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Sami Yousif

@samiyousif

Asst Prof @ Ohio State. I study how we perceive and represent the (spatial) world. More here: spatialcognitionlab.org

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28.07.2023
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Latest posts by Sami Yousif @samiyousif

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We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it. Are 25 year olds really more random than 60 year olds?

A few years ago, my favorite website (@puddingviz.bsky.social) put out this great piece analyzing a study of how randomizing ability changes with age. It includes demos where readers produce sequences of random coin flips, dice rolls, and locations in a 3x3 grid. pudding.cool/2022/04/rand...

06.03.2026 16:26 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Definitely very interesting! I’m glad I’ve learned about the concept!

28.02.2026 19:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Great! We hoped you would. Obviously many of these ideas stem from your work!

27.02.2026 20:43 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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SpaceTime β€” Spatial Cognition Lab @ OSU

I've also put up a separate page on the lab website where you can see some of these illusions more easily via improved, dynamic versions of the figures: spatialcognitionlab.org/spacetime

27.02.2026 15:53 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Distortions of space and time in and around objects and events

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions.

@brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here:

rdcu.be/e5SWo

27.02.2026 15:53 πŸ‘ 37 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 1

I feel like I remember being a pilot subject ~5 years ago, wow

10.02.2026 01:08 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Very proud that this is finally out!

Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

09.02.2026 20:41 πŸ‘ 48 πŸ” 16 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

03.02.2026 15:56 πŸ‘ 35 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

I am very grateful to Nessa and Maggie of Thoughtscape for all the energy they put into this project. In addition to being happy with the end result, I also greatly enjoyed the processed of brainstorming with them over many months. I highly recommend them!!

03.02.2026 16:11 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Spatial Cognition Lab @ OSU The Spatial Cognition Lab studies how we perceive, represent, and interact with the spatial world around us β€” all in the service of understanding how the mind works in general. We're also interested i...

Over the past several months, I've been working (in collaboration with www.thoughtscape.com) to rebrand my lab and improve our website. This new version better captures our core interests/ideas. I'm really, really thrilled with how things turned out: spatialcognitionlab.org

03.02.2026 16:11 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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How Prediction of the Future Affects Encoding of the Present: Cooperation or Competition? Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

20.01.2026 21:45 πŸ‘ 40 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

05.01.2026 17:04 πŸ‘ 36 πŸ” 12 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

This dispute will have to be settled 'on the field' next semester. Looking forward to it. πŸ‘‹

08.12.2025 19:07 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Last night, we hosted the inaugural momentslab.org vs. spatialcognitionlab.org competition. After going down early following a disappointing Jenga loss, our team rallied to a 2-1 victory, winning in Codenames and pool. Proud to have won against such tough competition! πŸ†

08.12.2025 18:53 πŸ‘ 14 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Hey! We discussed this work in a review paper of ours that is currently under review. Great work!

29.10.2025 23:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

29.10.2025 14:39 πŸ‘ 97 πŸ” 37 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3
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There’s a deep difference between sentences like:

(1) Jane caused the glass to break.

vs.

(2) Jane broke the glass.

A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2)

[Thread]

27.10.2025 13:49 πŸ‘ 20 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Are OSF view-only links broken? A journal keeps un-submitting our paper because the link doesn't work, but (a) it did work, just before the update, and (b) it says it should be working as usual in the OSF interface.

Anyone else having this problem, or know of a solution?

15.10.2025 16:21 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: β€œCore 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]πŸ‘‡

09.10.2025 15:51 πŸ‘ 97 πŸ” 39 πŸ’¬ 7 πŸ“Œ 3
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Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCartyβ€”our lab's wonderful RAβ€”we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧡

01.10.2025 01:26 πŸ‘ 116 πŸ” 38 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 8
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Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

19.09.2025 14:25 πŸ‘ 83 πŸ” 48 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

16.09.2025 12:19 πŸ‘ 47 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

smh the bots are just repeating themselves at this point

15.09.2025 18:31 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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PCDL @ OSU

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org

15.09.2025 17:56 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 18 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

Isn't the Filled Duration Illusion usually about filling spaces with other discrete entities (analogous to the visual Oppel-Kundt illusion)? If so, I think those effects are substantively different, personally!

12.09.2025 18:04 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below:

mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...

10.09.2025 17:20 πŸ‘ 16 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
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Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time β€” an event-based analog of β€œobject-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

04.09.2025 16:27 πŸ‘ 84 πŸ” 20 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3

I’ll send over the latest draft that we had!

03.09.2025 15:56 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

We’ve found the same when we’ve examined adherence to Weber’s law with different sorts of visual stimuli. Sam Clarke and I wrote up a paper recently that’s partly about this, but we haven’t known what to do with it.

03.09.2025 14:41 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Causal Perception(s)

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

🧡(1/22)

31.08.2025 07:18 πŸ‘ 44 πŸ” 13 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 1