Tracey Mills

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

There’s a fantastic developmental science resource called Children Helping Science, at MIT (childrenhelpingscience.com). Researchers run child studies online, Parents sign up & participate with their kids. CHS got an offer from an anonymous donor: matching gifts up to $100K through December!

OMG

Check our new paper out! 🤓

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...

Our next paper on comparing dynamical systems (with special interest to artificial and biological neural networks) is out!! Joint work with @annhuang42.bsky.social , as well as @satpreetsingh.bsky.social , @leokoz8.bsky.social , Ila Fiete, and @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social : arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25943

Do AI agents ask good questions? We built “Collaborative Battleship” to find out—and discovered that weaker LMs + Bayesian inference can beat GPT-5 at 1% of the cost.

Paper, code & demos: gabegrand.github.io/battleship

Here's what we learned about building rational information-seeking agents... 🧵🔽

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

Excited to share this work on ✨program learning✨ and grateful to have worked on this with @samcheyette.bsky.social, an incredible mentor and scientist!

Now up at #COSMOS2025: @kartikchandra.bsky.social & Lio Wong giving a tutorial on recursive social reasoning using MEMO github.com/kach/memo
Fun fact: those flowers between them and 🗻 are called "cosmos".
Collab notebook here to follow along 👉 cosmossummerschool.github.io/materials/#g...

Do Humans Use Push‐Down Stacks When Learning or Producing Center‐Embedded Sequences? Complex sequences are ubiquitous in human mental life, structuring representations within many different cognitive domains—natural language, music, mathematics, and logic, to name a few. However, the....

New work with @samcheyette.bsky.social & Susan Carey testing the memory architecture used when learning/producing center-embedded sequences. Adults don't use Push-Down Stacks as is often assumed, instead they rely on a Queue-like memory architecture onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

MIT BCS Application Assistance Program | Notion Made with Notion, the all-in-one connected workspace with publishing capabilities.

More info here:

If you’re applying to grad school this cycle, consider signing up for the MIT BCS application assistance program!

Co-organized with Lio Wong, Ionatan Kuperwajs, Katie Collins, and @cocoscilab.bsky.social 🎉

Meta-reasoning @ CogSci Workshop Description People are general purpose problem solvers. We obtain food and shelter, manage companies, solve moral dilemmas, spend years toiling away at thorny math problems, and even adopt a...

If you’ll be at #CogSci2025, consider (or at least consider considering) attending our @cogscisociety.bsky.social workshop on meta reasoning
🤔🤨🧐
We’ll be discussing problem selection through various lenses represented by a great lineup of speakers!

Found it