Lauren Aulet

Thanks! I hadn’t seen this so excited to check it out now!

draft lab ai policy, feel free to use, modify, or discuss! todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/06/g...

Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

1/7 Academics are facing an April deadline for making our course materials accessible. One big part of this is pdfs of journal articles. Editing them individually+manually in adobe acrobat pro looked painful, so I tried automating it. github.com/laurenaulet/...

7/7 Install with 'pip install accesspdf' and run with 'accesspdf serve' and you should be good to go! Please let me know when things break, if there are important features missing/not working properly, or generally any feedback you have!

6/7 I'm hesistant to share this, partially because of the vibe-coded nature of it, but also because I haven't tested every possible use case. But with the looming deadline, I decided better to make it available sooner rather than later so it will be maximally useful to folks.

a screenshot of a scientific figure of a brain with an AI generated description

5/7 One workaround is that I added the option for the user to provide context either at the pdf-level or individual figure-level, which leads to more accurate LLM-generated alt text. And it does seem to do a much better job in that case

a screenshot of LLM-generated caption of an image of a brain

4/7 And some of the LLM-generated alt text is pretty incorrect/misleading, so best to do human review if not just outright doing the alt text manually. For example, it thought an atypical view of a brain was "a banana superimposed over a slice of melon."

3/7 This tool remedies a lot of structural problems in pdfs including tags, reading direction, etc, and gives you two options for providing alt text for figures: manually or LLM-based. The easiest LLM use so far is running ollama locally. That being said, the LLM alt text is slow to generate...

2/7 To caveat, this is a work in progress, & I'm not a software engineer (or accessibility expert), just someone who knows enough to be dangerous with claude code. I checked outputs with many accessibility checkers & it doesnt fix everything, but it certainly helps (e.g., 21 -> 6 issues flagged)

1/7 Academics are facing an April deadline for making our course materials accessible. One big part of this is pdfs of journal articles. Editing them individually+manually in adobe acrobat pro looked painful, so I tried automating it. github.com/laurenaulet/...

The Developmental and Brain Sciences program at UMass Boston is looking for a half-time Program Coordinator. This colleague will be working directly with me (the Director of the program). Feel free to DM me with any questions! employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us...

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions.

@brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here:

rdcu.be/e5SWo

Neuroscience undergrad abducted at 6:30am. No judicial warrant. ICE lied to gain entry into the residence.

State-sanctioned kidnapping. And I’m supposed to somehow teach class this afternoon?

Larry Summers Will Resign From Harvard After Jeffrey Epstein Revelations Mr. Summers, former president of the school, had stepped back from teaching after documents showed a closer relationship to Jeffrey Epstein than previously known. He will leave at the end of the academic year.

Breaking News: Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard as the university reviews his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned an exclusive retreat. The guests were picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman.

The problem? Brockman added two women to the list, and his biggest funder — Jeffrey Epstein — wanted them out.

@jkutzie.bsky.social reports

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

I wrote about the Epstein files and what they tell us about men in academia.

In a field where climbing the career ladder is only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files show the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back.

19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

Good to see journalists scrutinizing “The Edge Network,” an intellectual circle of academic men who think that women are inherently inferior to men.
(and great interview by @laurenaulet.bsky.social)
19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)!

How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science.

Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

NEW reporting from @19thnews.org on the Epstein files shows how academic research funding intersected with women scientists and institutional power shaped by male influence. An important story about accountability, impact and who gets protected -- and who doesn't. 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language State-of-the-art MLLMs achieve PhD-level language reasoning but struggle with visual tasks that 3-year-olds solve effortlessly. We introduce BabyVision, a benchmark revealing the infancy of AI vision.

Very impressive visual reasoning benchmark. They found that most models still fall below the capacities of a 3-year-old

unipat.ai/blog/BabyVis...

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚

“Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).”

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

Again, I'm looking for a lab research coordinator to work on the developmental cognitive neuroscience of numeracy in preschoolers. Please pass on to those that might be interested publish.illinois.edu/danielchyde/...

Title card for Mindscape podcast episode with Tom Griffiths.

Mindscape 343 | Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social on The Laws of Thought. Everyone knows the laws of thermodynamics, but do you know the laws of thinking? #MindscapePodcast

www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026...

My dept - Psychology & Education at Mount Holyoke College - is searching for a 1-yr visitor in developmental psych. 3/2 teaching load with research support mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience If you are a current Barnard College employee, please use the internal career site to apply for this position. Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience The Barnard Visua...

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine

Imagination in bonobos!

I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org

We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative

youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

i haven't, but I can! I'll update you when I get a chance to try it :)

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint: