Bria Long

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

At #COLM2025 and would love to chat all things cogsci, LMs, & interpretability 🍁🥯 I'm also recruiting!

👉 I'm presenting at two workshops (PragLM, Visions) on Fri

👉 Also check out "Language Models Fail to Introspect About Their Knowledge of Language" (presented by @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue 11-1)

Global Collaboration to Capture Variability in Child Development - Levante Ensuring that children around the world can flourish is one of the most important goals of our time. Developmental science has made major strides in understanding how children grow, learn, and thrive ...

A first blogpost from the LEVANTE team, introducing our global project perspective.

A good intro if you're interested in learning more about cross-cultural developmental data collection using LEVANTE.

levante-network.org/global-colla...

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well?
We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics.
📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text.

In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech.

Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

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.

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

1/5 For upcoming work I lately read some articles on handling mistakes in science. They share an important consensus I think everyone should know:

Mistakes are a failure of systems, not people. In a working system, making a mistake is normal, but inconsequential. 🧵

🧠How “old” is your model?

Put it to the test with the KiVA Challenge: a new benchmark for abstract visual reasoning, grounded in real developmental data from children and adults.

🏆 Prizes:
🥇$1K to the top model
🥈🥉$500
📅 Deadline: 10/7/25
🔗 kiva-challenge.github.io
@iccv.bsky.social

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🎈 Out now: 🎈

"The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination"

(by Balaban & me)

of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more

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

Amazing resource that I now use myself in teaching graduate methods at UCSD! Highly recommended.

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Trump’s NIH cuts aren’t just numbers. They are delayed cures, abandoned treatments, futures stolen, lives that will be lost. This is why we Stand Up For Science.

#StandUpForScience
#SummerFightForScience

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

I feel grateful and fortunate to have international students in my lab, as well as numerous international collaborators and colleagues. You all make my science better. It pains me to think of the anxiety this causes all of you. I hope that universities come together and fight for what is right.

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

Outstanding presentation of the devastating cuts at NSF and their impact across multiple areas of scientific research and training. Angry at the impact now and in the long-term to US research. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Word learning is usually about what a word does refer to. But can toddlers learn from what it doesn’t?

Our new Cognition paper shows 20-month-olds use negative evidence to infer novel word meanings, reshaping theories of language development.

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

Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model The appropriate form of the drift diffusion model depends on how one wishes to reason about their target with the model. If the goal is to parsimoniously explain the speed-accuracy tradeoff, the appr...

super excited that the first paper from my PhD is now out! we develop a "philosophical toolkit" for computational cognitive modeling & use it to conceptually re-analyze a long-standing debate about evidence accumulation models of decision making 🧠📈 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

We are seeking a Research Scientist for a large-scale project on developmental data collection with children ages 2-12 called LEVANTE (Learning Variability Network Exchange). LEVANTE is a global research network to improve our understanding of variability in learning and development through coordinated data collection. The project is funded by the Jacobs Foundation; learn more at http://levante-network.org. This position is a mix of scientific work and work with a software development team: we are looking for someone to act as the interface between the scientific goals of the project and our team of ~6 software engineers who work to implement different aspects of our web platform including researcher management, tasks and surveys, and data processing. We expect the role to be ideal for someone with technical experience from their scientific work and an interest in building good tools for other scientists through software development. This position is appropriate for recent PhD grads and candidates with postdoctoral experience; exact title and compensation will be relative to experience post-PhD. The RS will contribute to – and have the opportunity to lead on – research products including papers and presentations. The LEVANTE team is a large and lively group pushing the boundaries of cross-cultural developmental measurement through a combination of technical innovation and psychometrics. The RS will also be part of the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford, a broad interdisciplinary group interested in using data to understand human development.

Requirements for the position include: - some kind of scientific software development experience (examples include developing experiments, computational models, or complex data analyses) - theoretical knowledge of psychology or a related discipline (e.g., cognitive science, neuroscience), ideally doing behavioral measurements of some kind - project management experience on a technical or scientific project with multiple participants Additional optional qualifications include: - experience with modern database-backed web applications - experience with measure development or psychometrics - R data analysis experience Applicants should submit a current CV, a short (~1 page) coverletter stating their qualifications for the position, and a link to a github account (preferred) or other code sample.

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " . Alt: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a woman and saying " too legit to quit " .

Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions.

Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though.

We will persist.

NSF’s grant cuts fall heaviest on scientists from underrepresented groups Projects to broaden participation were cut disproportionately—and were often led by Black scientists, women, and those with disabilities

'More than half of the 1500 research grants that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has terminated in the past month under orders from President Donald Trump’s administration aimed to bring groups historically underrepresented in science into the mainstream
www.science.org/content/arti...

Our R01 was part of yesterday's "mass termination" at Harvard; 1 of ~1000 NIH grants in Trump's "fight". The irony of how many Jewish (& non-Jewish) researchers/scientists/physicians/patients/students will be harmed in the name of "fighting antisemitism" is sickening.deliberately cruel. #AcademicSky

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year!

I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

Excited to see everyone at #VSS2025 - Come check out what my lab has been up to over this past year:

The president is recommending a 40% cut to next year’s NIH budget. This would be disastrous for our nation’s health and economy. Please contact your representatives, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them why this cannot happen. An easy option: 5calls.org