Melissa Kline Struhl

On the other hand, medicine labels, especially for babies, are playing some kind of hide-the-dosage game where it's either behind a sticker you have to peel up or just says "ask a doctor". I *think* the logic is it makes you read the rest of the instructions or involve a medical professional??

Please take a break from your regularly scheduled doomscrolling to read our new paper about how written consent forms can backfire as a means of protecting vulnerable individuals by activating a more formal "contract schema". We were initially surprised too! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

For the past several days she's been announcing lots of facts about the situation, to wit:

- Little white dog...is named a planet.
- Jupiter is a planet.
- Juniper is a dog.
- Jupiter is a dog.
- Juniper is a plant.
- That dog is named a plant...planet.
- Juniper is...Jupey (Jupiter) is...a dog.

On the left is a picture of my dog, Juniper. The one on the right is Jupiter, who lives with my FIL. This is already fairly confusing for my 2yo.

But my husband told her that Jupiter is named after a planet, whereas Juniper is named after a plant. This information has melted her brain.

Felicitations to all who celebrate

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

I know I don't have a ton of media followers, but I'll put this out there anyway: if you need someone to comment/offer context on the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philly, get in touch. I just finished an entire book on Americans' fight over Washington and slavery.

a man with glasses and a mustache is wearing a white shirt and says yes . ALT: a man with glasses and a mustache is wearing a white shirt and says yes .

I just did my first r code! Yes!
#rstats

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

I belatedly realized that one thing I can do to help Minneapolis is connect people there who want to write about what they're experiencing, but need support, to people who can provide that.

Support can mean comments on a draft, but it can also mean listening to you talk & asking questions,

1/

Data-ink Ratio Animation: How to Simplify Data Visualization The data-to-ink ratio is the idea that we want to maximize the amount of ink used to show data versus the amount of ink used to show the visualization.

Yesterday my toddler caught me looking at a graph on my laptop, demanded "blue graph", and then proceeded to sit through my not-very-detailed summary of the steps in this blog post about Tufte's data-to-ink ratio principle:

deliveringdataanalytics.com/the-data-to-...

(And there definitely IS a literature on how preschoolers combine 1st person evidence with testimony from another person showing they are combining language, observation, and social info about the other person )

To elaborate, I don't know this literature but would bet someone an ice cream cover that there may be (a) a study showing diminished learning with narration in some task somewhere under some condition but definitely not (b) any evidence of broad generalization or effects on learning in classrooms

Hebrew calligraphy in dark green stretches in lines across the image. Negative space makes room for a simple representation of an inflatable frog costume with a blue bandana. That shape consists of the English translation of the Hebrew, in a lighter green, and in much smaller text. -- Famously, the Egyptian tyrant causes Egypt to be overrun with frogs because he refuses to free the Hebrew people, but there are additional details that make this a fun one to ponder. For one, the Hebrew says "the frog came up" - ONE frog - even though the rest of the time it says "frogs." So there are a few explanations rabbis have come up with to explain this. One is that a single frog multiplied to create swarms. A more creative explanation is that there was a singular giant frog who traveled and brought destruction. Jewish social media was sharing videos of the Portland Frog protester with the caption, "One Big Frog! One Big Frog!" Of course the frog protesters did multiply, and many were seen in crowds all over the world on "No Kings" Day. This calligraphic work takes the verses addressing the frog plague and combines them to form a simple rendering of the Portland Frog protester. The frog figure itself is made up of the English translations of the Hebrew around it. At the bottom left my signature is in the shape of a lily pad.

"Tzefardea Tzedek" (Frog of Righteousness)

As soon as the Portland Frog became a meme, Jewish social media blew up with jokes about the 2nd Passover plague - tzefarde'a (frogs) - and the Rabbinical commentary around it. I knew I had to make a calligraphy piece encompassing all of it. (more in alt.)

As a cognitive scientist, I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to realise that emotion matters a lot, not just for understanding humans, but for understanding any thinking agent.

Why? Because emotion is an indicator of what that agent values, and values are essential to rationality.

Examples:

I’ve talked this up before, but: @slacktivistfred.bsky.social’s analysis of LEFT BEHIND is one of the most formative and useful things I’ve ever encountered, as a writer

This is a wug.

Captain Picard looking normal.

Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two _______.

Picard screaming in agony.

As a cognitive scientist, definitely yes. Your specific mind is contributing a lot to discovering meaning out of randomness. I don't know monoprinting, but while some structure in noise will be perceived by any human, there's many processes, both conscious and unconscious, unique to you :)

a screenshot of text from a website. it reads: The History of the January 1 Birthday The tradition dates back to the early days of organized horse racing, long before electronic timing and online records. Race organizers needed a simple way to group horses by age since a horse’s age often determines what races they can enter. Instead of tracking every horse’s exact birth date (which would have been a logistical nightmare), they decided that all thoroughbreds would share one official birthday: January 1.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HORSES! IT IS HORSE BIRTHDAY! HORSE!!!!!

And i think you need a certain generation and level of status to pull off the raw html homepage.

On a related note, "antepenultimate" was a surprisingly useful word in my last choir, three pages is a pretty common amount of score for the last chunk of a piece you're rehearsing.

The control of movement gradually transitions from feedback control to feedforward adaptation throughout childhood - npj Science of Learning npj Science of Learning - The control of movement gradually transitions from feedback control to feedforward adaptation throughout childhood

Remotely conducted motor control study(!!) w/ custom game & CHS participants, by Laura Malone, Nayo Hill, Haley Tripp, Vadim Zipunnikov, Daniel Wolpert & Amy Bastian @amybastian.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00304-7

(We can now embed your games for video recordings of your participants!)

For those of you who tend to see faces on a piece of toast: "A happy face advantage for pareidolic faces in children and adults" by Krisztina Jakobsen, Cate Hickman & Elizabeth Simpson doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

PS - if you're on your phone, that link might take you to MIT's general giving page. If that happens, search for "Children Helping Science" to find our fund and make sure donations reach us!!

Two days left to donate to Children Helping Science with 1-to-1 matches from an anonymous donor up to $100K!

giving.mit.edu/search/node/...

For fun: 1 repost = 1 citation to a paper with data from Children Helping Science/Lookit!

That's a good Hwæt!

(cf @hwaet.info)

love that software developers are advertising AI functionality in every single app now and it's up to you to try to figure out if they mean "this has spellcheck" or "everything you create in this app will sync in real-time to sam altman's personal laptop" or something in between