Elizabeth Mieczkowski

Honored to contribute a Journal Club piece to @natrevpsychol.nature.com!

I explore Robert White's seminal "competence motivation" framework (1959) and why it remains relevant over 60 years later—from why toddlers insist on doing things themselves to designing intrinsically motivated AI. 🤖

I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓

The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠

Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏

Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")?

Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior!

shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...

Timely reminder that 'associative' language leads lay people to confuse correlation and causation, as @tomerullman.bsky.social and I showed a few years ago.
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Snapshot from the BBC:
www.bbc.com/news/article...

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵

Our new lab for Human & Machine Intelligence is officially open at Princeton University!

Consider applying for a PhD or Postdoc position, either through Computer Science or Psychology. You can register interest on our new website lake-lab.github.io (1/2)

Bonan's energy and excitement for CogSci are truly unmatched 🤩 Apply!

A lineup showing upcoming talks and posters for the CoLab at CogSci 2025. Wednesday Natalia Vélez: Understanding structural diversity in human collaboration Metareasoning Workshop, Pacific H, 10:30-11:10am Thursday Huang Ham: Collaborative encoding of visual working memory P1-H-244 Friday Bonan Zhao (new PI!): Discovering hidden laws in innovation by recombination P2-Z-231 Elizabeth Mieczkowski: A normative account of specialization: How task and environment shape role differentiation in collaboration P2-M-133 Bella Fascendini: Are two-year-olds intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence? Learning & Development 2, Salon 6, 1-2:30pm Saturday Renée Creppy (first-timer!): Children’s expectations of dominant and prestigious leaders P3-C-40 Natalia Vélez: Thinking in teams Invited Symposium: New Theoretical Directions in Cognitive Science Salon 7, 2:15-3:45pm

The CoLab is headed to #CogSci2025!! 🥳 Here's where to find us!

Really exciting step toward AI-informed policy design! Nice work @sethkarten.ai 🙌

Our latest on the cognitive science of LLMs! To be presented @CogSci‬2025 🎉

LLMs are increasingly involved in human collaborations. How do LLMs assign responsibility and reward to collaborators? Is it similar to how humans do it? 🤖🧑

📃 gershmanlab.com/pubs/XiangBi... (1/4)

I've learned so much working with Rachit! Highly recommend joining his lab 👏

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

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

Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory."

arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

Thanks Bella! 😊

So excited our paper is now out in ‪@cognitionjournal.bsky.social‬! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions

New published paper with Ham Huang and @actlab.bsky.social! @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

How to cooperate for a sustainable future? We don't know (yet), but I'm thrilled to share that our new perspective piece has just been published in @pnas.org. Bridging complexity science and multiagent reinforcement learning can lead to a much-needed science of collective, cooperative intelligence.

Excited to share our findings on prediction in the brain’s "physics network" 🧠 Honored to have contributed to this work, & huge kudos to @rtpramod.bsky.social for leading the project!

Across 9 experiments (+6600 participants), we explored a paradox: How do non-experts judge scientific explanations they can’t fully understand? We found that scientific jargon can increase people’s satisfaction with explanations, even though it makes them less comprehensible.
2/9

Analysis | AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. A new effort using only openly licensed data may have implications on thorny policy disputes around copyright and AI

A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

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...

Are you an RL PhD at Harvard who has had your funding wrecked by the government and working on topics related to multi-agent? Reach out, I am happy to try to find a way to support you.

We are recruiting two postdoctoral scholars for a research project in human collective intelligence and creativity at UC Davis and Cornell. Joint project with @enfascination.com, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @oferon.bsky.social & Dalton Conley. Please forward this thread to relevant people. 1/n

Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!

Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy In a field of muddy results, it's among the clearest findings that one cognitive scientist has seen in his career.

Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy.

In a field of muddy results, it's among the clearest findings.

grist.org/science/brea...

#Science #Climate #Communication #Psychology #Greensky

The first big talk I have given since starting my lab in 2023! 🧠 👶 💻📊Thank you @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social for the invitation and recording. Feedback welcome!

The sub specifically bans bots and LLM-generated responses.. and at one point it was "acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse"?? Definitely unethical, also given how common bots are, they had no way of controlling if they persuaded real people or other bots in their results 🫠

Sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to... The ventral, dorsal, and lateral streams in high-level human visual cortex are implicated in distinct functional processes. Yet, deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on a single task model the...

**ecstatic** to share our @iclr-conf.bsky.social paper: sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to neural networks, with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and meenakshi khosla (openreview.net/forum?id=IqH...)

1/n

The cerebellar components of the human language network The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**

with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/n 🧵