Fred Callaway

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)

If you trust bar plots without labeled axes or error bars, the problem might run deeper than ChatPGT. The real lesson here is this: Don’t blindly accept data analyses, regardless of their source. People mess them up too, usually in a much harder to detect way.o

Together with other scientists I’m suing the 🇺🇸 US National Institutes of Health for violating our 1st Amendment rights & censoring our health science. I’m ready to shine a light on the darkest days. Buckle up, read on. This gets pretty wild… THREAD

📢 My lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is considering graduate student applications this fall! We welcome applicants interested in using computational modeling to study social interaction 🗓️ Deadline: December 1, 2026 🔗 Learn more: sinclaboratory.com/apply #comppsychiatry #socialneuro

Trying out a live demo in the documentation site.

Excited to give this a spin when it’s released!

Our paper is out in Nature Communications! In our messy, noisy world, do you find planning difficult/less worthwhile? It's not just you. As we increased the stochasticity in a planning environment, we found that people spent less effort planning: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #cogsci #planning

I think it's clear at this point that someone *could* get a bot to do online cognitive tasks without being detected. My question is: *would* anyone do this? Are cogpsych experiments (vs. surveys) really an appealing target for bad actors?

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a paper as much as this one. Such clear thinking. Beyond the compelling nativism-empiricism argument, it's among the best illustrations/explanations of levels of analysis I've seen. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I take great joy in using a pullout faucet to create a "whirlpool" in the pot I'm washing, with peak joy ~exponential in rotational velocity. This surely points to something deep about human cognition, but I'm not sure what.

🚨New preprint with Fei Dai, @hanqizhou.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.social We extend empowerment (control over external states) by turning it inward. *Representational empowerment* asks which representations a learner should acquire and curate to solve future problems arxiv.org/abs/2609.02322

Excited to share the first first-author preprint of my PhD at NYU with @s-michelmann.bsky.social andDaryl Fougnie. Using eye-tracking in a novel behavioral paradigm, we reveal the mechanisms by which episodic memory (EM) and working memory (WM) interact. 🧠 doi: doi.org/10.64898/202...

How do we make good decisions with little experience? Adults can rely on memories of past choices. In our new study in @pnas.org we show kids & teens do something similar–but what they remember turns out to be quite different! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions? In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This. But I’d take it further. Most humans are most often substantially less logical and more biased than frontier models. Humans are still much smarter in many crucial ways, but internal consistency is not one of them.

like us! No one is doing computer science and math with their naked brains. Pen & paper, math notation, computer language—these are our neurosymbolic add ons! @lampinen.bsky.social , @blaiseaguera.bsky.social , @kmahowald.bsky.social all get it. Not sure why this isn’t more obvious to folks

So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!

Tired of doom-scrolling bluesky? Try mitpuzzles.com!

So proud of Ted @languagemit.bsky.social! <3

We make flexible choices in new situations by knitting together information from separate relevant memories. But what governs which memories are retrieved and when? In a new preprint, we captured how people build decision variables from different memories by tracking their gaze on a blank screen.

How do human minds make sense of big, messy problems? 😵‍💫🌀 How do we distill complexity into something simple enough to solve? 🤔💡 We’ll be tackling these questions (and more!) at two workshops on task representations, abstractions, and construals #CogSci2026 #CCN2026 🧵 framing-the-problem.github.io

Pleased to share that this work is now published in TMLR! openreview.net/forum?id=RuW...

I'm making a website for my new lab (!!!). Who should I steal ideas from? (Self-nominations welcome)

This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot. AIs are weird.

📢📢 Announcing this year's conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience & AI (Rome, 9-12th June). We’ve got a stellar line-up and venue, and invite everyone to join: www.neuromonster.org

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning

Convincing evidence that people recall individual past experiences to inform decisions—specifically when an easier incremental learning strategy isn’t available. Also, a masterclass in experimental design.

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Writing is thinking Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

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/

Yes! @upenn.edu declines signing The Compact. I'm proud of this decision.

1st Sharp Lab preprint! 🚨 We tested how anxiety affects task generalization—not how people generalize threat stimuli, but how they reuse action-outcome structures when planning in new contexts. Worry makes people avoid reusing actions that co-occurred w/ threat! 📄: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵 1/12

Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")? Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior! shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...