Kate Nussenbaum

Are you attending @cogdevsoc.bsky.social 2026? Come join us for an afternoon pre-conference workshop on motivation in development! We'll bring together developmental, educational, and computational perspectives to ask: Can we build a unified account of motivation across the lifespan? ✨

learningfromscratch march 16th, workshop day 1 @ cosyne 2026

Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k

Thanks for having me! Enjoyed the great questions from your group

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

A few days left to apply to join my lab as a PhD student! We study how people explore, how new ideas form, and how thinking develops. Learn more at liquinlab.github.io. Application review begins 1/15.
#PsychSciSky #CogPsyc #CogSci #DevPsyc

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

But aren’t tasks typically designed to test theories about how cognition works? And aren’t models just ways of precisely expressing those theories in quantitative terms?

📢 Applications are open for the 2026 #JacobsCIFARFellowship!

A new partnership between the Jacobs Foundation and CIFAR supports early- & mid-career researchers advancing how children learn & develop worldwide.

🗓️ Apply by 2 February 2026 → cifarportal.smapply.io/prog/jacobs_...

My lab at Boston University has open positions for a postdoc and PhD students. We study visual perception, attention, and decision making with a focus on temporal dynamics. Check out our recent work here sites.bu.edu/denisonlab/ and email me if you're interested in learning more

🎉 Bonus thread addition: Lots of open questions. How do children learn to predict temporally distal states? To what extent can children leverage these predictions in more complex environments? How do early experiences in predictable environments modulate children's reliance on the SR? Stay tuned!

What about when mental shortcuts, like more temporally abstracted, predictive representations can be used, circumventing the need for costly simulation? Here we show that, in these cases, children use knowledge of their environments to guide their decisions to a comparable degree as adults! 🧒🧑 (4/4)

We suggest that this dissociation may emerge because leveraging structured knowledge often requires mentally simulating sequences of potential actions and their potential outcomes, which requires both time and computational resources that may be particularly costly for children. 🧠⌛(3/4)

❓ There's a puzzling dissociation in the developmental literature: In many contexts, children seem to effectively learn the structure of their environments, but fail to use this structured knowledge to guide their choices. ❓ (2/4)

Excited about Alice's new paper, in which we find evidence that children as young as 8 years old use successor representations for multi-step planning.

short 🧵 (1/4)

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

Careers at Drexel - Human Resources

The MAC lab at Drexel is looking for a new post-doc to work on NIH-funded projects investigating the intersection of prior knowledge and long-term memory consolidation. Please pass along to any interested lab members! careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

Huge congrats to Dr. Lucinda Sisk on receiving the Flux Dissertation Award! 🎉 @fluxsociety.bsky.social #Flux2025

My lab at UCLA is hiring 1-2 PhD students this cycle!

Join us to work at the intersection of cognitive science and AI applied to pressing societal challenges like climate change.

More info about me: rachit-dubey.github.io

My lab: ucla-cocopol.github.io

Please help repost/spread the word!

Information for prospective graduate students The Translational Lab will be reviewing applications this cycle! Prospective students can apply through Clinical Science or Cognitive and Computational Sciences in the Emory Psychology Department to ...

I'll be reviewing computational/cognitive and clinical psychology applications this year for the Translational Lab at Emory 💭🔬

Please share broadly and send applicants my way! 🔄

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Very happy to see this work with Euan Prentis posted! If you’re going to CCN next week, go check out Euan’s poster on this work!

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Possible start in October 2025 (contact me ASAP), or from April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky #neurojobs 1/

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Just 4 weeks until the abstract deadline for Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration - ciseconf.github.io/CISE_2025/

🗓️ 30th Sept-1st Oct
📍 Brown University
👥 Romy Frömer, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Ohad Dan, Matt Nassar, Tali Sharot & Jacqueline Gottlieb
👇 Speakers

Please submit & share!

I'm thrilled to announce that I will start as an Assistant Professor in Psychology & Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona in Jan 2026! My lab will investigate human planning and decision making through a combination of computational models, behavior, and fMRI (1/2)

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨

Thrilled to share new research on teaching!
Work supervised by
@cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social.

This project asks:
When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3

osf.io/preprints/os...

New paper with @catehartley.bsky.social

How does the reward structure of the environment influence the specificity with which children, adolescents, and adults learn and remember information?

See preprint 🧵 and paper for our efforts to answer to this!

#PsychSciSky

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...