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Cognitive scientist seeking to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit. Asst Prof of Psychology at Stanford. Lab website: https://cogtoolslab.github.io

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak “This country has given me endless opportunities…: The America we inhabit today bears almost no resemblance to the country I chose all those years ago” newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

Exciting news! 🎉 We're thrilled to introduce our new Governing Board members! • Judith Ellen Fan @judithfan.bsky.social, from Stanford • Joshua Hartshorne, from @sydney.edu.au We appreciate their service and dedication to the Society, and look forward to the years ahead.

New preprint! How do children’s drawing abilities develop in contexts where they have relatively fewer drawing opportunities? In a study with 120 Kisumu, Kenya children, we find that children produce more recognizable drawings with age and with drawing experience. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/ New preprint! Reasoning models often require hundreds of task examples and thousands of rollouts to improve on a task. How can they learn more from much less? Introducing CORE: contrastive self-reflection for rapid, sample-efficient, and interpretable self-improvement 🧵

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

New paper in press at Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts w/ @aaronhertzmann.com interrogating the information bottlenecks that make the drawing of objects & scenes from observation so difficult. This was a really fun paper to write together--we hope it'll be a fun read, too!

The Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford (cogtoolslab.github.io) is recruiting two new research staff members to join in AY 26-27. Full-Time Lab Manager: forms.gle/UVwfx5wbY9Km.... IRiSS Predoc Researcher: iriss.stanford.edu/predoc/2026-.... Please share widely in your networks, thank you!!

Following the release of the President's Budget Request (PBR) on April 3rd, NSF quickly and quietly took steps to begin to dismantle the SBE Directorate. The Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) wants to hear about how the SBE Directorate at NSF has supported your research and career. Your stories help FABBS communicate to policymakers and the public what’s at stake when the federal government fails to fund critical sciences. We may follow up for clarification, but we will not share your name or institution publicly without your permission.

If asked to draw a person's portrait, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Why is observational drawing so hard? In a new paper, @judithfan.bsky.social and I answer: it's the limitations of human vision. Learning to draw is learning skills to overcome them. aaronhertzmann.com/2026/03/23/d... 1/

If asked to draw a picture of a tree or a person in front of them, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Thirty years ago, two psychologists pointed out that this should be surprising. They reasoned ...