Robert Hawkins

Facial clues to conversational intentions It has long been known that we use words to perform speech acts foundational to everyday conversation, such as requesting, informing, proposing, or complaining. However, the natural environment of hum...

"Facial clues to conversational intentions" -- very nice review from @judithholler.bsky.social arguing for the notion of "social action" as more modality-neutral terminology!

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

Direct your research. Forge lifelong connections. Apply for the 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent PhD graduates with quantitative and computational skills interested in theoretical collaborative research.

Deadline: Oct 1, 2025
Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

it's a beautiful cover AND very cool article!

I use "indeed" and "to be sure" and "clearly" so much in my first drafts it feels like I'm trying to be my own hype man

I'm reviewing PhD applications this cycle to join my lab at
@uwpsych.bsky.social in Fall ‘26. Ideal for those interested in dev, decision-making, emotion regulation, fMRI, and quant/comp methods. We have cool stuff in the works and want more brilliant ppl in the fold!

psych.wisc.edu/joao-guassi-...

🚨 Excited to announce our #NeurIPS2025 Workshop: Data on the Brain & Mind

📣 Call for: Findings (4- or 8-page) + Tutorials tracks

🎙️ Speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @lauragwilliams.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

🌐 Learn more: data-brain-mind.github.io

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

This is the most important thing to read on Trump's higher ed war. It's not "Harvard vs. trade schools." It's the same ecosystem and all parts are essential. Research breakthroughs need skilled labor to manufacture/fix them. Jobs & communities are at risk. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/m...

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

the trump administration is selling its war on higher education as a strike against the elites who have disadvantaged ordinary americans. in actuality, the administration is destroying advanced education for *everyone* in pursuit of its effort to deskill the american public

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

The Effect of Timescale Dependence on Dyadic Interactions Author(s): Severino, Gabriel Juliano; Winkler, Sasha L; Barwich, Ann-Sophie | Abstract: Interactions between agents are supported through a continuous process of detecting and responding to behaviors ...

New paper from the lab:

"The Effect of Timescale Dependence on Dyadic Interactions"
GJ Severino, SL Winkler, AS Barwich
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 47
escholarship.org/uc/item/8h10...

CogSci 2025 talk by Rebekah Gelpí: "Resource-rational belief revision can amplify or mitigate polarization"

Good morning #cogsci2025! Join me at Salon 3 today at 14:15 PDT if you're interested in learning how resource-rational models can help us to capture when and why people become polarized.

Pixel-based environments in POBAX. (Left) Ant and HalfCheetah in visual continuous control. Images are rendered with full JAX support in the Madrona MJX rendering engine (Shack- lett, 2024), with the dark coloration due artifacts of the new framework. (Right) Observations in no-inventory Crafter have the agent’s inventory cropped out, requiring the agent to remember its items and stats.

An RLC paper or two a day until the conference!
First off: openreview.net/forum?id=HUT...
There isn't really a canonical benchmark for partial observability in RL. This one is:
1) Written in Jax
2) Covers clear variants of partial observability
3) has checks that memory is helpful for each env

@laurennross.bsky.social is giving an important reminder of the importance of philosophy of science in cognitive science at the #cogsci2025 keynote, which I really appreciate in the current moment.

Antara Bhattacharya in her CogSci #cogsci2025 debut, presenting on The Humorous Hill and doing a smashing job

(seen in pic: Antara also printed examples of model outputs for people to chuckle at, or not)

At #CogSci2025 and curious about resource-rational models of social cognition? Come to Nob Hill A at 11:14 tomorrow to hear me talk about work with @tadegquillien.bsky.social where we use the information bottleneck to study stereotype use and the outgroup homogeneity bias!

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

1/7 If you're at CogSci 2025, I'd love to see you at my talk on Friday 1pm PDT in Nob Hill A! I'll be talking about our work towards an implemented computational model of noisy-channel comprehension (with @postylem.bsky.social, Ted Gibson, and @rplevy.bsky.social).

So many institutions have failed us, but probably the most disappointing (at least to me) are our universities. Thirty years ago I would have naively predicted they'd be the center of resistance. Instead, we're seeing absolutely shameless capitulation in exchange for power and money.

Farm to faculty: How federal research funding changes lives and boosts Minnesota's economy When I was growing up on a farm near Cambridge, I never met a scientist. I didn’t know what scientific research was or how people became scientists. I graduated from

My contribution to the @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social effort to communicate the value of federal science funding:

www.hometownsource.com/county_news_...

Nora S. Newcombe and Robert Glushko stand together smiling on stage at CogSci 2025. Nora wears the Rumelhart Prize medal around her neck

Huge congratulations to the brilliant Nora Newcombe, recipient of the 2025 David E. Rumelhart Prize! 🏅#CogSci2025

Sketchnote of Nora Newcombe's Rumelhart Prize Talk, posing three questions and case studies for cognitive science: (1) innateness (with the geometric module as a case study), (2) representations (featuring cognitive maps vs. graphs), and (3) embodiment (featuring mental rotation)

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

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

What makes visual processing in the brain so powerful and flexible? Very excited to share our new work where we started from SOTA models that accurately predict dynamic brain activity during hours of video watching, and investigated core computations underlying visual perception

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...

If you’ve ever tried to cram for an exam, you know that it’s easier to memorize something if you learn the information in shorter, spaced-out sessions. These dynamics are as relevant to each individual cell’s existence as they are to ours. Claire Evans reports: www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

Check out our lab members' presentations at CogSci 2025!
@cogscisociety.bsky.social
#cogsci2025 #MIT #ECCL #cognitivescience #developmentalcognition

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

A large audience fills a historic hall with wooden pew seating, ornate ceiling details, and a stained-glass dome. People face a stage with a large screen displaying a presentation, as the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event takes place at the Internet Archive

Packed room at the @archive.org for today’s amazing speaker lineup at the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event. #CogSci2025

A smiling researcher at CogSci 2025 stands indoors wearing their scientific poster draped like a cape, with charts, graphs, and text visible on the fabric. The background shows a spacious conference hall with people walking and blurred architectural details.

A research poster draped like a cape, showing charts, graphs, and text about collaborative memory and decision-making. The poster includes colorful data plots, grid diagrams, and sections labeled “Introduction,” “Results,” “Model Benchmark,” and “Conclusions.” The bottom includes the researcher’s contact information and social links

Because nothing says “ready to present” like literally wearing your findings at #CogSci2025

Ham Huang leveled up from poster session to superhero mode! 🦸

Brown University to lead national institute focused on intuitive, trustworthy AI assistants A new institute, based at Brown and supported by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant, will convene researchers to guide development of a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental a...

Excited to be a (very tiny part) of this new AI Research Institute, led by the amazing Ellie Pavlick. Looking forward to doing some human factors and education work, and getting to hopefully nerd out with some cognitive scientists!
www.brown.edu/news/2025-07...