Fiery Cushman
Psychologist, but not the kind that can help you
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- Reposted by Fiery Cushman"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanWriting 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.
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanThe 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20 📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanWith 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.
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanNew paper from the IMC lab! I am very excited about this one. For years, I have been arguing that one of the main claims of the so-called "simulation heuristic" is likely not true for episodic counterfactual thinking, namely that the harder it is to mentally simulate it, the less plausible (1/n)
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- Reposted by Fiery CushmanA fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanWe tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanGoal selection through the lens of subjective functions: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948 I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanA common problem w/ studies testing non-WEIRD groups is they compare multiple groups using the same WEIRD measure. How can we compare groups w/ apples-apples measures w/o distorting cross-cultural differences? We explore this in this new paper! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Fiery Cushmanfun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanChildren’s judgments of possibility align with their judgments of actuality ‼️From Mo Pabla, Andrew Shtulman & Ori Friedman
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🚨Job Alert plz RT! Johns Hopkins Psych & Brain Sciences is looking for a new colleague using behavioral or computational approaches to study cognition! We are excited about many areas of (esp higher) cognition in human adults, children, or nonhuman animals Open-rank apply.interfolio.com/178146
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanExcited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨
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- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanHow early do children grasp mathematical patterns? In a new Cognition paper, Ciccione et al. show that 5–6-year-olds can intuitively extend lines, curves and oscillating patterns, revealing rich proto-mathematical intuitions before schooling.
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanA thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/ www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanExperimental participants to us
- Three preregistered experiments with prolific participants (N = 2,254) found no evidence for experimenter demand effects osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238 👇
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanNew article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanWe'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/
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanOnly one day left to apply for the Moral Psychology Preconference at SPSP! We have an outstanding line-up of invited speakers, will have blitz contributed talks, a best poster award, and more. Don’t miss it!
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- Reposted by Fiery CushmanLast call for data-blitz and poster submission for the Computational Psychology preconference @spspnews.bsky.social! See thread below for details and hope to see you in Chicago!
- The computational psych preconference is back @spspnews.bsky.social for a full day! This year's lineup: 👉theory-driven modeling: Hyowon Gweon 👉data-driven discovery: @clemensstachl.bsky.social 👉application: me 👉 panel: @steveread.bsky.social Sandra Matz, @markthornton.bsky.social Wil Cunningham
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- Reposted by Fiery CushmanConsciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman‼️ Recent work by Setayesh Radkani, Joshua Tenenbaum & Rebecca Saxe: What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanI'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman📣Recent work by Emily G. Liquin, Marjorie Rhodes & Todd M. Gureckis: Seeking new information with old questions: Children and adults reuse and recombine concepts from prior questions
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanThe computational psych preconference is back @spspnews.bsky.social for a full day! This year's lineup: 👉theory-driven modeling: Hyowon Gweon 👉data-driven discovery: @clemensstachl.bsky.social 👉application: me 👉 panel: @steveread.bsky.social Sandra Matz, @markthornton.bsky.social Wil Cunningham
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- Reposted by Fiery CushmanMy website is official 🙌 Excited to share that I am interested in reviewing applications for Harvard’s Clinical Science PhD program this fall as I look for the first student to join my lab! I appreciate it if you can share with your network :) psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mark-...
- This was such a fun project! Dozens of philosophers wrote philosophical arguments trying to get people to donate more to charity, and we ask: Do any of these work? Which ones work best? Why?
- Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵
- This project took a very unexpected path that was super helpful in updating the way my lab thinks about experimental design -- so we're sharing it with the world!
- Reposted by Fiery Cushman💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
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- Reposted by Fiery Cushman📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year! Links below: Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903 Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989 Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970
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- Reposted by Fiery CushmanWe're hiring!!! Princeton Psych has an Assistant Prof search in cog neuro (joint with @princetonneuro.bsky.social). Apply apply apply! puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...
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- Reposted by Fiery Cushman🚨Out in PNAS🚨 with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire. Our computational cognitive model explains why! Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7 News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu 🧵
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- Reposted by Fiery Cushman📣 Heads-up that our amazing dept (Berkeley Psych) is anticipating hiring *two* TT Asst Profs this Fall, under the themes of (1) Social & Personality Psychology, and (2) Biological Basis of Behavior. Official job ads coming soon... Send qs for (1) to Iris Mauss/Serena Chen, (2) to Linda Wilbrecht
- Reposted by Fiery CushmanThrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.
- Through experiments and simulations, this study shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shaping the processes involved in cultural evolution. @davidschultner.bsky.social @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social @lucasmolleman.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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