steven t. piantadosi

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Basically a long, popular version of this:
web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/Cha...

I'm only partway through, but it's clear that this book by Chater & Lowenstein is one of the most important books to ever come out of psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation.

“I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

The Biden Administration enacted over $198 billion in clean energy and manufacturing incentives, with the expectation that delivering material economic benefits could yield political dividends. This nationwide study examines whether these investments affect public opinion. Although proximity to green projects makes them more visible to the public, it does not bestow credit on the Biden Administration which pushed for them. The most substantial political beneficiaries are governors, who more actively claim credit than the White House. For policies to affect politics, voters need to be able to trace them back to the responsible political actors, which is challenging in a complex information environment. Green spending channeled through private firms alone is unlikely to build ground-up coalitions for climate policy.

The Biden administration did a lot of good things that did not generate political gain. This paper argues that "voters need to be able to trace them back to the responsible political actors" made harder by federalism and the role of private actors in delivery
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues

Different species see the world as fast as they need to...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Doctors say that vaccines are the best way to protect children against measles. A guy who eats dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says they should just swim in untreated sewage water instead. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

Good to see journalists scrutinizing “The Edge Network,” an intellectual circle of academic men who think that women are inherently inferior to men.
(and great interview by @laurenaulet.bsky.social)
19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

To: Jeevacation[jeevacation@gmail.com] From: roger schank Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:53:33 PM Subject: Re: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence wrong; one; my very best PhD student was female; smartest woman I ever knew; she has decided to quit being a professor and is now an accupuncturist; that is the point; no matter how smart, she wanted to be liked or some such crap; also she failed to be brilliant when I made her leave Yale; she needed a man in order to be smart; they all do roger schank http://www.rogerschank.com/ On Jan 4, 2010, at 7:27 AM, Jeevacation wrote: > It's the tail of distribution , no really smart women ---none > Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 4, 2010, at 7:15 AM, roger schank • t > wrote: » intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed >> behavior); (this is why you have the absent minded professor » caricature) >> it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what >> others are thinking and feeling about her >> >> hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why >> another woman hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag

Epstein responds in the affirmative, insisting "no really smart women---none." Schank, in turn, admits that his "very best Phd student was female," but laments that she "decided to quit being a professor," adding "that is the point; no matter how smart, she wanted to be liked or some such crap."

The FBI Director, everyone. You paid for it.

Trump wins the FIFA gold medal for downhill skiing

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Stacy Bradley voted for President Trump because of his border policies, and she likes that he has restored “law and order.” But she is unsettled by one aspect of his immigration agenda. Last month, the federal government bought a warehouse next to her cheerleading gym in Surprise, Ariz., which the administration plans to convert into a detention center for up to 1,500 immigrants. Ms. Bradley, the co-owner of Woodlands Elite Cheer, said she worried that a detainee could escape, or that protests could break out. The children who train at her gym are as young as 3 and could see “people in shackles” next door, she said.

“my children might see the children I voted to put in shackles, how shall they grow up”

Trainees: check out the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Seminar that is taking place this summer in New Hampshire. The theme is "Cells, Circuits, and Computation".
www.grc.org/neurobiology...

Trump administration drops appeal of order blocking $1.2 billion UCLA settlement - Daily Bruin This post was updated Feb. 13 at 10:00 p.m. The Trump administration dropped its appeal of a decision Friday that blocked it from demanding a $1.2 billion settlement from UCLA.

Resist. Trump will keep losing. And his legal battles and Epstein are stretching the DOJ thin.

He has dropped his appeal of the $1.2B demand from UCLA.

This fight was not from tepid administrators or the faculty senate

It was from the DeFacto faculty union and the UAW.

Trump administration drops appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement The Trump administration dropped its appeal of a major higher education case in which a federal judge blocked its $1.2-billion settlement proposal to UCLA over alleged civil rights violations. It will...

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.

The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

‘No Reason He Should Have Died’: Alex Pretti’s Parents Open Up

“He said, ‘Mom, they’re kidnapping kids,’” Mr. Pretti said, recalling a conversation. “‘Why would anybody do that? Why would people treat each other like that? That just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason to.’”

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/u...

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

Thanks, super interesting!

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Some kind of structural alignment to the real version that supports generalization? Maybe a difference is that you might not expect an analogy to have any of the qualia/imagery of pretending, even though the relationships are copied?

Very cool!!

Can you distinguish imagination from analogy?

YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine

Imagination in bonobos!

I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org

We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative

youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

It's a once in a lifetime opportunity for Democrats, @schumer.senate.gov