Jonathan F. Kominsky
(he/him) Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Central European University in Vienna, PI of the CEU Causal Cognition Lab (https://ccl.ceu.edu) #CogSci #PsychSciSky #SciSky
Personal site: https://www.jfkominsky.com
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyThe 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.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyIf 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.
- Push the Overton window. Shove it. Don't settle, don't stop bsky.app/profile/char...
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyOur 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! 🌟
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyExcellent analysis! Including e.g. Trump's own crude take, "You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms… they’ll find a reason to impeach me."
What should academics be doing right now? I have been writing up some thoughts on what the research says about effective action, and what universities specifically can do. davidbau.github.io/poetsandnurs... It's on GitHub. Suggestions and pull requests welcome. github.com/davidbau/poe...
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyAn incredible saga
- In Budapest for #BCCCD26 and in a new hotel (to accommodate bringing a baby along) with a spectacular view of downtown Budapest
- Applications still open until February 4! Important note for US applicants: We do consider applicants with only a bachelor's degree and some research experience! You don't need a masters. #CogSci #PsychSciSky
- Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU! cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students! #PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych
- Reposted by Jonathan F. Kominskyonce again being driven insane by ML conference submissions
- Another pointless forever war for oil company profits. My baby just made a spectacularly messy sound in his diaper that I think fully expresses my opinion on the topic. And gives me something to do, so that's nice.
- Yes I think wall-to-wall gelatinous shit is an excellent summary of the situation, well done child
- Happy New year. In 2025 I became a dad and it has been an amazing experience. Also why I am posting this at 4:45 instead of midnight or, you know, an hour when people without small infants would normally be awake.
- It is testament to how good the academic environment in the US was that it could do well on that market while at best tolerating foreign talent. I moved from the US to Austria and they practically rolled out the red(-white-red🇦🇹) carpet for me immigration-wise. Feeling valued is a draw, it turns out!
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyIf A Christmas Carol were Jewish, how would it be different? Would it even be possible to adapt?
- Tis the season
- Merry Christmas! It's the Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog! defector.com/the-2025-hat...
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyNo. Oh no...
- GREAT NEWS! This year’s Williams-Sonoma catalog is powered by AI! defector.com/the-2025-hat...
- Hanukkah is a festival of defiant survival, but two mass shooting in a matter of hours, one that affects my friends and colleagues at Brown, and one targeting the Jewish community of Sydney, does not make for a festive mood. My heart is with everyone affected.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. Kominsky🚨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
- Finally someone actually asked the right question to the right people.
- I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
- Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU! cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students! #PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych
- Now that Word has an un-removable copilot button I am contemplating using scrivener for more of my professional writing. Only problem is I'd need to get all my co-authors to use it too...
- Unlike most apps these days, Scrivener does not use AI in any way. However, if you’re on a Mac, you may see an AI prompt. . Here’s why, and what you can do if you want to remove this: buff.ly/MlAq0rL
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyFully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏
- I got a request in a recent review to insert a large number of wholly irrelevant citations. I complained to the editor immediately, and that review was simply removed. Blocking this kind of nonsense is an editor's responsibility, make them do it. (And I'm saying that as an editor myself!)
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyBlueSky is automatically hiding posts with cuss words in them. You may want to adjust your settings:
- Wondering why no one likes your posts anymore, even among your friends? It's because @jay.bsky.team and team have decided to hide a huge amount of content from all of our feeds by default. Here's how to turn it off. First go to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner
- Reposted by Jonathan F. Kominskyi set these all to "warn" because i was wondering what it was catching (and I actually don't like to see language wishing violence, as people who have tried it in my mentions have found out) ....and immediately saw warnings on posts with phrases like "give a shit"
- Wondering why no one likes your posts anymore, even among your friends? It's because @jay.bsky.team and team have decided to hide a huge amount of content from all of our feeds by default. Here's how to turn it off. First go to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyGerman train life I hope my connecting train is delayed at about the same rate as my current train so that I can dash between platforms 😐
- I recently asked a class of undergrads what they actually use Siri/voice assistants for. The list had one item: Setting timers, usually for cooking because their hands were dirty. That was *it* This whole branch of tech seems to be a dead end.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. Kominskyeh, It wasn't that high up... and 4-year-olds can take it. 😜 But if you're looking for other good moments in the paper... I also recommend reading the acknowledgments closely.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyExciting news: My lab has published our first paper! Here, we review the literature on early social evaluation, and we make recommendations about how to best study social evaluation in infants and toddlers. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyNotably this problem is also solved 100% without any AI and instead, at zero cost, by journals adopting format-agnostic initial submissions (as many journals have already done)
- Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyIf you're wondering whether or not to get a flu shot, I didn't get one in time, and I just had a fever dream where I was in the Drew Carey Show because several days ago I was on the Wikipedia page for the Drew Carey Show. You don't have to do this to yourself.
- This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I noted that there are some disconnects between the causal perception literature and the core cognition literature on causality in a recent paper onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
- Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇
- Does that contradict the argument being made here? I haven't had time to read the accepted article in depth yet, but from what I can tell, not quite. It might mean that we need to reconsider what the core concept of "cause" actually looks like, but it's not that perception is completely unrelated...
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyHelp! Do you know some great resources for teaching (grad or UG thesis) students how to manage their projects?
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyWhether it’s Joe Biden attending weekly mass or Donald Trump’s ICE agents shooting a priest in the face with a pepper ball, presidents of both sides have directly engaged with the Catholic faith.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyWhen the Yankees get eliminated
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyI feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyA wild exchange with Gemini Pro 2.5. In preparing some examples for my seminar (cogsci-llms.netlify.app) I remembered @randomwalker.bsky.social old tweet about playing Rock paper scissors with LLMs. Decided to see what it's like now ....
- Reposted by Jonathan F. Kominskykids these days just don’t understand their computer’s filesystem. gotta organise your files into folders, not just rely on cloud and search!
- Reposted by Jonathan F. KominskyNothing. I use it for nothing at all because AI is good at zero of the tasks I do regularly Honestly I don't even know what its web address is, is it like a 2000s style ChatGPT.com or something funkier like chat.g.pt
- Reposting for the morning crowd (and with proper tags this time): My Ph.D. student's first paper, on how causal coherence affects our episodic memory. #CogSci #PsychSciSky
- Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)
