dae houlihan

If at ARO today, check out the presentations from our lab:

talk at 3:15pm: Optimized Models of Uncertainty Explain Human Confidence in Auditory Perception, by Lakshmi Govindarajan

poster 28: In-Silico fMRI Experiments Enable Comparisons of Speech Models to Human Auditory Cortex, by Gasser Elbanna

Steve Bannon calls for Trump to deploy ICE and military troops to polling sites The Trump ally was one of few GOP voices to support the president’s push to nationalize voting.

www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

With public support rising (abolish ICE up to +5 among all adults, +12 indep, +61 dem), @schumer.senate.gov and D leadership is pulling back from an already pitifully soft position.

Trump's private army will inevitably be used for voter suppression.

Dem leaders are intentionally throwing the game.

finally replaced with BibLaTeX this year!

Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average.
climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...

How terrific! Free in person summer school for future PhDs who want more quantitative training before grad school; happening at one of the best places in the world to pursue it (the Gatsby at UCL).

Eight years ago we thought that the demise of satire would come at the hands of the absurd caricature of incompetence and evil that was the TP administration.

But we had yet to see the impassioned rhetoric, from Chuck Schumer and NYT opinion columnists, calling for better ICE training.

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.

An algorithm that generates faster and better responses to your inquiries The new paper provides a faster and more accurate algorithm for generating structured text from language models.

A new approach could help AI answer complex questions faster and more accurately.

In a prize-winning paper, Yale engineer Alex Lew shows how some guiding constraints can slow AI or distort results and offers a practical way to improve both speed and quality. #Yale

fuck outta here

Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale Chemical industry lobbyists have long pushed the government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or...

In a highly unusual move, the EPA is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air.

(Published Dec. 2025)

a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fall

the Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳

my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception

currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science!

reach out if you're interested 😊

The New School was founded by Columbia University professors who wanted a university run by the faculty with minimal administration. For over 100 years it has been a unique institution with progressive values and incredible students and faculty from Ai Weiwei to Hannah Arendt. We are devastated.

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

My (awesome) department @bcpsychneuro.bsky.social is looking for a Visiting Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology/Neuroscience. 3-2 teaching load and competetive compensation. Area of expertise is broad. Apply here. Email me with questions! apply.interfolio.com/178919 Please RT #Neuroskyence

It’s simply not possible to overstate how important NCAR is to US and world science. We need to fight this with everything we’ve got.

Promotional graphic for CogSci 2026. The top left shows the conference logo with three interlocking gears and the text: ‘CogSci 2026 – Cognitive Inefficiency – July 22–25, Rio de Janeiro.’ On the right, large text reads ‘Call for Submissions.’ Below, the message says: ‘Review the submission guidelines, download the templates, and make note of key deadline dates.’ The background is a dark teal color, and the word ‘Submissions’ appears in large lime-green letters.

📣 #CogSci2026 submissions now OPEN!

🔍 Review the submission guidelines
⬇️ Download the required templates
📅 Make note of key deadline dates

cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/

Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...

We're hiring interns in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC!

If you're interested in designing AI‑based systems and understanding their impact at both individual and societal scales, apply here by Jan 9, 2026: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network The brain's language network is often implicated in the representation and manipulation of abstract semantic knowledge. However, this view is inconsistent with a large body of evidence suggesting that...

The last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint!

“Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇

🚨🚨🚨
Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
🚨🚨🚨

We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

Social Science Research Coordinator in School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, California, United States The Department of Psychology’s Psychophysiology Lab is seeking a full-time Social Science Research Coordinator (RC) position. The RC will be an...

The Stanford Psychophysiology Lab (PI: James Gross) is hiring a new lab manager! If you have a superstar student interested in emotion, please share this ad with them! Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Job ad: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

#psychjobs

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

I wholesale switched from gmail to @proton.me mail about a year ago and haven't looked back.

If you primarily use a local client (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, eM Client, etc.), Proton Bridge works great. I was skeptical that the Bridge would be seamless, but it really has been.

U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols The military service, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has drafted a new policy that classifies such items “potentially divisive.”

Symbolic Trumpification making room for white nationalists, racists, and nazis in the organizations with weapons of war

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

I'm recruiting a grad student! My lab at NYU (psych dept) studies the computational basis of moral cognition and aims to build AI systems that are aligned with human values. Now admitting a PhD student for Fall 2026. Apps due 12/1. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

🚨 LAST CALL 🚨

Applications to become a member of the CogSci Student Committee close Nov 14!

Graduate students from all countries are welcome! Don’t miss it👇