ari ☀️

🚨 New preprint 🚨

How do people's mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization? We find that people spontaneously construct goal-dependent causal abstractions that compress experience to privilege relevant information.

📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
🔗 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

The AI Industry Is Traumatizing Desperate Contractors in the Developing World for Pennies AI is propped up by a global sweat shop operation, where exploited workers polish the software for wealthy corporations in the west.

“…for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images, a gig known as ‘data labeling.’”

A compressed code for memory discrimination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.12.681901v1

Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians Exclusive: Tech firm ends military unit’s access to AI and data services after Guardian reveals secret spy project

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

whaaaat’s going on at sfn??!!

i always knew writing my dissertation was going to be tedious, intimidating, overwhelming, etc. but no one ever told me it was also going to be *fun* 😳

join the protest: YES!

register for the protest: NO!

From student to 3-time TA, Shahrzad M. Esfahan’s journey shows how Neuromatch Academy opens doors to global science and community 🌍🧠✨

➡️ Read her story: www.linkedin.com/posts/neurom...

#MyNeuromatchStory #ComputationalNeuroscience #STEMEducation #Neuroscience #DeepLearning

thank you for writing this and making it open access!!!! these tensions have continually kept me up at night as i work on my comp cog neuro phd - i am so glad to have a collection of writing i can reference instead of my own scattered thoughts 😅

personally i do not think human rights should be up for “debate” but what do i know, i’m emotional and biased because those are my rights they’re talking about

New opinion piece!

@amirtal.bsky.social and I argue that "wake reactivation" is not a scientifically useful construct; It encompasses nonconscious & conscious processes w/ varying levels of elaboration & diverging consequences, leading to conflicting results

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lgli4sIRvW-LQ

Why a Classic Psychology Theory about Vision Has Fallen Apart The downfall of a long-standing theory in psychology raises a question: How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we literally see the world?

How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we see the world? Wonderful piece in @sciam.bsky.social by @norabradford.bsky.social, ft. an interview with @dorsaamir.bsky.social about our work on the 'cultural byproduct hypothesis'.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Therefore: Please don't use LLMs as research participants. LLMs do not simulate human psychology. (11/12)

seriously 😭 pls keep posting your posters & papers, especially if you work on expectations in perceptual decision making 🤲

CCN for social good - satellite registration See https://anneurai.net/2025/05/05/ccn-for-social-good-2025-satellite-event/ for more information

Are you planning to attend #CCN2025? Do you want to reflect on how to direct your skills and aptitudes to tackle today's most pressing social problems? Make sure you come to Amsterdam a day early to attend our satellite event on Science for Social Good. Register here: forms.gle/TFRCZYX2qfwD...

I’m looking forward to our symposium at @ispsm.bsky.social on Sat at 5:30pm CEST. Zoom in to catch me, @kenaizawa.bsky.social, @gualtiero.bsky.social, and @francesegan.bsky.social talk about realism in Neuroscience! 🧠 🥳

Sign a letter demanding that UC and the state of California refuse to appease the fascists any further:

tinyurl.com/ucstandup

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

so happy for you & excited to see all the great work to come 🤓

presenting today at #CogSci2025🚀
come check out my poster on how stress & state anxiety influence the representation of info needed for visual working memory & decision-making🧠!

underline.io/events/489/p...

📍P2-K-92, Salon 8
🕐 Fri Aug 1, 10:30 AM

Abstract: While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring “human behaviour and experience,” it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker- upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no mat- ter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context — from clocks to artificial neural networks — results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, pervert- ing cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes. Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; artificial neural network; technology; cognition; human-centred AI

💫 Just out! A tour de force by my colleague @olivia.science, new paper 📝:

What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? 🧮 ⏰ 🧠

Keywords: AI; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; ANN; technology; cognition; human-centred AI

Link to the paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/e9nHGkMK 1/n

Accepted in the European Journal of Neuroscience:

"Wider than the Sky: An Alternative to “Mapping” the World onto the Brain"
(Barwich, A.S., Firestein, S., and M. Dietrich)

Open Access link to journal as soon as the paper is online!
Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
#NeuroSky #PhilSky #HPS

Detecting dementia earlier With $4 million grant, UC Irvine researcher seeks to develop inexpensive assessment of cognitive ability

Detecting dementia earlier | With $4 million grant, UC Irvine cognitive scientist Aaron Bornstein seeks to develop inexpensive assessment of cognitive ability

@ucirvine.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @uofcalifornia.bsky.social

NO. AI. FOR. WAR. CRIMES!!!

check out this blogpost where I share some of the behind-the-scenes motivations for this new paper w/ @meganakpeters.bsky.social & @aaronbornstein.bsky.social!

v grateful to get to share how philosophy helped me move thru the "existemic" angst that is years 3-4 of a comp cog neuro phd 🥲 🧠 🖥️

Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors Nature Communications - Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors

Who doesn't like a good model of the brain? Yet, from simple regression to neural nets, some limitations keep popping up (e.g., overfitting) @mjwolff.bsky.social & I saw some cool but puzzling data, ran a quick analysis & found one such limitation: model mimicry. Now in #naturecommunications &🧵below

Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model The appropriate form of the drift diffusion model depends on how one wishes to reason about their target with the model. If the goal is to parsimoniously explain the speed-accuracy tradeoff, the appr...

for context: we recently showed how the same model structure (the DDM) gives different types of explanation depending on the measurements to which it’s applied (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

been thinking abt how this transfers to deep learning models & would love to hear ur thoughts!!

sorry if i’m being too literal but i’m wondering if you have in mind a “both-and” relation to mechanistic/normative or a “neither/nor”?

and if the latter, do you think that all instances of neuroAI explanation fall into this third type of exp?

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

1/