Vlad Chituc

that was exactly the question I wanted to ask if there was more time! Are behavioral economists activists for studying how to get people to save more? What does activist even mean in this context?? This is like a pillar of behavioral science.

If you're at #SPSP2026, come check out what folks in my lab are up to!

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions.

@brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here:

rdcu.be/e5SWo

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....

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

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here:
forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...

YouTube video by Data Science Learning Community Videos The #TidyTuesday Cookbook: Bee colony losses: visualizing quantities w/ Poisson ... (ttcookbook01 4)

Recent DSLC.io club meetings:

🔵 Cookbook: Bee colony losses: visualizing quantities with Poisson disk sampling youtu.be/PQz7gUBkFI4

Support the Data Science Learning Community at patreon.com/DSLC

#dataBS #TidyTuesday #RStats #DataViz #ggplot2

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

Let’s fund the ‘shooting random citizens in the face’ organization at either slightly lower levels, or at somewhat higher levels but they have to sit through some more training before they’re deployed to American cities

Saw an ancestor of this paper as a talk and liked it a lot! Glad to see it’s found a good home. Everything Matthias does is must-read imho

Extremely telling that Americans will take to the street to virtue signal over one woman being shot but were mostly silent on the nine month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh aka Artsakh by the authoritarian Aliyevan regime in 2023.

I still fondly remember arguing with you in the comments as a young man :’)

Graphic with a dark teal background announcing “Nominations for the Glushko Dissertation Prize are open until January 19.” The words “Glushko Dissertation Prize” appear large in bright green, with “January 19” highlighted.

⏳Closing in 2 WEEKS!

Nominate an outstanding dissertation in cognitive science for the Glushko Dissertation Prize.

Up to five winners will receive $10,000 each. Self-nominations encouraged.

Deadline for nomination: January 19 🗓️

👉 cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-diss...

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST GRIPE ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY?

Saw this on Reddit and it’s still tripping me up: is the horse walking toward you or away?

I’m telling you give it a year and students are going to start doing this in their papers.

Yale Psychology is accepting applications for the Susan Nolen-Hoeksema postdoctoral fellowship! Open to a broad range of areas in psychology, and applicants should identify 1 or more potential faculty mentors.

Apply by Feb 1, 2026: apply.interfolio.com/178435

Dudes rock

2026 PIN number sounding ass year. That's my freaking PIN number

Exploring the evolutionary roots of theory of mind: Primate errors on false belief tasks reveal representational limits Human adults flexibly reason about others' unobservable mental states, a capacity known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Unfortunately, the roots of this capa…

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.

A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.

Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

Congratulations you two!!! 😭😭

Shaggy the singer's real name is Orville and Shaggy off Scooby-Doo's real name is Norville

Why did so many previous studies report low dimensionality? 1. High-quality neural datasets are finally large enough to probe representations beyond just tens of dimensions! 2. Standard methods in cognitive neuroscience are insensitive to low-variance—but meaningful—dimensions.

now out in Decision! 🎉 awspntest.apa.org/manuscript/2...

It’s a great study, and I’m excited to see this entering public awareness! But there’s still much more to cover, as BOLD coincides with other metabolic changes, including anaerobic metabolism and lactic acid production. In fact, others have proposed ↑CBF may help regulate local pH homeostasis.

I'll start replying to my emails like this.

#science #academia #academic #philosophy #philsky

Mass Effect style dialogue wheel except the only dialogue options ever offered are "No, yeah, for sure." and "Damn, that's crazy"