Julian Jara-Ettinger

Figure 1 showing alignment pipeline using CLIP models on BabyView data.

Figure 2: human judgments are correlated with CLIP scores.

Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out!

New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824

Computational Psychiatry Conference New Haven, USA (July 14-16, 2026)

🔥🔥SAVE THE DATE!!🔥🔥

Join us at Yale for the 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference July 14-16, 2026 www.cpconf.org

@xiaosigu.bsky.social @yiplab.bsky.social @shirleybwang.bsky.social @alpowers7.bsky.social

See you in New Haven!

Estimating cognitive biases with attention-aware inverse planning People's goal-directed behaviors are influenced by their cognitive biases, and autonomous systems that interact with people should be aware of this. For example, people's attention to objects in their...

Excited to share a new preprint, accepted as a spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!

Humans are imperfect decision-makers, and autonomous systems should understand how we deviate from idealized rationality

Our paper aims to address this! 👀🧠✨
arxiv.org/abs/2510.25951

a 🧵⤵️

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.

All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏

So cool!

How do people flexibly integrate visual & textual information to draw mental inferences about agents we've never met?

In a new paper led by @lanceying.bsky.social, we introduce a cognitive model that achieves this by synthesizing rational agent models on-the-fly -- presented at #EMNLP2025!

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

Interested in doing a PhD at the intersection of human and machine cognition? ✨ I'm recruiting students for Fall 2026! ✨

Topics of interest include pragmatics, metacognition, reasoning, & interpretability (in humans and AI).

Check out JHU's mentoring program (due 11/15) for help with your SoP 👇

Excited to share that my lab will be accepting applications for our very first PhD student to start in Fall 2026!

Interested applicants can learn more about the lab here: wordpress.lehigh.edu/littlelearne...

And Lehigh’s graduate program here: psychology.cas.lehigh.edu/graduate

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

“Okay great I opened the city gates like you suggested. And yeah, if you could generate a list of fun things to do with a giant wooden horse that would be super.”

About CBMH The Center for Brain & Mind Health (CBMH) promotes interdisciplinary clinical and translational research leading to the management, diagnosis, treatment of, and

Do you use AI for clinically relevant neuroscience problems? We have a faculty search at Yale that might be for you! Info about CBMH: medicine.yale.edu/brain-mind-h... Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/157186. We start reviewing apps in November!

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘

If you read the paper and have any thoughts we'd love to hear them! Ps. the copy-editors accidentally changed the exact month at which infants succeed in a couple of papers. We'll post the fixed version to the same link as soon as we have it.

We think this is a major part of development that's partially learned through parent-child conversations! (and it connects to ideas that Lio Wong, Dan Greco, and others have made about adult cognition!).

the idea is that adults are constantly building restricted scope models--simplified context-specific models that make reasoning tractable. Infants don't know how to do this, so they only succeed in tasks where the experiment itself gives them the restricted model (e.g., through familiarization)

There's two puzzles we've been thinking about: Why are infants so smart in the lab and seemingly dumb in real life? And how can the Bayesian reasoning models that explain infant and adult social cognition scale up to the messiness of the real world? We think both puzzles have the same solution

The paper tries to unify a lot of studies on social development by breaking them down into basic computational primitives and processes. Beyond the review side we have a couple of new ideas in there that I'm excited about.

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

We have an open-rank position in quantitative psychology at Yale! Please apply if this describes you: apply.interfolio.com/171903

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️!

We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺
🔗 minds-making.github.io

June – July 2024, free & open to the public
(all career stages, all disciplines)

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little ...

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Now out in JPSP ‼️

"Inference from social evaluation" with Zach Davis, Kelsey Allen, @maxkw.bsky.social, and @julianje.bsky.social

📃 (paper): psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
📜 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...

AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways

My new piece in @theguardian.com

Techno-optimism is human pessimism.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Daedalus Home Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele,
@alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here:

www.amacad.org/daedalus

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us!

careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc...
and
careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

🚨 Finally out! My new @annualreviews.bsky.social in Psychology paper:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵

New paper in Open Mind! What does it mean to help? What is the goal of a helping action? We wanted to probe infants' & preschoolers' helping concept - specifically, whether they think helpers reduce others' action costs. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!