Sam Gershman

Zergham Ahmed, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chris Bates, Samuel J. Gershman: Code to Control: Synthesizing Parameterized Reactive Controllers https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38733 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.38733 https://arxiv.org/html/2609.38733

🚨 Preprint alert! 👶🧠🌊 "The Emergence of a Distinction between Things and Stuff" osf.io/preprints/ps... So excited to share my first infant study, with the wonderful Sanghee Song and Liz Spelke.🎉 Do babies expect sand to behave differently from solid objects? 🧵1/5

Amazing work by @sromeropinto.bsky.social ! Sandra found that in Pavlovian tasks with hidden states, neural population dynamics in mouse OFC resemble beliefs/state-inference

We present PlayTrain, a new Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that reimagines how we build video-game environments for RL by harnessing LLMs’ ability to write JavaScript games. PlayTrain turns single-file JS browser games into RL environments ready for efficient training.

Pay attention to Arthur: he’s breathing fresh life into psychophysics.

We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...

Excited to share that our paper on explainable AI for autonomous driving is out today in @nature.com! Super proud to have been part of this amazing collaboration between Motional and MIT! Details in the 🧵

Yes, some people are worse at writing than an LLM. Those people are also usually incoherent thinkers. If they learned to write better, they would get better at thinking.

If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Lance Ying, William Van Uitert, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Pragmatic Reasoning in Design https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26322 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26322 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.26322

Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman: Using Theory of Mind to Arbitrate between Social and Non-social Learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28601 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.28601 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.28601

Sometimes my kids are so out to lunch they literally forget to eat the lunch I packed them.

For those interested in memory transfer (the topic of my book): #16mmfilmography (avgeeks.bsky.social) hosts The Way Out Men, a documentary that features James V. McConnell studying his cannibal worms (featured at 9:45): 16mmfilmography.org/film/the-way... #hps #philsky

I'm really excited about this work. In addition to a new genome assembly for Stentor, we show through transcriptomics that a pathway for long-term depression (in neurons) is involved in mechanosensory habituation... despite the cell having no synapses!

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics recently, observing an interdisciplinary group of scientists as they grappled with the limits of language in the face of biological complexity. My scene report: clairelevans.substack.com/p/report-fro...

We're looking for volunteers for our #CCN2026 community event's live problem-solving demos! Join a 10min think-aloud session solving an everyday planning task or playing a video game, and help kick off our panel discussions. 🎬 🙌 Please sign up here if you're interested: forms.gle/D7HNwFE1pet9...

Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

A brief history of Open Mind 2013: Dick Aslin was disillusioned with Cognition (Elsevier). Nick Lindsay (MIT Press) wanted to create an open access cognitive science journal Nick contacted Dick, and Open Mind started. Editorial, February 2017, issue 1 of Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

To adapt to a new prior, tuning curves should "move" toward more frequent stimuli ('prior attraction'). But in adaptation studies they are shown to move away from the more frequent stimuli ('adapter repulsion'). Oh also how do tuning curves move at all?? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Join us at both conferences this summer! Our #CogSci2026 workshop features a series of invited talks on problem representations and abstractions. Our #CCN2026 community event opens a broader discussion on naturalistic problem solving: frameworks, tasks, methods, and where the field should go next.

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.09.731162v1

1/11 When we think about learning, we think about brains. Neurons.
Animals. But what if learning began much earlier? Our paper in PRXLife, led by @maorknak.bsky.social explores whether a unicell relative of animals can use environmental cues to anticipate future stress. 🧵 Link: go.aps.org/4vAU56R

In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell pureed a bunch of worms and fed them to other worms. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories...