Celia Heyes

McGettigan and Press Inaugural Professorial Lectures 2025 YouTube video by UCL PALS

I finally gave my Professorial Inaugural Lecture. A great night with friends, family, & colleagues, & sharing the stage with a good friend @cmcgettigan.bsky.social🥂

Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTG... Bookmarks flag both my lecture and
@celiaheyes.bsky.social’s (far more entertaining!) intro

Happening today. A person and a career well worth celebrating.

I am advertising 2 positions in language evolution with my group at ‪‪@dondersinst.bsky.social:
📢 Fully-funded PhD position (Robotics/AI 🤖) www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
📢 Postdoc position (Virtual Reality 🎮)
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Deadline for applications is August 14th. Please RT! :)

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary Excess words track LLM usage in biomedical publications.

!! Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

💥New postdoc position! 💥

Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution.

Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social
📍 Stockholm
More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

A conversation with the editors of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science Editors-in-Chief Michael C. Frank and Asifa Majid share their vision for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science as it surpasses 100 published articles.

A great resource

Disagreement drives metacognitive development Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent research demonstrating that disagreement prompts competent responses by young children across several metacognitive domains (confidence monitoring, information search, and source monitoring). We then propose a mechanistic model of how disagreement facilitates metacognition. We localize one main source of children’s metacognitive limitations in their still-developing capacities to reason about alternative possibilities, which manifest in an overly narrow focus on one hypothesis. Disagreement increases the child’s likelihood of representing alternative hypotheses, thereby promoting improved metacognitive reasoning. The broader proposal is that, through repeated experiences of disagreement, children become better at representing alternative possibilities even when reasoning on their own, leading to metacognitive development.

Online Now: Disagreement drives metacognitive development

Latest from the lab: our theory of how paranoia can be about social things, without dedicated social processing @juliasheffield.bsky.social, Santiago Castiello, Rosa Rossi-Goldthorpe, @praveensuthaharan.bsky.social and @celiaheyes.bsky.social

nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

All Souls College, University of Oxford is advertising a senior academic position in philosophy. Closing date: 19 September 2025. #PhilJobs, #Philosophy, @jowolff.bsky.social, @birchlse.bsky.social
www.asc.ox.ac.uk/senior-resea...

Our new paper suggests that transmissible sender characteristics, such as the ability to persuade people and communicate effectively, might play a more significant role in cultural evolution than how we learn and from whom.

New Prague District Pays Tribute to Famous Philosophers Prague’s new Rohan City district will feature streets and parks named after Kant, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil.

Czech streets to be named after Carnap, Scruton and Hegel et al, and park after Derek Parfit. praguemorning.cz/new-prague-d...

I am absolutely thrilled to be a fellow at the IAS next year and participant in the theme seminar on Digital (In)Equality!

I'll be thinking & writing about how illusions of 'human-like' AI clarify human potential.

If only!

Love this paper!

You were smooth as honey and a lot more interesting. Well done!

New preprint: elaborating the domain-general prediction error driven account of paranoia and delusion contents:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Awesome to work with @praveensuthaharan.bsky.social Rosa Rossi-Goldthorpe, @juliasheffield.bsky.social, Santiago Castiello, and @celiaheyes.bsky.social on this

Molly Crockett – Changing the World is a Group Project In this episode, Wendy speaks with psychologist and cognitive scientist Molly Crockett. Molly is a leader in studying moral cognition, with an emphasis on ethics, knowledge, and power in the digital a...

Recorded at a much calmer time... thanks to Wendy Hasenkamp at Mind & Life for this conversation, and to the many brilliant friends & colleagues who inspired the ideas in here... podcast.mindandlife.org/molly-crocke...

Darwin Day in Iran, 12-14 Feb, with big names in evolutionary psychology - e.g. Pinker, Nesse, Dunbar, Daly. Also Mike Tomasello & me. Attendance free online. Link in poster. Click the 'Globe' button for English and login as a guest. Full programme below. Tehran time = GMT+3.5 hours.

I'm delighted to share our team's recent research findings: on www.understanding-others.com we describe the basis of how humans understand each other, summaries of our research studies, and tips for translating this into your everyday work as an educator, mental health professional, or policymaker.

For social psychologists looking for a more permanent home in the UK, Oxford Experimental Psychology Department @oxexppsy.bsky.social is hiring. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Uta’s here! Welcome!

Brilliant mid-career prize lecture by @mikelepelley.bsky.social on "Prediction, Plasticity and Prioritisation" at the London meeting of the @exppsychsoc.bsky.social

Fabulous EPS prize lecture by @danieljamesyon.bsky.social entitled "Understanding uncertainty in the human mind" at the London UCL meeting of the @exppsychsoc.bsky.social

Judas Priest for intellectuals. Love it.

Really looking forward to the EPS London meeting this week - particularly our symposium on uncertainty w/ talks from Nick Yeung, @tarrynbalsdon.bsky.social, Claire Sergent, Hanneke den Ouden, @philcorlett.bsky.social, @beckyneuro.bsky.social (& me)

eps.ac.uk/next-meeting/

Can what you eat change your mind? 🍎
My first piece in @theguardian.com on why we like what we like, and the role the gut might play in mental health. Hint: it’s probably not all about the microbiome.

Read it yesterday over breakfast and admire the interesting content, measured take, and lively writing. Congratulations.