Robert Hawkins
asst prof @Stanford linguistics | director of social interaction lab 🌱 | bluskies about computational cognitive science & language
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsFinal paper of my PhD 🤗 www.nature.com/articles/s44... There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making. However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsHow do diverse context structures reshape representations in LLMs? In our new work, we explore this via representational straightening. We found LLMs are like a Swiss Army knife: they select different computational mechanisms reflected in different representational structures. 1/
- Reposted by Robert Hawkins1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsOur paper (w/ @bodowinter.bsky.social and @mperlman.bsky.social) is finally out, officially 🥳. In it, we set ourselves the lofty goal of defining iconicity, focusing on its subjectivity, context-dependence, and gradability. Let us know if you agree with our definition? 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...
- Reposted by Robert Hawkins🎭 How do LLMs (mis)represent culture? 🧮 How often? 🧠 Misrepresentations = missing knowledge? spoiler: NO! At #CHI2026 we are bringing ✨TALES✨ a participatory evaluation of cultural (mis)reps & knowledge in multilingual LLM-stories for India 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2511.21322 1/10
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsWith 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 Robert Hawkins🚨 New preprint 🚨 Excited to share new work led by @tikhomirova.bsky.social, presenting a large-scale evaluation of the accessibility of psycholinguistic information in transformer language models. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.03798
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsNew 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 Robert HawkinsNew study out in Neuron: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne.... This work led by Zaid Zada uses fMRI hyperscanning of real dyads to show that speaking and listening rely on shared neural systems; and that conversation recruits unique brain processes that aren't observed in passive comprehension.
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsGreat to see this paper on sensory expectations in motor control from @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @andpru.bsky.social out in Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience 🧪
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsThom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsWe're hiring at the Associate Professor level in Social Psychology! Join us in our vibrant and wonderful department and area. Contact Markus Brauer, search committee chair, for details (markus.brauer@wisc.edu). Job ad here: shorturl.at/nnvv8
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsBichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsNow in press at Topics in Cognitive Science! We review children's understanding of different kinds of visual media across contexts, and argue that this work has important implications for childhood learning and assessment tools @cogscisociety.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Do children understand all types of visual media in the same way? "Cross-contextual diversity in children’s early understanding of visual media" - a new review paper led by Rebecca Zhu: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Robert Hawkinswww.science.org/doi/10.1126/... damn this is so very clever! "... we investigated how the brain categorizes stimuli that are not linearly separable in the physical world ... The sensory manifold was ... expanded into a seven-dimensional perceptual manifold..."
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsNew paper on lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language with Swedish colleagues. Using a combo of elicitation (in-person), survey (online) & corpus data, we look at some changes in lexical choices over time & discuss methods for measuring variation of variation #linguistics doi.org/10.16995/glo...
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsOfficially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsSuper proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsExcited that this is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com 🎉 David Rose (davdrose.github.io) led this project on how children's understanding of causal language develops. 📃 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎: github.com/davdrose/cau...
- By age 4, children understand lexical causatives to refer to direct causes and periphrastic causatives to indirect causes in causal chains. Understanding causation by absence develops later in older children. @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsA couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n
- Reposted by Robert Hawkins🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsOk activists and nerds... I promised that I was SO MAD ABOUT HOW CONFLICT-AVOIDANT "CENTRISTS" UNDERMINE RESISTANCE TO FASCISM that I would resort to math to make this point and that I would write it up in a paper. So, here ya go. Share, enjoy, and get up on that soapbox. osf.io/preprints/so...
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsAnother fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsWell this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsNew in Science, Macaques tap to the beat. Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsOur new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social "Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures" Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @kudilvebilis.bsky.social
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- Reposted by Robert HawkinsWhat does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇
- Reposted by Robert HawkinsIn our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor. osf.io/preprints/ps... People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
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