What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Please consider attending and sharing our final webinar of the spring on Caregiving! Our panelists have all kinds of caregiving responsibilities from children to spouses to parents (and international). us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
1. Russia loves having a new excuse to continue the war.
2. Rising oil prices are a gift to Putin.
3. All-round negotiator Steve Witkoff says we can believe that nice Mr. Putin that he's not sharing intelligence with Iran.
Gift link.
New postdoc position at Cornell! This is a bit of a unique one: It's a teaching postdoc focused on integrating active learning strategies into psychology courses (including one of my own). Should be a lot of fun!
Apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31738
Read our analysis of the video showing a US Tomahawk missile strike next to Girls’ School in Iran on February 28 here: www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...
When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
“Peace in Ukraine cannot be built on promises alone. It must begin with proof. Until Russia returns the children it has taken — and ends the systems designed to erase those who remain under occupation — no settlement can be considered credible, durable or just.”
thehill.com/opinion/inte...
More on Hungary's detention of Ukrainian bank workers and vehicles.
Ukraine's Foreign Min, Andrii Sybiha describing it as hostage taking and stealing money.
The armoured cars contained
♦️$40 million
♦️€35 million
♦️9kg of gold
Bigger. Problem. Than. Anticipated.
The first verified Shahed Drone attack on Ukraine was 1,270 days ago.
Ukrainian numbers put the number of Shahed strike UAVs launched at them last year alone at over 32,000.
Your brain, is it... not good? Do you have the bad brain? Sir? Sir?
So... A friend was supposed to give a PURELY SCIENTIFIC talk at NIH within the next couple of weeks and it was cancelled because of a "new process" where all speakers/talks have to be CLEARED BY A POLITICAL APPOINTEE.
Russia lost more territory than it gained in February for the first time since Ukraine's failed counteroffensive in 2023, according to independent Finnish open-source intelligence collective Black Bird Group.
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.
NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)
Directorates to follow
1/10
my family plays this game, "you fell asleep at a talk, but have to ask a question at the end; what can you get away with?"
it varies by field.
e.g.
mom, clinical/social: did you control for gender?
dad, vision science: can't all this simply be explained by 'attention'?
Putin could end the war tomorrow
1/ New paper in Communications Psychology: Against Frictionless AI. Led by my student Emily Zohar and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social.
The argument: AI's greatest selling point is also its problem.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
The UN General Assembly has adopted the resolution "Advancing a Comprehensive, Just and Lasting Peace in Ukraine." The resolution calls for an immediate ceasefire, respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the exchange of prisoners of war, and the release of all unlawfully detained persons.
This is the fourth winter under missiles and bombs, in darkness and cold. And once again fascist Russia has failed to break Ukraine, no matter what it tried.
"silly"
and no, it's not a war over territory
What Kremlin doesn’t want you to see. Nearly 4 years after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has utterly failed to achieve its stated objectives while sustaining losses not seen since WW2. Now using Washington to try to get what it couldn’t on the battlefield.
www.csis.org/analysis/rus...
without looking it up, guess the author. It's a person you know. "History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior."
Wow.
“Showing Russia that Ukraine can sustain its resistance while expanding the costs on the Kremlin is the only path towards a settlement on durable terms.”
www.rusi.org/explore-our-...
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance
1/
Very good overview of the state of peace talks. Key point: Team Trump fails to accept Putin means what he says.
"Russia wants all of Donbas, but also a rewiring of Ukraine’s government, military, media, religion and identity, amounting to the restoration of Russian sway over the country."
Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Humiliating as usual
My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has shared a big data update, covering all recorded US protests through Jan 2026. Some key takeaways 🧵:
Russia took ~5k more casualties in December than Russia gained in recruits. In January, casualties outstripped recruits by ~8k.
As @phillipspobrien.bsky.social writes—with caveats that it may be a fluke or specific to those months—if Ukraine can sustain that, they can exhaust Russia's ware effort.
