Gabor Brody

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :)

Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun

This was my lab's first foray into event cognition

gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU!

cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission

Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students!

#PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

⚠️ New Postdoc or PhD position open (3 years+) ⚠️

🚩Developmental milestones across cultures 🌍

Based @leuphana.bsky.social , in collaboration with @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Please share/apply!

Link: tinyurl.com/58dsn43u

I do feel like "did you ever consider that might suck" is the unofficial Decoder tagline www.theverge.com/podcast/8220...

And how much Transportation is hidden in the other categories? What portion of Housing costs is the garage under your apartment building? What portion of Food is the sea of parking surrounding the supermarket? What portion of Healthcare is car-related injury and respiratory disease?

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

Developmental & Brain Sciences PhD UMass Boston's Developmental and Brain Sciences (DBS) PhD is a research-intensive program focused on understanding cognition, perception, and behavior when underlying neural and hormonal mechanisms ar...

Faculty colleagues, please let your students know about our PhD program in Developmental and Brain Sciences at UMass Boston! Online info session coming up on 10/22 at 4.30 pm. Applications are due 12/1/25
www.umb.edu/academics/pr...
#devpsych #devsky #AcademicSky

New paper: the ‘Double Ring Illusion’!
Does the visual system integrate *intuitive physics*? This new illusion developed by Brent Strickland and I offers a straightforward demonstration – one that you can experience yourselves!
Demos in thread👇
[1/6]

Interested in understanding how young humans think about social relationships? I am reading PhD applications this year! **Please note**, that Harvard now requires the GRE. More information here: www.ashleyjthomas.com/workwithme

this is fun! I absolutely "kanizsa" the gapped ring into a full one. I see it passing through the gaps, but the experience is somehow very surprising? I dont how completion relates to solidity and physics in your framework, but I feel like both predictions could have been warranted

To clarify: you are a muddlehead only if you think _every_ ”verbal disagreement “ comes down to a ‘matter of semantics’ (and not to a matter of fact for instance).

He too! Thats the point.

New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too

When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think <em>any</em> means <em>no</em> Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but...

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh?

We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

New publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article.

We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)

really enjoyed this. h/t to @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social for the pointer.

📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year!

Links below:

Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903
Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989
Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970

makes perfect sense: both are based on questioning/problematizing things that seem very natural and taken for granted otherwise
🙃

I feel that having an “if you wouldnt have X you also wouldnt have Y” part is a critical for having a functional explanation

Wait, so whatever X correlates with is X-s function? Here is another intuition: when you see contrails, the plane is pretty high or in other words you cannot fly very high if you dont generate some contrails.

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

🧵(1/22)

Such a cool way to go about this question, this study is a beauty! I am still unsure about "real-world size". In our paper (in JEP:G) we found that the very same picture (even with the same rotation) could generate different interpretations and size estimates: funky if effect is driven by IRLsize

I’m okay with this as long as we are all doing Hungarian as it “wears its LF on its sleeve” (according to Hungarians).

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out

(1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object.

(2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about null complementizers.

nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Returning science to the status quo is inadequate. They’ll print the harms of funding cuts while it gets clicks, but if their wealth is on the line, they’ll mangle our work as badly as RFK Jr does.

This is what “depoliticized” science looks like. We should politicize science as much as possible.

Substack is back in the news again for the wrong reason: this time, the platform sent a push notification to a neo-Nazi newsletter featuring a swastika logo. Here's Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best on Decoder two years ago struggling to answer a question about moderating hate speech.

it works incredibly well for me... and this difference can be only explained by a culture-specific variation of tridents/pitchfork motifs in the environment. There is absolutely no other way