Christopher Honey

Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵

Such a great question and nice to see a positive answer

Congratulations to this year’s Packard Fellows! Including Hopkins’s own Shari Liu. Such an important program. @packardfdn.bsky.social www.packard.org/insights/new...

🚨 New paper 🚨 Are your participants or annotators using AI to complete your tasks? We conducted the first study directly observing AI assistance across 700K+ @joinprolific.bsky.social submissions. We found rare, concentrated AI use, but gaps in safeguards. arxiv.org/abs/2610.09279

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

What is the nature of universal representations in AI models, and what determines whether they emerge? Our paper accepted at #neurips2026 led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @rothj.bsky.social addressed these questions comparing 162 vision models, with intriguing results. arxiv.org/abs/2605.13675 🧵

So thankful to the University of Cambridge for enabling a new chapter in the long history of the APU/CBU (since MRC decided to close all its units…)

Join us at @mpicbs.bsky.social as a fully funded 3-year PostDoc (m/f/d). Your project will focus on how cognitive maps shape learning, memory, and decision-making. Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by September 30: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58460

What does the *empirical evidence* tell us about work and wellbeing? And what does that imply for AI futures? arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 We reviewed studies of populations across the world, including the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, and financially dependent spouses. Major takeaways:

very cool! Once their world extends beyond primary colors & shapes in a matrix to one w/ realistic scenes and situations incl social dynamics, will be esp cool to see how they extend meanings in new contexts, and ultimately develop a full range of constructions, almost as if they don't need UG

UCSD Cognitive Science Department is hiring an Assistant Professor incorporating novel computational approaches in the study of biological and/or artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working in this department for 10 years and the intellectual environment really is unique. 1/3

Meet Zeus. ⚡ Hopkins’ new recycling machine turns packaging foam into dense plastic blocks that become park benches and picture frames, keeping it out of the landfill. ♻️ hub.jhu.edu/2026/09/11/f...

The crank doesn't actually do anything, but it makes the humans happy. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/crank PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

The UK AI pushback: 42% of people are deliberately limiting their AI use and 70% of people think it would be difficult or impossible to avoid being exposed to AI even if they wanted to. New report from us at @kings-dfi.bsky.social : www.kcl.ac.uk/news/over-40...

Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

If our experiences unfold like a stream over time, how would this stream unfold in other animal species? Together with @birchlse.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social, a review of temporal illusions and a path for temporal phenomenology in animals! a 🧵/n www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...

The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢 We are recruiting a full-time lab manager/RA joint between our lab and @marinabedny.bsky.social 's lab. A great opportunity for a recent grad interested in gaining more research experience in cognitive neuroscience. Details and apply here: hiring.jhu.edu/careers/job/...

Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵

Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool. arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747

Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term! Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/ I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️ In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that! Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory! We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵1/9

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

Excited to share my new lab website! The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social www.sinclairlab-rice.com