Sumesh MK

Ever wondered how the Dalmatian Dog effect works?

The human brain can quickly learn from a single experience and generalize it to related experiences — an impressive feat so far not matched by AI.

Our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com reveals how this works.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

New on the Archive:

Reydon, Thomas A. C. (2025) The Scope of Evolutionary Thinking. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781009619196

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27740/

COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music By Patrick E. Savage (to published by Oxford University Press in Feb 2026)

Just submitted corrected proofs for my first book!
Publication (open access) is scheduled for late Feb 2026 (but the preprint is already available if you don't want to wait: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Locke’s desk – centrepiece of our Library exhibition The current exhibition in the Upper Library, “To love truth for truth’s sake”: John Locke and Christ Church, contains many fascinating items, but the star of the show is John Locke’s desk. Lindsay Jud...

Another famous literary desk is on show at Christ Church. A writing desk designed by the philosopher John Locke forms part of an exhibition in the college library, open every Wednesday afternoon until 14 January.

www.chch.ox.ac.uk/news/lockes-...

logo for Philosophical logic that looks like a diamond composed of P and L

However, the real winner here is clearly Philosophical Logic. This logo is just so good.

The lines evoke 80s logic textbooks. That interlocking P and L. Diamond for possibility. Diamond for real open access.

It's a classy logo from a bygone era.

So anyway, support good design and open access.

are better-performing face recognition models more human-like? turns out: NO

in terms of how we see/treat different faces as similar/different to each other, there seems to be tradeoff: better models are LESS human-like

so they already work in some 'alien' ways...

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧠📈🧠🤖🧠💻

Representational Momentum Transcends Motion Dillon Plunkett & Jorge Morales (2025) Psychological Science

When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵

"I dived deep in the ocean of astronomical theories, true and false, and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect."

Quoted in The Golden Road, by William Dalrymple

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Essays on Logic, Ethics, and Universal Grammar This new volume of Bentham’s philosophical writings deals with his most fundamental ideas concerning logic, language, ethics, and grammar. It includes four major essays written between 1814 and 1816, ...

uclpress.co.uk/book/essays-...

The only interdisciplinary conversations worth having (This is a niche post of interest to a relatively narrow community of scholars.

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/the-only-i...

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.

Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.”

Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris

Can we “see” value? Spatiotopic “visual” adaptation to an imperceptible dimension In much recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science, repulsive adaptation effects are considered a litmus test — a crucial marker, that distinguis…

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system.

In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Book Cover, The Idealized Mind.

The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science -by Prof. Michael D. Kirchhoff, published (Aug 2025) by the MIT Press. #OpenAccess

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Cognitive bridge between geometric and numerical learning in monkeys | PNAS Educational research highlights strong developmental links between numerical and spatial cognition in humans, often shaped by cultural tools like t...

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Auditory object representation in the bat hippocampus Krishna et al. identify two populations of CA1 neurons that encode allocentric object location or egocentric object distance but only when bats actively track a moving target using echolocation. These...

Super excited to share that the first work from my PhD is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

www.cell.com/current-biol...

We tackle two fundamental questions:
1) How does the brain create a cognitive map solely using auditory information?
2)How does the hippocampus represent a moving object?

New from Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social lab:

Mental rotation is often regarded as paradigmatic for #mentalimagery. But it turns out people often don't use imagery for mental rotation - & when they do it is often not useful (same viewpoint trials). #visionscience #psychscisky

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Good video panel at MUSE Trento: evolution is complicated! www.muse.it

While I was in Rotterdam for CogSci '24, I visited the Escher Museum and fell in love with his work all over again. Now, a year later, I'm delighted by this SIGGRAPH paper led by my friend Ana!

(Say what you will about the technical details, you must admit that we came up with the ~perfect~ title.)

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Image description: figure from review titled Map and compass navigation: the mechanism and ontogeny of animal maps. The figure shows how environmental cues can vary in predictable gradients through space, generating unique cue combinations at each location. The second part of this figure shows how animals may respond to these cue combinations, either treating them as discrete cue-location associations, or as continuous gradients. These differences may lead to differences in navigational strategies and performance.

Ever wondered how animals know where they are? Or how they find where they need to be?

The answer is that they have maps and compasses built into their heads! Excited to see this new review of map-and-compass navigation led by Joe Morford out in Animal Behaviour @asab.org

doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

Are world models necessary to achieve human-level agents, or is there a model-free short-cut?
Our new #ICML2025 paper tackles this question from first principles, and finds a surprising answer, agents _are_ world models… 🧵
arxiv.org/abs/2506.01622

Who's that boy? Vincenzo Foppa's 'The Young Cicero Reading' | Art UK Discover artworks, explore venues and meet artists. Art UK is the online home for every public collection in the UK, featuring over 600,000 artworks by over 60,000 artists.

Who's that boy?

Read about Vincenzo Foppa's 'The Young Cicero Reading' 👉 buff.ly/ojqVJQj

📷 Wallace Museum

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot:

"Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"

(by Balaban & me)

relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation A genomic study of 2,762 individuals from India offers important insights into the genomic diversity and evolutionary history of the subcontinent and highlights the extensive genetic variation, gene f...

Impressive work, now out in @cp-cell.bsky.social, by Priya Moorjani @lauritsskov.bsky.social @ekerdoncuff.bsky.social
Aparajit Ballav Dey, Sharon Kardia, Jinkook Lee & colleagues, offering the most thorough analysis yet of India’s genetic diversity
🧪🧬
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Pleased to announce my new open access paper out in Developmental Psychology:
The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind”

with @xphilosopher.bsky.social and @ebonawitz.bsky.social

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-25569-001.html

#CogSci #PsychSciSki #DevSci

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences Review Core systems of music perception Samuel A. Mehr 1 ,2 , * 1 School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Human musicality is supported by two distinct systems of representation: one for tonal perception, which contextualizes pitch input in reference to a hierarchy of tones; and one for metrical perception, which contextualizes temporal input in reference to a hierarchy of rhythmic groupings. Growing evidence suggests that the two systems are universal, automatic, encapsulated, and relatively early-developing. But like speech perception, and unlike several other perceptual systems, they appear to be uniquely human. The systems of tonal and metrical perception form a foundational structure for musicality that, when combined with the processing of other acoustical information (e.g., timbre or auditory scenes), and applied in conjunction with other cognitive domains, yields a human psychology of music.

my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm

or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...