Mark Ho

@harootonian.bsky.social 's paper on cognitive strategies in teaching is now out in Nature Human Behavior! 🎉🎉 Very excited about this line of work bc it combines efficient decision-making with theory of mind - check out Sev's thread 👇

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

My main PhD paper is finally out in Nature Human Behaviour! The question: what cognitive strategies do people use when they teach, and can we nudge them toward a better one? Work with my PhD mentors @yaelniv.bsky.social, @markkho.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social. 1/5

@harootonian.bsky.social 's paper on cognitive strategies in teaching is now out in Nature Human Behavior! 🎉🎉 Very excited about this line of work bc it combines efficient decision-making with theory of mind - check out Sev's thread 👇

This week's #PaperILike is "People construct simplified mental representations to plan" (Ho et al., Nature 2022). People generate ("construe") simplified task representations on-the-fly. (Robots should too!) Also: awesome first paragraph. PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2105.06948

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!

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

Within-participants designs need 2-8x fewer participants than between-participants designs for the same level of precision. Ch 9 of Experimentology argues for making within your default. 🧵 experimentology.io

This gorgeous essay from the social-media-less Lily Hu is everything: on what it means to "do" philosophy amidst pressure to automate it (with lessons that travel much more broadly). Rhymes with brilliant insights from @biblioracle.bsky.social @janerosenzweig.bsky.social Ted Chiang & others

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...

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

This is an interesting set of results Reminds me of anti-humor, eg A: What did one lawyer say to the other lawyer? B: I don't know, what did they say? A: "We're both lawyers!"

Framing in the wild

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

—— 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

New Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.19370 Self-play yields capabilities but requires frustrating cost-function tuning. Surprisingly, just 30 minutes of demonstration data produces much more human-like driving policies! Led by @daphne-cornelisse.bsky.social Website: spiced-self-play.com

If you're going to Cogsci, you should check out this workshop being organized by @davidnagy.bsky.social and @hanqizhou.bsky.social from hmc-lab.com, together with an all-star cast of co-organizers and speakers. I'll be heading there straight from teaching at @bamb-school.bsky.social

Added to my summer reading list

53 years in the making.

Come join us!

We're bringing the Knicks Championship Parade to the people — no matter where you are. Watch live at nyc.gov/knicks or on the NYC Mayor's Office YouTube, X, and Facebook at 10AM EST tomorrow. Stick around for the City Hall Ceremony following the parade.

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.

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

HISTORY.

Holden Thorp is an institutionalist. He's been a university chancellor, provost, now EiC of Science. When institutionalists pull the fire alarm, we listen, because the call to action he issued this week exposes the dire nature of the threat we are facing. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The White House today announced it plans to make major changes in how the U.S. government manages research funding. https://scim.ag/43HgW4s

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Plans for next year. Bochum, Germany.

Exploring why Claude develops something like emotion could ultimately help us better understand the function that emotions serve in humans, writes @nicolecrust.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/emotion/what...

Princeton scraps honor code and will supervise exams for first time in 133 years because of AI

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

We recently taught a methods course supported by Experimentology + various primary readings. Experimentology was a truly fantastic resource! psych-methods.netlify.app

Some fun stats from this paper! eg the paper a scientist cites the most is typically published 2 years before their own first pub

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

🚨 New preprint w/ Valerio Rubino and Peter Dayan: how do people discover and use compositional structure under constraints? osf.io/preprints/ps... A key factor is a simple heuristic that favors reuse of repeated and symmetric fragments across scales, is robust to time pressure, and sped up RTs 🧵👇

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited that this work with @rachitdubey.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social is finally officially out!

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

I have just finished reading The Technology of Teaching by Skinner it confirmed two ideas for me. First, the image of Skinner as an “evil” behaviorist is false. Reading him directly, I find a profoundly humanist thinker. Second, he may be more useful than expected in our AI-powered era Few takeaways