Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition
By Samuel Johnson @amirhkarimi.bsky.social @yoshuabengio.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social @sydneylevine.bsky.social @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @iyadrahwan.bsky.social @igi.bsky.social and more
tinyurl.com/36yc6ant
Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!!
cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...
Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍
📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏
Thank you Yoonseo Zoh (zohyos7.github.io) for sharing your work with us on "Intuitive Theories in Moral Cognition". Intuitive theories structure how people represent dilemmas, how they generalize to new contexts, and how they switch between representations based on resource-rational constraints.
1/3 AI is getting smarter, but is it getting wiser? 🤔 Thrilled to share our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social paper on building wise machines, co-authored with Sam Johnson, @amirhkarimi.bsky.social, @yoshuabengio.bsky.social , @sydneylevine.bsky.social , @melaniemitchell.bsky.social, & more!
Thanks @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on "Using the information bottleneck to study social cognition". Max develops resource-rational models that elegantly unify existing theories for various phenomena such as stereotyping and ToM development.
📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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)
I'm very sad to have learned today that Joe Halpern passed away. Joe was a giant who knew no scientific boundaries. He loved science with a contagious, child-like enthusiasm. He was wonderful and I'm so grateful that I got to learn from him. Thank you Joe 🙏
www.bangsfuneralhome.com/obituaries/j...
Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!
"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
Thanks @katenuss.bsky.social for sharing your work with us! Kate studies how people learn about the world through external exploration (acting) and internal exploration (imagining). Modeling & experiments reveal that people learn by simulating counterfactuals!
📃 elifesciences.org/articles/84260
Thank you @ltreiman.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on how people act differently when they know that their behavior is used to train AI. In the ultimatum game, people are more likely to reject disadvantageous offers when an AI is watching and learning.
📃 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Imagination in bonobos!
I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org
We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative
youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
This July, we are holding a virtual hackathon to explore LEVANTE data!
If you're interested in data analysis, development, and cross-cultural variability, please join us!
First week is open, second week is by application with mentorship on group projects.
levante-hackathon-2026.github.io
Thanks @miriam-hauptman.bsky.social for sharing your work with us! How people learn about the visual world from language is mediated through causal models. Both sighted and blind people infer how many colors an object has based on how color ➡️ function.
📃 m-hauptman.github.io/files/Hauptm...
Thank you Aniket Vashishtha (aniketvashishtha.github.io) for sharing your work on counterfactual reasoning in LLMs with us! Most current benchmarks don't assess genuine counterfactual reasoning. Aniket's work does, showing that LLMs struggle and what to do about that.
📃 arxiv.org/abs/2510.015...
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.
Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Excited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉
David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops.
📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...
The Harvard Gazette has a nice story on my student @yangxiang.bsky.social and her work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
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Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
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We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!
fantastic!! congratulations 🎉
starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳
my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception
currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science!
reach out if you're interested 😊
Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences:
"Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
I'm very excited about this work led by @nbalamur.bsky.social Inspired by the classic "Spot the ball ⚽" task, we develop a benchmark for visual social inference. We find that human participants perform much better than vision-language models.
Try it here: v0-new-project-9b5vt6k9ugb.vercel.app
It was great to hear from Brian Leahy (brianleahy.net) in the devo lunch at Stanford today!!
He presented a beautiful set of studies that suggest that many 4-year-old children have a minimal concept of possibility: they simulate only once and treat the outcome as a fact. 🎱⬅️➡️🤔💭💡
I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.
These results suggest that people build internal causal models that abstract away irrelevant information. Through surprise tests, we gain insights into what these models look like, finding that they shape memory, prediction, and generalization.
w Steven Shin, Chuqi Hu & @paulm-k.bsky.social
We develop a causal abstraction that infers a causal story of how the data was generated, paying more attention to factors that mattered for the prediction task. This model captures participants' generalization judgments better than a feature-based model, despite having many fewer parameters.
