Fiery Cushman

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Postdoc! 🚨🚨

Postdoc opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026).

We study identity, group dynamics, language, & politics.

Rolling review begins 3/14
Apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15806

Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇

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)

This is a great new book by the brilliant Tom Griffiths- highly reeccomend

For Valentine's Day, my 9 year old daughter printed out a powerpoint slide deck bullet-pointing areas of appreciation.

It begins with "You provide me with food" (illustration: a bowl of beans), and ends with "You always keep me on task".

I am questioning my qualifications as a parent.

Institutions are how we scale up cooperation among millions | Aeon Essays Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. How do they work?

Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social

When Josi was a star at Harvard, 10am on a frigid December Sunday, she shows up for a pickup game with a couple dozen local elementary school girls on a muddy field in Cambridge. You should have seen their faces -- an hour they'll never forget. Pure character, Josi. They'll be cheering you on.

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

📢 New Paper 🚨

Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.

In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.

bit.ly/4kvLOwA

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Really cool new project from @urvi.bsky.social that finds that kids are much better at temporal reasoning than previously reported, if we test them with REAL passing time, rather than hypothetical past or future events and differentiate past and future at 3 years old.

The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution Abstract. The societal effects of children’s learning in cultural evolution have been underexplored. Here, we investigate using agent-based models how a pr

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Writing is thinking

Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20

📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

New paper from the IMC lab! I am very excited about this one. For years, I have been arguing that one of the main claims of the so-called "simulation heuristic" is likely not true for episodic counterfactual thinking, namely that the harder it is to mentally simulate it, the less plausible (1/n)

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard

A revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction.

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? by Hanna Pickard, illustrated by Marco Venniro, is now available (3 March UK pub).

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Exploring the evolutionary roots of theory of mind: Primate errors on false belief tasks reveal representational limits Human adults flexibly reason about others' unobservable mental states, a capacity known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Unfortunately, the roots of this capa…

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.

A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.

Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...

Subjective functions Where do objective functions come from? How do we select what goals to pursue? Human intelligence is adept at synthesizing new objective functions on the fly. How does this work, and can we endow arti...

Goal selection through the lens of subjective functions:
arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948
I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.

The Development of Morality and Conventionality Across Cultures: Implementing a Two‐Stage Model for Cross‐Cultural Research Establishing a shared sense of right and wrong is an essential milestone for human cooperation, raising the question of whether a universal set of moral intuitions exists. However, tests of universa.....

A common problem w/ studies testing non-WEIRD groups is they compare multiple groups using the same WEIRD measure. How can we compare groups w/ apples-apples measures w/o distorting cross-cultural differences? We explore this in this new paper! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

fun pre-print for your start of week reading:

"People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable"

(by Hu, Sosa, and me)

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Children's Judgments of Possibility Align With Their Judgments of Actuality Children often say that possible events are impossible, and only gradually come to see these events as possible. For instance, they often deny that people could do unusual things, like own a pet pea.....

Children’s judgments of possibility align with their judgments of actuality

‼️From Mo Pabla, Andrew Shtulman & Ori Friedman

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

🚨Job Alert plz RT!

Johns Hopkins Psych & Brain Sciences is looking for a new colleague using behavioral or computational approaches to study cognition!

We are excited about many areas of (esp higher) cognition in human adults, children, or nonhuman animals

Open-rank

apply.interfolio.com/178146

Motivational context does not influence children’s third-party punishment in intergroup contexts Children punish to reciprocate harm (retributive motives) and to prevent future wrongdoing (consequentialist motives). Building on this idea, we wante…

Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨

Action repetition biases choice in context-dependent decision-making - Communications Psychology This study shows that decision biases previously attributed to value normalization (e.g. relative value learning or range normalization) are better explained by action repetition. Repeating an action ...

Very happy that this is out www.nature.com/articles/s44.... Together with @stefankiebel.bsky.social we show that decision biases in context-dependent decision making, previously attributed to different forms of value normalization, are very well explained by habit-like action repetition.

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

How early do children grasp mathematical patterns? In a new Cognition paper, Ciccione et al. show that 5–6-year-olds can intuitively extend lines, curves and oscillating patterns, revealing rich proto-mathematical intuitions before schooling.

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....