Jonathan F. Kominsky

#HiSciSky I study the cognitive science of causality: How we identify cause-and-effect in the world and how we think and reason about it. I'm the PI of the CEU Causal Cognition Lab in Vienna, Austria. (ccl.ceu.edu) #CogSci #PsySci #DevSci

Applications are now open for our 2027 Fellows-to-Faculty Award! This program helps early-career neuroscientists and autism researchers transition into tenure-track faculty positions through funding, career development & mentorship. Read more: https://bit.ly/4ihxzMd #science #neuroscience

On a quick skim, the core function that OSF will fulfil is registration of studies (plus protocols and analysis plans) and hosting preprints. This means we will need to find data repositories for new projects following mid-November; perhaps Github, Zenodo, or university-operated commons.

I am very unhappy about this. There are alternative repositories but they all have limitations of one kind or another (ease of use, what data are "qualified", etc.) and in any case we will lose the ability to put one link in a paper and have the prereg, materials, & data all in one place

Now final in @elife.bsky.social: #Synesthetes really do 'see' when reporting colors while reading (typeface gray) numbers: pupils change according to the perceived colors' brightness - if a synesthete sees a bright yellow, the pupils become smaller. elifesciences.org/articles/110...

1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Holy Cow! We're at over 70,000 COMMENTS!! These OMB proposed rules will destroy science in the US. Make your voice heard! We have until July 13!! Otherwise, our science will be controlled by partisan politics, not peer review! fight2win.standupforscience.net

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

Signs that summer has started: I have a pile of five articles to review. I have gotten four additional review requests *today*. Everybody slamming in those papers as soon as their done grading.

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

I usually come down on the "if it really works it should work with a larger n of untrained observers too" side of this. You get meaningful individual variation, which can be interesting in its own right.

Markey is one of the small handful of US politicians I actually like. He is unapologetic about fighting the good fights.

It is a great privilege and a sign of hope that even in the urban environs of Vienna I can wake up to the sound of songbirds chirping in the trees. If only the little assholes didn't start yelling at 4:15am.

This thread is a trip.

Nothing undermine the never-ending fight against antisemitism in a worse way than the repression of pro-Palestinian activism as inherently antisemitic, which has become routine in many European countries and in the US

I have determined that babies are a fourth-dimensional liquid. Liquids spread to fill the spatial volume in which they are placed, and then overflow. Babies expand to take up all the time you have available, and then more. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, sorry it started a little late.

I love this genre of expat tweet "we had a baby and it's crazy how other countries are normal and not weird about pediatrics" mine was when our midwife came to our house to teach us how to bathe a newborn, which at the time was standard care in new zealand. iirc I made tea and cake for the occasion

I'm not crying, you're crying - wife asked me if I had a cable. Yes, yes I did!

Feeling very personally attacked by this one.

The Unfolding World: Causal & Physical Cognition in Humans and Other Animals (April 24-25) We're bringing together comparative, computational, developmental, vision science & philosophy for a workshop on causal reasoning + intuitive physics! If you're in the Cambridge (UK) area, check it out! ⬇️

I’m a cognitive psychologist. Don’t tell me this isn’t a stroopwafel.

Our Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program is an exceptional opportunity for undergrad students looking for their first hands-on #neuroscience research job. Learn more and apply: https://bit.ly/3RprAH0

The OECS is invaluable every time I prepare a class. It's clear enough for undergraduates to understand, and comprehensive enough that I can use it for most big-picture ideas in the field. I really appreciate all the work that went into it!

Okay CTA. This is a good sign.

Sorry to miss #cds2026, but two of my students made the trip from Vienna! Be sure to ask Beyza (P3-6) and Leslie (P3-39) about how babies and dogs 🐕 understand causal events! (I'm also on a project with @ebonawitz.bsky.social and her student Michelle on counterfactuals at P3-47)

I wanted a way to explore Unicode by visual similarity, not just by name or codepoint, so I built Charcutrie. It lets you browse characters that look alike, search across scripts and symbols, and even sketch a shape to find matching glyphs. (pretty badly for now :D) charcuterie.elastiq.ch#U+221E

The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏

Is mental imagery a single process? Our meta-analysis of 46 fMRI studies suggests not. We find a key divide between object imagery (visualizing an object in rich detail) and spatial imagery (mentally transforming objects). This split mirrors the ventral and dorsal streams of vision

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

On one hand I'm very sad that this was necessary. On the other, I might get to go see the igNobel prize ceremony live again, which is frankly something I thought I wouldn't have the chance to do again.

I look for little spots of amusement on grim days, and this is pretty damn amusing. It doesn't actually use real money, it's more of a form of protest art, which is even better.

@niallw.bsky.social pointed out an error in a preprint of ours that contained a fabricated citation. The cause: we used Claude to fix an arxiv upload / compile error. It decided the best way to do that was to remove an actual citation and replace it with a fabricated one. bsky.app/profile/ben....

I beat the rush, as it were, by moving in 2022, but the headline quote pretty much captures my feelings on the subject. Austria has done a good job of making me feel welcome, and my science has flourished here. It was a good move on a variety of levels. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Commentary with 1000-word limit. Two hours of editing down. This will be funny in retrospect.

DeLauro was my rep for the seven years I spent in New Haven and she was normally good. Strong on issues that directly affected her constituents lives. This is a surprising and deeply disappointing failure of moral insight and political will.

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

If anybody out there is like, “kids so young would never do this without adult prompting!“ 1) you really don’t know kids 2) when Reagan met with Gorbachev, I was in 5th grade & still managed to get my class to sign an anti-nuke petition Don’t underestimate how much the kids are paying attention

ICE should not exist in the Overton window. The debate should be, at most, about how many former agents should face prosecution after its abolition.

Our lab is back from #BCCCD26 in Budapest 🧠👶 We really enjoyed the conference (and party!) and had a great time sharing our work, meeting old friends and making new ones! 🌟