Mark Ho

“So we beat on, boats moving directly forward with the current, making excellent time to our clearly stated destinations, no longer crushed by the weight of our own protective shells or the insistence on moving sideways when forward was always an option.” 😂

If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵

1/n

These job ads have now been posted! 🎉

Social/Personality: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05020

Biological Basis of Behavior: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054

Please spread the word!

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

doug medin finding out he is the rumelhart prize winner

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

📢 @markkho.bsky.social & I are recruiting a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & mental health

💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling

📅 Apps are reviewed on a rolling basis

🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809

New work with @mariannazhang.bsky.social, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and @marjorierhodes.bsky.social on learning about inductive potential from generics 🗣️ 🤔💭

If you're at #CogSci2025 come see @mariannazhang.bsky.social's talk Fri at 4pm (Language and Computation)!!

continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

Analogy making as amortised model construction Humans flexibly construct internal models to navigate novel situations. To be useful, these internal models must be sufficiently faithful to the environment that resource-limited planning leads to ade...

Since @markkho.bsky.social's seminal work, I've been wondering how we build task construals under uncertainty, given I think it bears on explaining chronic worry (www.cell.com/trends/cogni....

Here, @davidnagy.bsky.social @thecharleywu.bsky.social et al tackle how we do so arxiv.org/abs/2507.16511

Science Funding Process =====Written July 11 2025====== Hi all, Just wanted to share some information that is likely relevant to a lot of us, but not always easy to understand, about federal science budget procedure (feel f...

Just sent this as an email to my department but figured I'd share more broadly in case it is useful. This describes the procedure happening now for science funding in Congress (@davidimiller.bsky.social can correct me if I got this wrong). Importantly, there are still actions that can be taken.

I went to high school with this guy!! First bxsci mayor?! ⚛️⚛️⚛️

Congrats Dr. Oktar!!!

We are bringing together neuroscience, reinforcement learning, and decision making at @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social #RLDM2025 #NeuroAI #DecisionMaking

Very excited about this work that examines the interaction between lateralization and value-guided construal!

🚨Excited to share my first preprint from my postdoc with @smfleming.bsky.social! 🚨 We explore how attention shapes simplified mental representations for planning. We show that inductive biases characteristic of attentional selection shape how we plan. Check it out: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠🔦🤖

Are you planning to attend @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social #RLDM2025 and interested in human and artificial intelligence across the adult lifespan? Come check out our Representational Alignment and Aging Workshop!👇
sites.google.com/brown.edu/raa/

How do people teach? 🍎🧑‍🏫

We know theory of mind is important for teaching (eg simulating a learner's mind) but that can take effort 🤔

New work led by @harootonian.bsky.social expands this picture by examining how people also teach with *less effortful heuristics*

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨

Thrilled to share new research on teaching!
Work supervised by
@cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social.

This project asks:
When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3

osf.io/preprints/os...

Boston is such an academic city that Stroop tasks are part of the public transportation system

email starting, "The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has undertaken a review of its award portfolio. Each award was carefully and individually reviewed, and the agency has determined that termination of certain awards is necessary because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorites."

yesterday, my postdoc funding (salary and research funds) was cancelled by the National Science Foundation, effective immediately. I received the same generic, vaguely threatening, typo-ridden email as many of my colleagues who have had their awards terminated recently. (1/n)

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science:
How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

NYU Social Psychology is looking for people passing through NYC next year who want to give a research TALK in our Speaker Series.

We welcome self-nominations and scholars from all career stages (you can apply multiple times).

Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

We are hiring! Interested in computational models of social interaction and computational psychiatry?

🤔 Interested in models of social interaction and computational psychiatry?

🤗 If so, @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are seeking a highly motivated and talented postdoc to work on these topics!

Please share widely!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

🚨 @markkho.bsky.social & I are hiring a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & computational psychiatry

💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling

📅 Review begins April 18, 2025

🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org

🚨 Now accepting commentary proposals!! 🚨Thrilled to share that our paper --- "Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition" --- was accepted for publication at Behavioral and Brain Sciences and is open for commentary!

Contacting your congressperson is fine.

But contacting your local TV station is better.

One interview on local TV saying your congressperson should act is worth 1,000 office calls.

If you’ve been directly impacted by a pause or cancellation of an NIH study session, we @forbes.com would like to talk to you

Daniel Dennett’s call to ban “counterfeit people” is still one of the keenest arguments I’ve read about how to regulate AI itself (rather than some externality of AI, like its energy use). www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Friends and frenemies! I'll be at #NeurIPS2024 all week and would love to catch up! Let's grab coffee/food and talk about goal generation and representation, how to think about goals with/in/for LLMs, cognitive science in 2025+, or give me advice for getting into (mech.) interpretability research!