Mark Ho

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

#AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

A screenshot of an article published in popular science. It reads: “First known wild 'grue jay' hybrid spotted in Texas. Green and blue jays are crossing paths as temperatures rise.”

I’ve been training my whole life for this moment

Congratulations Guy! 🎉🎉

The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations

This great piece by @addyosmani.bsky.social resonates strongly with my recent experience using AI coding agents

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

Come work with us! UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is looking for a new Assistant Professor to join our team: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

I'm not on the committee, but happy to talk if you're interested.

Well yes! Sharing Thoughts is now published!! @oupphilosophy.bsky.social

With amazing fresh pieces from C Peacocke, I Dickie, G Longworth, F Recanati, J Pollock, M García-Carpintero, S Sawyer, S Prosser, L and F Schroeter, A Onofri, JL Bermúdez, R Goodman, A Gray.

academic.oup.com/book/60759

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October)
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

I used to love computers. Computers reify math/logic into reality. Silicon Valley exists to chase money but at least it offered a living working on math/logic. Now not even that. Hard logic is old-fashioned. Silicon Valley is for vibe coding with $$$s in your eyes and little else.

Evolving choice hysteresis in reinforcement learning: Comparing the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration | PNAS The tendency to repeat past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement...

Ever wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

me too!

Information for prospective graduate students The Translational Lab will be reviewing applications this cycle! Prospective students can apply through Clinical Science or Cognitive and Computational Sciences in the Emory Psychology Department to ...

I'll be reviewing computational/cognitive and clinical psychology applications this year for the Translational Lab at Emory 💭🔬

Please share broadly and send applicants my way! 🔄

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

My lab at UCLA is hiring 1-2 PhD students this cycle!

Join us to work at the intersection of cognitive science and AI applied to pressing societal challenges like climate change.

More info about me: rachit-dubey.github.io

My lab: ucla-cocopol.github.io

Please help repost/spread the word!

A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making Recent research from economics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and marketing is increasingly interested in the idea that people face cognitive costs when making decisions. Reviewing ...

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄

Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney)

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

We’re hiring an assistant or associate professor to join our psychology department at the University of Illinois Chicago! We’re a vibrant research-active department in a great city, a diverse institution with a purpose-driven mission, and a fun place to work! #psychjobs

uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Review of applications begins Sept 15 for this quantitative Psych position. Please share; TYIA!

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today?

Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels
(guess who talked about which!)

Mental representation of the locations and identities of multiple hidden agents or objects by a bonobo | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Humans are adept at navigating the social world in part because we flexibly map the locations and identities of agents around us. While field studies suggest primates can track individual conspecifics...

When an animals' groupmates go out of sight, do they also go out of mind?

In a new paper in Proc B @royalsocietypublishing.org, Luz Carvajal and I show that a bonobo (Kanzi) can keep mental tabs on the whereabouts of multiple hidden social partners

royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/4GI7G...

Interesting work that uses automatically generated “visual anagrams”!

The top shows the title and authors of the paper: "Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?" by Tom Griffiths, Brenden Lake, Tom McCoy, Ellie Pavlick, and Taylor Webb. At the bottom is text saying "Modern neural networks display capacities traditionally believed to require symbolic systems. This motivates a re-assessment of the role of symbols in cognitive theories." In the middle is a graphic illustrating this text by showing three capacities: compositionality, productivity, and inductive biases. For each one, there is an illustration of a neural network displaying it. For compositionality, the illustration is DALL-E 3 creating an image of a teddy bear skateboarding in Times Square. For productivity, the illustration is novel words produced by GPT-2: "IKEA-ness", "nonneotropical", "Brazilianisms", "quackdom", "Smurfverse". For inductive biases, the illustration is a graph showing that a meta-learned neural network can learn formal languages from a small number of examples.

🤖 🧠 NEW PAPER ON COGSCI & AI 🧠 🤖

Recent neural networks capture properties long thought to require symbols: compositionality, productivity, rapid learning

So what role should symbols play in theories of the mind? For our answer...read on!

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776

1/n

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

“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.