todd gureckis

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

YouTube video by ToddGureckis Introducing Smile v0.1.0

New on YouTube: (Informally) Introducing Smile v0.1.0. Video walkthrough which might be helpful for people who are smile-curious. youtu.be/m0nDalDrLMI?...

The mental simulation adversarial collaboration continues... #cogsci2025

doug medin finding out he is the rumelhart prize winner

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

packed, but 25% were creepy non-human plaster dolls

This was such a fun collaboration! I am thrilled to see this out today!! Amazing work by Cody Dong comparing memory-augmented LLMs to human episodic memory.

Margaret (Maggie) Boden BODEN — Professor Margaret (Maggie) Boden, renowned cognitive scientist and long-time member of the University of Sussex, died peacefully in…

sad to hear about passing of margaret boden: www.theargus.co.uk/memorials/de... real cogsci pioneer and amazing writer. one of my favs by her: ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/i...

My slides from a internal workshop giving overview of Smile. Might be a helpful shortcut to getting an overview: talks.gureckislab.org/public/2025/...

To be fair, I might have mentioned that it might be worth going back and looking at impetus theory more seriously.

what's sad is i think departments should have joint hires in physics-psychology which studies "psycho-physics" but not like "the relationship between simulus and sensation" (normal psychophyics) but a focus on the form of physics that exists in the mind.

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents.
Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656
And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

more or less every time i try to explain to a working physicist that the way our mind represent physics might differ from the actual laws of physics, they look at me like i'm proposing the most zany post-modern humanities theory they have ever heard and slowly inch away from the conversation.

Why Smile? It’s called Smile because it’s written to make you smile while developing your experiments. Check it out and let us know what you think, and maybe help us make it better!

Smile tasks are written using the popular Vue framework. It provides high-quality, accessible, and consistently styled components (e.g., buttons, popups, forms, layouts, etc.) built using Tailwind and Shadcn. There’s more to say but just check out the extensive docs: smile.gureckislab.org

You set up Smile once for your whole lab, and then every project is just a quick fork or branch from an existing project, inheriting all your configuration and deployment settings.

Of particular note is that Smile provides a “developer mode” interface overlaid on top of your experiment which allow you to jump around in your task, autofill out forms with a single button, and perform “brain surgery” on your task without a debugger. You can test your design on multiple devices.

Today we open-sourced a new project for developing behavioral experiments online. It is called Smile. Announcement of v0.1.0: todd.gureckislab.org/2025/07/22/s... Smile has been used internally in my lab for several years and has substantially increased our productivity.

yes and no

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Incentives and Discovery There are lots of benefits to promoting discoveries. Can incentives be used to make people more likely to make discoveries?

Are people more likely to make discoveries when you give them incentives? My latest for Psychology Today with shout-outs to Todd Gureckis, Ben Newell, and Dan Bartels. @psychologytoday.com @toddgureckis.bsky.social

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulte...

Defend the Internet Archive. Protect the Wayback Machine. Tell the music labels: Drop the 78s lawsuit. Sign our open letter on change.org

📢 The Internet Archive needs your help.

At a time when information is being rewritten or erased online, a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels threatens to destroy the Wayback Machine.

Tell the labels to drop the 78s lawsuit.

👉 Sign our open letter: www.change.org/p/defend-the...

🧵⬇️

New preprint alert! We often prompt ICL tasks using either demonstrations or instructions. How much does the form of the prompt matter to the task representation formed by a language model? Stick around to find out 1/N

i wonder if that's due to projects aligned with computer science and ai that also grew

i let greg know and he replied "so far"

I haven't tried this but I think that there are reliable patterns in RT while typing. Cutting/pasting appears to be incredibly fast typing. You can also disallow cut and paste in some Javascirpt elements.

A few of us organized a workshop at the Choice Symposium a few years ago that resulted in this interesting paper taking an interdisciplinary view on cognitive costs, now out in Trends in Cognitive Science! authors.elsevier.com/a/1l7Lz_V1r-...

Students often ask me for advice on what projects to prioritize. Today I recommended putting every project you are working on in a different folder named 'untitled folder 1', 'untitled folder 2', etc... and to slowly move the mouse over each one waiting for it to speak to you from the future.

weird how people are talking about research grants. i get paid to teach. sometimes the government says "we want to do some research but we can't do it ourselves. if you can out-compete everyone else, we'll pay you to do it for us." it's not a subsidy, it's a competitive work-for-hire.

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

does anyone know -- if they cancel all of social behavioral economic (SBE) sciences at NSF and all the basic grants on learning at IES, what does that do to conference attendance at, say, cognitive science in 2026?