rdhawkins.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Solidarity with the workers striking across the UC system—including my brilliant partner. All workers deserve fair wages and dignified working conditions. Unions make us stronger! www.kqed.org/news/1202844...

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

What is human #StatisticalLearning for? The standard assumption is that the goal of SL is to learn the regularities in the environment to guide behavior. In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that SL instead is provides the basis for novelty detection within an information foraging system 1/2

submitted 7 hours ago • 2 comments

30 years of representing CogSci (outside my aunt's house in Delaware, 1995)

submitted 3 hours ago • 1 comment

I just got access to Claude Code (docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agen...) and so far it looks pretty amazing after trying it out on a couple of repos. Looking forward to kicking its tires a bit more, and interested to hear thoughts from others.

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

Opening Social Interactions: The Coordination of Approach, Gaze, Speech, and Handshakes During Greetings onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... "Despite the importance of greetings for opening social interactions, their multimodal coordination processes remain poorly understood" 🚶‍♂️👀 🙂 👀 🤝👅 🎵👂😄

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

A paper I'm really proud of has found a home. In “Brazen Dogwhistles,” I give a name to those dogwhistles that are not quite meant to be secret, placing them alongside standard accounts and illuminating the role each of us can play in furthering or hindering their use. philpapers.org/rec/WEIBDV

submitted 6 days ago • 5 comments

Our paper from AI at Meta and @bcbl.bsky.social is out on arxiv 🔥 “From Thought to Action: How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production” arxiv.org/abs/2502.07429 How does the brain transform a thought into a sequence of motor actions? Results summarized in 🧵1/8

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

DOGE By The Numbers theonion.com/doge-by...

submitted 6 days ago • 189 comments

How many federal workers would DOGE need to fire to make up for Musk not paying his fair share of taxes? Answer: 677,000. That's 44% of the entire non-DoD federal workforce. Again, this power grab is not about the budget. It’s about politics.

submitted 6 days ago • 62 comments

New preprint! Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard. We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3 #NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci 🐦🐦

submitted 7 days ago • 5 comments

@emmatempleton.bsky.social a network analysis of meet and greet conversations with strangers shows: there are certain central topics that function to help speakers find common ground - strangers don't start conversations randomly! #comppsych #spsp2025

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

@cinoolee.bsky.social: compiled 1000+ sm posts about racial discrimination and matched set on non-race topic...both AI and humans are sig more likely to flag posts about race for removal (36% more likely!) Triggered by identity threat + tone-policing #spsp2025 #comppsych

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Here we go! 3rd installment of the misinformation and belief science preconference at #SPSP2025. First up is Jeff Hancock talking about the truth-default theory of deception detection. We are all truth-biased, expect ppl to be honest and most are but we can shift out of that mindset when cued. 1/

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

How to computationaly🔢 identify persuasion and misinformation? And how can humam and AI🤖 resisit persuasions? Please come to my poster today 2:30-3:45 at #SPSP2025 belief and misinformation preconference. Joint work with @rdhawkins.bsky.social and @thecharleywu.bsky.social and Michael Franke

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

I wrote a column in my hometown newspaper about the importance of keeping SCIENCE FUNDING in our community 🧪 More soon about the power of writing back HOME 🏠 www.chicagotribune.com/2025/02/15/g...

submitted 9 days ago • 6 comments

Our paper on how neural codes track prior events in a narrative and predict subsequent memory for details, led by @collinsilvy.bsky.social, is now out in Communications Psychology! rdcu.be/d93Vc #neuroskyence #psychscisky

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Do you or your colleagues have grants in Cruz's database of "woke DEI grants"? This would be a great time to write leadership at your school and ask how they'll be protecting scientific research (and higher ed more broadly) from attacks on academic freedom. www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/2/cruz-...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

(1/9) Excited to share my recent work on "Alignment reduces LM's conceptual diversity" with @tomerullman.bsky.social and @jennhu.bsky.social, to appear at #NAACL2025! 🐟 We want models that match our values...but could this hurt their diversity of thought? Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2411.04427

submitted 17 days ago • 3 comments

New paper in #ProcB with @alexmesoudi.com, @jfbonnefon.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social and Rob Boyd. We investigate how social learning shapes the way we explore and show that it can even preserve useless theories! 🧵👇

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

Academic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately. There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event. Join us! form.jotform.com/250226137228...

submitted 30 days ago • 17 comments

This is legit - the organizers (including unions) are organizing. When I ask those in the know what we can do that will actually matter, the answer includes collective action of this type. I'm joining @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and all the others for this Thurs 3p ET effort. I hope you do too!

submitted 30 days ago • 4 comments

How do language models organize concepts and their properties? Do they use taxonomies to infer new properties, or infer based on concept similarities? Apparently, both! 🌟 New paper with my fantastic collaborators @amuuueller.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

submitted 110 days ago • 4 comments

My commentary on the do's and don'ts of cognitive evaluations in LLMs is now out in Nature Human Behavior: doi.org/10.1038/s415... posting here with a figure that didn't make it into the final draft and is now instead a boring table :P #CogSci #LLMs #AI

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

Nature Neuroscience Neural mechanisms of relational learning and fast knowledge reassembly in plastic neural networks www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

New preprint! Category-biased patches encircle domain-general brain regions in the human lateral prefrontal cortex t.co/Zx56W6wobj #neuroscience #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

I'm pleased to announce that my article on how the Reconstruction era was remembered and misremembered in the Civil Rights era has just been published in @modamhist.bsky.social. Very grateful to the editors and anonymous readers for their generous help./1 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

submitted 41 days ago • 49 comments

so excited for this community!

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

Absolutely ecstatic to share that I’ll be joining Lehigh University as an Assistant Professor in Psychology this July! ✨ I am so excited to build my own lab and join such an amazing department with the best colleagues. It really is a dream come true 💫 [1/2]

submitted 52 days ago • 8 comments

New paper out from our NSF Collaborative grant testing the widely used minimal group paradigm across multiple racial groups in the US! Overall, minimal group effects hold, but exploratory analyses show stronger effects with older kids and White kids. #psychology www.sciencedirect.com/science/auth...

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

Is personal identity intransitive?  ‼️ Recent work by Julian De Freitas and Lance J. Rips

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

so excited about this one, out now in American Psychologist, "The Detection of Automatic Behavior in Other People" (with Ilona Bass & me) link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-... pre-print: osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 65 days ago • 6 comments

People use uncertainty to negotiate the explore-exploit trade-off in reinforcement learning. Do they do something similar during mental planning? This is what @haoxuefan.bsky.social, with me and @fredcallaway.bsky.social, has shown: osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 69 days ago • 1 comment

Can the motor system use sensory expectations to prepare for unexpected events? Excited to share my latest work with @andpru.bsky.social – where we establish that sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits! 🧵 and paper below 1/

submitted 66 days ago • 5 comments

"Children as agents of cultural adaptation" - very interesting. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

Abstracts for the 2025 SPP at Cornell are due on January 24th!

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

Why do diverse ANNs resemble brain representations? Check out our new paper with Colton Casto, @nogazs.bsky.social , Colin Conwell, Mark Richardson, & @evfedorenko.bsky.social on “Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks.” 🧠🤖 tinyurl.com/yckndmjt

submitted 62 days ago • 2 comments

Here's the kicker: "when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly. Groups of people do not show such improvement and, when their communication is restricted, even display deteriorated performances." It's great that this paper includes movie clips of humans and ants in action!

submitted 62 days ago • 0 comments

If you're looking for a great #linguistics and #neuroscience read before the break, look no further! In our new paper, we show that the prosodic hierarchy (a pillar of theory in #phonology and #phonetics) is actually neurally implemented during the comprehension of speech. 🧵 doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

submitted 68 days ago • 2 comments

Grateful for Bill Labov, a model scholar in every way: an intellectual giant who created the field I work in, who was generous & kind to his students, colleagues, & academic predecessors, and who took genuine interest in the people who participated in his research (not just their vowels).

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 71 days ago • 10 comments

Preprint alert! "Words and Action: Modeling Linguistic Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter Communities," led by two amazing undergrads in my lab. A short 🧵 on its implications and findings: arxiv.org/abs/2412.02637 1/

submitted 73 days ago • 1 comment

Like so many, I’m new here and excited to share a short 🧵 about our paper in the current issue of Nature Human Behaviour (@naturehumbehav.bsky.social)! Key takeaway: The influence of emotions on financial decision-making is not universal but varies substantially and systematically across countries.

submitted 73 days ago • 1 comment

This paper by @harwiltz.bsky.social and colleagues is one of the high points of #NeurIPS2024 for me so far: arxiv.org/abs/2409.00328

submitted 76 days ago • 2 comments

Kids will be kids -- even if they're Ice Age kids. Maybe especially if they're Ice Age kids. New research by @felixthehauskat.bsky.social and @izzywisher.bsky.social identifies children's contributions to ancient cave art: www.science.org/content/arti... @science.org

submitted 77 days ago • 3 comments

We have extended the deadline for this position to January 31st. Also, the start date is pretty flexible; if you're graduating next spring/summer and interested in the role, apply!

submitted 76 days ago • 2 comments