism.
osf.io/preprints/ps...