David Levari

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?"
We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity)
📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps
📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok
📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Please contact Nina if you're interested in working with us! Much of this work is also with @dgrand.bsky.social & @tomcostello.bsky.social, and others! Very fun collaborative environment. And Nina is wonderful to work with!! (She is also the coolest among us, FWIW)

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.

🎉 Congratulations to our very own David Badre on being elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society! This prestigious honor recognizes his sustained and impactful contributions to cognitive science. Read more here: tinyurl.com/5n8rdrsm

a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally ...

Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social

Pedagogy Recommendations Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

Over the years I've been asked many times for advice on pedagogy, what to read to learn more, etc. I've finally put together a bunch of materials into one blog post: Key Advice • Readings • Neuromyths • For Computer Scientists • Classroom Tips. Enjoy!
parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/ped...

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨

We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait

The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

Fantastic -- bravo!

A replication of Triplett’s ‘social facilitation experiment’ Scientific Reports - A replication of Triplett’s ‘social facilitation experiment’

Arising out of discussions in @csi-research.bsky.social we conducted a Registered Report replicating Triplett’s (1898) experiment with over 400 children, showing children completed the task faster when paired with a coactor, compared to competing the task alone rdcu.be/eQwAE 1/3

Screenshot of news headline: "Jesse Eisenberg Reveals Plan To Donate His Kidney To A Stranger 'In Six Weeks,' But Doesn't 'Know Why'"

Tired: moral dumbfounding
Wired: *moral* dumbfounding

From Groundwork to Graduate School: How a New CoPsy Series Helps Students Explore Clinical Career Paths

Interested in clinical psychology? Check out this recent article showcasing Prof. Elizabeth Thompson’s Clinical Psychology Conversation Series, which helps Brown students explore careers in clinical and applied psychology.
👉 Read the full story here: tinyurl.com/wurw4jzs

Graduate Study Our graduate programs are highly selective, successfully recruiting and retaining excellent students, competing with the top programs in the world. Our doctoral students go on to be scientists and sch...

PhD applications for Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown (@browncopsy.bsky.social) are due on December 1st. We have a great community, so please apply, share with your students, etc. Read more on our fancy new website here: copsy.brown.edu/graduate-study

🧠 Thrilled to share our NeuroView with Ellie Pavlick!

"From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?"

AI foundation models are coming to neuroscience—if scaling laws hold, predictive power will be unprecedented.

But is that enough?

Thread 🧵👇

Last call for applications! Join us in advancing AI and the science of mind at Brown. Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies hav…

Glad to see my first-year project is out!

In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations.

1/n

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab!

We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

Slow change blindness from serial dependence Slow change blindness, when attentive observers fail to notice large changes that happen gradually, raises questions about how visual information is combined across time. One plausible integration str...

Slow change blindness from serial dependence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

#AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

New work led by the brilliant @yizhang96.bsky.social:

In lab experiments and naturalistic groups, people generalize perceptions of acceptance and rejection across social network ties.

Excited to announce our amazing lineup of speakers for the 2026 JDM preconference at SPSP!

Conference date: Feb 26th
Location: Chicago
Deadline to apply: Oct 23rd.

Application link: spsp.wufoo.com/forms/2026-p...

cc: @sdellavi.bsky.social, @hirshmansam.bsky.social, @vinisingh.bsky.social

Title: Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving Authors: Kirstan Brodie, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

What happens if you *ask* instead of *tell*? Turns out, teasing people with a question before sharing a fact can shape whether people engage with critical health information. Read our new paper in Management Science to learn more: pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10....

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Research Staff Assistant - Morningside, New York, United States Job Type: Support Staff - Non-Union Regular/Temporary: Regular Hours Per Week: 35 Salary Range: $41,000- $41,000 The salary of the finalist selected for this role will be set based on a variety of fa...

My lab is hiring a lab manager! Application deadline = 11/1, start date sometime between June & September 2026 (to be arranged with finalist). Please spread the word & apply here: opportunities.columbia.edu/jobs/a3f80f7....
#AcademicSky #PhdSky #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #psychjobs

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...

A wonderful article on work (both old and new) pushing the frontier of memory research.

👋 Hello, Bluesky! We’re Brown CoPsy—the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. We study how minds work, how people think and develop, and how brains and behavior connect. 🧠💬 Follow us for research, news & more!