Asifa Majid

An LLM-backed "socratic tutor" to replace reading responses Blog about fatherhood, langauge, developmental psychology, and cognitive science.

New blogpost about a teaching experiment I'm doing this quarter: a "socratic tutor" bot to help students gain understanding of specific reading assignments.

babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-l...

Group photograph of faculty and participants of the very first Cold Spring Harbor summer course on Genetics and Neurobiology of Language in 2014, taken as the sun was going down at the Banbury Campus, Lloyd Harbor.

Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social

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

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)

EPS 80th Anniversary Symposium – Call for Proposals To mark the 80th anniversary of the Experimental Psychology Society, we invite proposals for a special anniversary symposium that reflects on the current state of experimental psychology and its fu…

To mark the 80th anniversary of the Experimental Psychology Society, we invite proposals for a special anniversary symposium reflecting on the current state of experimental psychology and its future trajectory.

Please see below for information on how to submit a proposal!

eps.ac.uk/eps-80th-ann...

The Clarendon Building with large windows lit up reflected on a calm puddle of water

The wet weather produces some beautiful photos!

Thank you to estherjohnsonphotography on Instagram for this wonderful shot of the Clarendon Building. 📸

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇

Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic!

Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

This is a great paper going deep on the connection between language (and linguistic diversity) and the mind! 👀👂👇🌍 Highly recommended (like every paper from @enorcliffe.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social)!

Constructing Meaning from Language: Visual Knowledge in People Born Blind and in Large Language Models A key function of language is to enable concept construction, but empirically disentangling the contribution of language from the contribution of other (e.g., sensory) experiences is challenging. Comp...

Also in the same issue Constructing Meaning from Language: Visual Knowledge in People Born Blind and in Large Language Models from Marina Bedny's lab www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Lexical Typology of Sensory Perception Sensory language has fascinated researchers, as it is here that meaning most clearly straddles biology and culture. Since the seminal work on color vocabularies, typologists have attempted to describe...

New paper with @enorcliffe.bsky.social The Lexical Typology of Sensory Perception
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Motor Learning

New article in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science @oecs-bot.bsky.social on Motor Learning.

Thank you @mcxfrank.bsky.social @asifamajid.bsky.social for the opportunity to contribute!

oecs.mit.edu/pub/l3hscpvx...

Sensory ratings across sensory modalities and semantic categories show blind people associate touch more strongly with (most) concepts than sighted people

New paper: Evidence of crossmodal compensation in the conceptual representation of blind people: while they share visual associations with sighted people, blind people more strongly associate concepts with touch direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Keep a look out for Cole and Sean @seangroberts.bsky.social discussing their odyssey to understand this phenomenon on @becauselanguage.com Coming soon!

Language and economic behaviour: Future tense use causes less not more temporal discounting Previous studies have found cross-cultural correlations between linguistic obligations for talking about future events and economic decisions like saving money. The hypothesis is that a grammatical ob...

In fact, future tense use causes less not more temporal discounting journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

A new twist to the idea that future tense use affects decision making👇 Cole Robertson @seangroberts.bsky.social et al show it’s not future tense that drives psychological discounting but how people express the possibility of future events happening (modality). authors.elsevier.com/c/1m4gJ2Hx2-...

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Scottish Gaelic and David Adger Podcast Episode · A Language I Love Is... · 10/09/2025 · 1h 1m

New podcast! @dannybate.bsky.social and I chat about Scottish Gaelic, mediaeval sea kingdoms, the spread and retreat of Gaelic in Scotland, influence from Pictish, sounds borrowed from Old Norse, and much more 🐦🐦 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a... or wherever you get your podcasts :)

appreciate the translation 😆

Fab!

Open Science as Confused: Contradictory and Conflicting Discourses in Open Science Guidance to Researchers Abstract The open science (OS) movement is growing, with increasing policies, guidelines, tools and infrastructures being developed to support researchers who engage in OS practices. However, there is no widely accepted single definition of OS. Different initiatives and countries employ a variety of characterizations. To chart how OS is understood in different parts of the world, we conducted a scoping review and critical discourse analysis of OS guidance documents aimed at researchers. Our search led to the inclusion of 69 national and international documents, with most originating from North America, Europe, and Latin America. Our results show that OS discourses are exaggerated, framing OS as the solution to address all scientific and societal problems. Furthermore, they provide often conflicting ideas about what OS can achieve. Many guidance documents frame OS as a tool to promote economic growth and efficiency. Others see OS as necessary to safeguard research quality and reproducibility through transparency. In contrast, few documents address knowledge equity and inclusion. Taking this into account, we see dominant OS discourses reproducing knowledge equity problems already present in research, rather than tackling them. We urge researchers be more precise about the specific approach they take to OS and more humble about the effects it can have – both positive, and negative. #OpenSci

New scoping review and critical discourse analysis of guidance documents on open science (OS) urges researchers to be “more precise about the specific approach they take to OS and more humble about the effects it can have.”

Preprint by @jeroenderidder.bsky.social and colleagues: osf.io/zr35u_v1

Awesome! I'm assuming it's for English, or does it work in multiple languages?

"It is crucial to make psychology inclusive of all the world's people but vitally important to do this in ways that are respectful, ethical & empirically accurate. I weigh the promises & pitfalls of research in small-scale societies & discuss how we can improve our research practices moving forward"

Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic E...

Super excited to share our new multimodal corpus analysis, "Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures" 🥳

Project led by our PhD student Ell Wilding and in collab w/ @jeannettel.bsky.social & @mperlman.bsky.social:

doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Berkeley linguistics is hiring an Assistant Professor in language revitalization!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05022

Graphical abstract for Coffee Knowledge Test

New paper: Validation of the Coffee Knowledge Test for Assessing Expertise in Coffee with Jonas Yde Junge, @icroij.bsky.social, Line Ahm Mielby, and Ulla Kidmose doi.org/10.1111/joss... #OpenAccess

Chemical structure of acetophenone and 2-heptanone

1/5
Odor intensity isn’t just about concentration! We have a new preprint to prove it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In cahoots with @jmainland.bsky.social, @alexkoulakov.bsky.social, Rick Gerkin, Khristina Samoilova and others not on bluesky. 🧪

Which of these molecules smells stronger?

Remembering the Whorf quote about how languages cut reality up in different ways. A Danish supermarket has a “pålæg” fridge—essentially things that go on (open-faced) sandwiches (see pic of pic).It’s where you find ham & salmon & various patés. But not cheese, which has its own slice of reality.

Take away our language and we will forget who we are: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the language of conquest The long read: The late Kenyan novelist and activist believed erasing language was the most lasting weapon of oppression. Here, Aminatta Forna recalls the man and introduces his essay on decolonisatio...

Long read on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who we had the honor of interviewing on the History of Africana Philosophy podcast a while back:

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

I'm sorry to hear of the passing of Robin Lakoff, hugely influential. The first work of hers I encountered was Talking Power, which we read in an undergrad class for Myrdene Anderson

Susan Carey mic-drop at #cogsci2025. "There are no innate concepts: Discuss"