I am on the job market!
Looking for postdocs and/or teaching-focused roles
I study explanations for inequality & what motivates civic engagement, at the intersection of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology with philosophy and policy
I appreciate any leads! lewry.princeton.edu/home
I mean, I shouldn't be surprised by this, but it's wild how many academics apparently don't want to do the main things (write papers, teach students) they are paid to do
New with @tobiasegner.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social! The relationship between external and internal attention is not fixed but varies between competition, concurrence, and cooperation. We shed light on the conditions that allow for each of these relationships to occur🔍
psyarxiv.com/ry94x_v1
Our new paper is out in Cognition! What determines whether confidence follows the classic "folded-X" pattern vs. the "double-increase" pattern? The answer lies in the type of stimulus manipulation. Big thanks to my advisor Doby @dobyrahnev.bsky.social and co-first author @herrickfung.bsky.social !
If the brain doesn’t store memories, where are they? Why do we summon the past into the present? Henri Bergson explored these questions. Doudja Boumaza (Grenoble) is at The Memory Palace today encouraging us all to revisit Bergson’s answers. Enjoy!
open.substack.com/pub/thememor...
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
🧵
Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.
Cow Tools!
We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them
It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS
Here I describe our study
(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social
Our new paper on different types of underconfidence in relation to anxiety symptoms and gender out now in Psychological Medicine 😊
doi.org/10.1017/S003...
with @smfleming.bsky.social
My department, Duke Neurobiology, is searching for a new chair. Ad below. Come work with me, @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @ennatsew.bsky.social @jorggrandl.bsky.social @jnklab.bsky.social @sbilbo.bsky.social @neurocircuits.bsky.social and many other amazing folks! @dukemedschool.bsky.social
Applications still open until February 4!
Important note for US applicants: We do consider applicants with only a bachelor's degree and some research experience! You don't need a masters.
#CogSci #PsychSciSky
I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.
Very proud to announce that the final chapter of my thesis is now out in Cell Reports! How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? We combined data from over 1,000 individuals aged 4–89 to answer this question. (1/6) 🧠👶👦👧👱👩🦱🧔♂️🧓👴
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/11/s...
if you have a specific non-linear function in mind then brms has a special “non-linear syntax” that is well described in the docs
depends on what you mean by non-linear, but if you want something like a GAM then it’s about as simple as:
bf(y ~ s(x), phi ~ s(x), family=“beta”)
Our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com introduces improv, a flexible software platform that integrates models with experiments in real-time. Traditional experiments collect all data first, then analyze it later. With improv, models analyze data as it streams in and actively guide what to do next.
super excited to say that the first paper from my PhD has been published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 🧠!!
“I could have done otherwise”: the neural bases of counterfactual representations -> doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
New paper from our lab by Ricardo Morales-Torres (@rmt93.bsky.social) on the visual and semantic properties that shape the vividness of mental representations for events past.
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
The short answer to the title, "What Makes Memories Vivid?" is ... meaning!
a particularly fun example of this is that the term “sensitivity” now means both P(true positive) and also z(P(true positive)) - z(P(false positive)), which really helps with explaining ROC curves
Good news everyone: #Duke Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) are back!! We are now accepting applications for SSNAP 2026, which will take place from May 26 to June 6, 2026. #neuroscience #philosophy #brain Please spread the word! ssnap.submittable.com/submit
Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....
genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.
moral of the story is that just about anything can be used as a black box, which isn’t inherently bad. but this is also why we need experts to spot the “landlord special”/causal salad regressions for us
this might sound like a knock on this particular professor, but it’s also something we do all the time. most people don’t have a deep causal understanding of how e.g. their fridge, electric, or bicycle work. we usually don’t even notice it until pointed out by a handyman/mechanic
I once worked with a senior professor with a habit for calling anything they didn’t understand a “black box”. it wasn’t until they used it to describe GLMMs that I realized the habit was less an exercise in intellectual humility than an excuse to avoid statistical thinking
Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)
An aerial photograph of the Tilburg University campus.
I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social.
We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.
tiu.nu/22989
one of the best parts about working in the MetaLab!
Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations
my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People who coax chatbots into sensible answers are basically opening and closing the fridge until it contains something you wanna eat, yes, eventually you get hungrier & eat the stuff in there. But what changed was your cognition. The fridge stayed the same. You changed your mind about the contents.
