Mike Frank

Slide from Tenenbaum talk

Cogsci and AI: two different approaches as articulated by Josh Tenenbaum #cogsci2025

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

New #cogsci2025 paper! with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
In “Generics Revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children’s books and caregivers’ speech” we revisit the connection between generic use in children’s language input and psychological essentialism.

a picture of me wearing a blue shirt. I’m showing off a pair of earrings that are two shapes stacked on top of each other.

A picture of my poster, which shows that compositional structure only emerges when there is compositional structure in the environment (shapes with subshapes or no subshapes)

I’m here at #CogSci2025! And I made some earrings to match my stimuli! If you want to chat about the ✨emergence of compositional structure in iterated reference games✨, come by my poster today at P1-M-125

Good morning #CogSci2025! We're really in our element here and excited to connect with you. Stop by table 4 to say hello!

☕ Tomorrow morning (10-10:30 AM, Salon 8): Join Michael C. Frank, co-editor of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (#OECS), for coffee and conversation.

Language and cognition lab cogsci presentations!

Come see us at #cogsci2025! Here’s a (revised) list of posters and talks from my lab!

Come say hi tomorrow morning at our OECS coffee! #cogsci2025

Proving yet again that searching for bsky handles is hard, I didn't tag @vboyce.bsky.social the first time around, sorry!

I like the different action shots ...

We tried very hard to study language and communication during strategic games like prisoner's dilemma. Veronica Boyce did many experiments chasing what could have been an interesting result but in the end wasn't very strong. Now she's written a nice postmortem: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

"increasing reports of AI hallucinations making their way into academic papers, court decisions, and White House reports [that] have been caught by humans; One wonders how many haven’t been identified and are being spread across the information ecosystem" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks to @elevenlabs.io for supporting LEVANTE voice generation with their Impact program!

#ElevenLabs

Humbled and thank you, @mcxfrank.bsky.social! One dream for Elusive Cures is that its ideas trigger new insights that belong to its readers. I am *so happy* to hear that you not only appreciated it, but its ideas led you to connect dots that I’ve never even thought to think about.

I really enjoyed @nicolecrust.bsky.social's book, Elusive Cures!

Here's a short book review: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2025/07/book...

Note, I'm presenting the RISE poster with @jkileyhamlin.bsky.social on behalf of a large author group. :) I'm one among many there.

Also, thanks to @alvinwmtan.bsky.social for designing our poster.

Presentation list for language and cognition lab at CogSci 2025.

Looking forward to #cogsci2025 next week - here's a list of presentations from my lab!

There is a place outside the house for the sticks. And the rocks. And the really big sticks that are more like logs.

Welcome to the team!!!!

Homepage - Levante

Some big news: I'm leaving Newcastle University and the usual academic path with it. I'll be joining the LEVANTE project (levante-network.org) at Stanford as a research scientist, with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and a fantastic international crew of scientists and developers 1/

Centaur's performance may be largely driven by learning a good model of behavioral auto-regression—independent of the task. An important lesson for cognitive modelers: higher likelihood ≠ better account of behavior.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thanks for sharing that memory!!

A truly good as well as great scientist

John H. Flavell, influential scholar of developmental psychology, has died Remembered for his humility and generosity, Flavell was a giant in his field.

Obituary for John Flavell, who passed away this spring. He was a wonderful guy.

news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Feel free to put an issue on their github. I’m a fan not a contributor…

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268

and it has a great lowkey mailing list :)

lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/list...

Is it a lowkey great list or is it a great lowkey list? Asking for a gen alpha friend.

one thing I believe as a journal reviewer is that it's best to avoid referring to the authors at all

my job is to review the science, not the people who did it, and I think being really careful to leave the authors out of it makes for better reviewing. reads as less adversarial and more supportive

memo-lang A language for mental models

memo is a new probabilistic programming language for modeling social inferences quickly. Looks like a real advance over previous approaches: fast, python-based, easily integrated into data analysis. Super cool!

pypi.org/project/memo...
and
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Preprint does, but the term “digital twin” is not discussed there and hasn’t been used coextensively…