Tobias Gerstenberg

Make sure to follow @natvelali.bsky.social for awesome science + sketches!! 👩‍🔬🎨

We won best paper at the COLM Workshop on Agent Behavior for our paper: AI Assistants Overassist! Congratulations @veronateo.bsky.social, Raghav Jain and @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social! Check out the preprint arxiv.org/abs/2607.21306

delighted to share my review article, out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! i have been thinking a lot about dynamics lately. this article outlines three key principles - persistence, parallelism, and time-stamped encoding - that support human speech comprehension 🧠✨🌀

Just out in Cognition, with Aaron Chuey & @rbzsparks.bsky.social! Here we ask: What do children infer from watching others communicate? authors.elsevier.com/a/1ntbr2Hx32...

Out today!

👉 The Social Tinkering paper with Nick Chater is now out in an issue of BBS. We highlight the importance of bottom-up and socially-oriented factors in cultural evolution 1/4 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am recruiting graduate students for UCI's PhD in Cognitive Sciences - www.cogsci.uci.edu/graduate/pro... The lab's focus is on how relational structure and combinatorial reasoning is implemented in human brains and large language models--and if they are similar.

Amazing!! Huge congratulations @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant' 🥳🎉 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/a...

I'm so grateful for the continued support from my lab, and for everyone who helped along the way, now as an associate professor with tenure at Stanford 🧑‍🏫🥂🌲

Excited and grateful to be part of this initiative by the Toyota Research Institute 🙏 Together with Thomas Icard, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social, and @yangxiang.bsky.social our team will explore what role responsibility plays in supporting effective collaboration. 📃 www.tri.global/news/elevati...

The Stanford Psychology Department is having a search for a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Application deadline is 10/15. More infos here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

(1/7) New paper in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Manipulating Prior Causal Beliefs Affects the Formation of Apparent Causal Illusions" Why do people sometimes "see" causal links in zero-contingency data? We tested if this is rational updating, not bias. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Deciding when to jump in and help someone—and when to hold back and let them work through it—is something humans navigate constantly. How do AI assistants handle this tradeoff? We introduce Int-Bench, a framework for evaluating interventions during problem-solving tasks.

Wonderful keynote by @hyogweon.bsky.social at #cogsci2026 on "Distinctively human intelligence: Thinking, learning, and communicating about the self". Hyo argues that better understanding how people think about the self is a key ingredient for uncovering what makes us intelligent.

Yay @judithfan.bsky.social! Congrats on the Gleitman Prize at #cogsci2026!

The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #CogSci2026 🇧🇷

When you meet someone new, what kind of questions do you ask? It’s tempting to think that *really* getting to know people is just a matter of asking the right questions. Excited to share the next chapter in ongoing work on what makes a *deep question* with amazing collaborators...

Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

Most models of learning ask what you can represent. We think the real bottleneck is what you can afford to find, since searching for a good representation is itself expensive. New preprint w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social, Peter Dayan & @thecharleywu.bsky.social 🧵👇

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.

—— 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 in Cognitive Psychology on how people combine visual 👀, auditory 👂, and haptic information 🖐️ to make causal judgments. Led by Elyse Chase (www.elysechase.com), with Kevin Smith, and Sean Follmer. 📜 authors.elsevier.com/a/1nHnI2Hxok...

It was such an honor and so much fun to participate in Phil Johnson-Laird's 90th birthday conference. Thank you @ruthbyrne.bsky.social and Sunny Khemlani for organizing the event, and the folks at NYU for hosting it. Here is Phil asking whether people are smarter than logic. Phil certainly is!

Congratulations to Dr. Dr. David Rose! 🥳 David (davdrose.github.io) first got a PhD in Philosophy, and now added another one in Psychology.

Congratulations Dr. Sarah Wu 🎓🎉 (sarahawu.github.io)

Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Looking forward to it!! Thank you for organizing 🙏

Excited (and cold) for my first ever #CDS2026! I'll be presenting work by the 'Dropping Things' dream team in the workshop on "Counterfactual thinking: What is it good for?" Paper sneak peek: cicl.stanford.edu/papers/rose2...

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 🙏

Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition By Samuel Johnson @amirhkarimi.bsky.social @yoshuabengio.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social @sydneylevine.bsky.social @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @iyadrahwan.bsky.social @igi.bsky.social and more tinyurl.com/36yc6ant

Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!! cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...

Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍 📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Thank you Yoonseo Zoh (zohyos7.github.io) for sharing your work with us on "Intuitive Theories in Moral Cognition". Intuitive theories structure how people represent dilemmas, how they generalize to new contexts, and how they switch between representations based on resource-rational constraints.