PDFs can be downloaded for non-commercial information purposes only.
For questions or requests, please email velez.colab@gmail.com
* denotes authors who contributed equally. Representative papers are marked in bold.
Under review
Vélez, N., Wu, C.M.*, Gershman, S.J., & Schulz, E.* (under review). The rise and fall of technological development in virtual communities. [preprint]
Mieczkowski, E.*, Mon-Williams, R.*, Bramley, N., Lucas, C. G., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T. L. (under review). Predicting multi-agent specialization with task parallelizability. [preprint]
Xiang, Y., Gershman, S.J., & Vélez, N. (under review). Cognitive foundations of collaboration.
Zhao, B., Griffiths, T.L.*, & Vélez, N.* (under review). Rational risk-taking in innovation by recombination.
Mieczkowski, E., Collins, K. M., Sucholutsky, I., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T. L. (under review). Large language model teams as distributed systems. [preprint]
Turner, C.R., Russek, E.M., Seed, A., McEwen, E.S., Vélez, N., Morgan, T.J.H, & Griffiths, T.L. (under review). Cognitive capacity and control in the evolution of intelligence. [preprint]
Journal Articles
2026
Guo, X., Huang, K., Liu, J., Fan, W., Vélez, N., Wu, Q., ... & Wang, M. (2026). Embodied LLM agents learn to cooperate in organized teams. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. [PDF]
2025
Ham, H., Zhao, B., Griffiths, T.L., & Vélez, N. (2025). Teaching recombinable motifs through simple examples. Cognitive Science. [PDF]
Mieczkowski, E., Turner, C., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T.L. (2025). People evaluate idle collaborators based on their impact on task efficiency. Cognition. [PDF]
Xiang, Y., Landy, J., Cushman, F., Vélez, N. & Gershman, S.J. (2025). People reward others based on their willingness to exert effort. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [PDF]
2024
Xiang, Y., Vélez, N., & Gershman, S.J. (2024). Optimizing competence in the service of collaboration. Cognitive Psychology. [PDF]
Chen, A.M., Palacci, A., Vélez, N., Hawkins, R., & Gershman, S.J. (2024). A hierarchical Bayesian model of adaptive teaching. Cognitive Science. [PDF]
Allen, K.*, Brändle, F.*, ... Vélez, N., Watrous, A., Tenenbaum, J., & Schulz, E. (2024). Using games to understand the mind. Nature Human Behaviour. [PDF]
2023
Xiang, Y., Landy, J., Cushman, F., Vélez, N., & Gershman, S. J. (2023). Actual and counterfactual effort contribute to responsibility attributions in collaborative tasks. Cognition. [PDF]
Vélez, N., Chen, A. M., Burke, T., Cushman, F., & Gershman, S. J. (2023). Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs. PNAS. [PDF] [repository]
Vélez, N., Christian, B., Hardy, M., Thompson, B. D., & Griffiths, T. L. (2023). How do humans overcome individual computational limitations by working together?. Cognitive Science. [PDF]
Torabian, S., Vélez, N., Sochat, V., Halchenko, Y. O., & Grossman, E. D. (2023). The PyMVPA BIDS-App: A Robust MultiVariate Pattern Analysis Pipeline for fMRI Data. Frontiers in Neuroscience. [PDF] [repository]
Xiang, Y., Vélez, N., & Gershman, S. J. (2023). Collaborative decision making is grounded in representations of other people’s competence and effort. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [PDF]
Vélez, Wu, C.M., & Cushman F.A. (2022). Representational exchange in social learning: Blurring the lines between the ritual and instrumental. (*Commentary on Jagiello et al., 2022). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. [PDF]
Chuey, A., Asaba, M., Bridgers, S., Carrillo, B., Dietz, G., Garcia, T., Leonard, J. A., Liu, S., Merrick, M., Radwan, S., Stegal, J., Vélez, N., Woo, B., Wu, Y., Zhou, X. J., Frank, M. C., & Gweon, H. (2021). Moderated online data-collection for developmental research: Methods and replications. Frontiers in Psychology. [PDF]
Vélez, N., & Gweon, H. (2021). Learning from other minds: An optimistic critique of reinforcement learning models of social learning. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. [PDF]
Vélez, N., Bridgers, S., & Gweon, H. (2019). The rare preference effect: Statistical information influences affiliation judgments. Cognition. [PDF] [repository]
Vélez, N., & Gweon, H. (2018). Integrating incomplete information with imperfect advice. Topics in Cognitive Science. [PDF] [repository]
Koster-Hale, J.*, Richardson, H.*, Velez-Alicea, N., Asaba, M., Young, L., & Saxe, R. (2017). Mentalizing regions represent continuous, abstract dimensions of others' beliefs. Neuroimage. [PDF]
Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science. [PDF]
Pre-2023
Book Chapters
Wu, C. M., Vélez, N., & Cushman, F. A. (2022). Representational exchange in human social learning: Balancing efficiency and flexibility. In I. Cogliati Dezza, E. Schulz & C. Wu (Eds.) The drive for knowledge: the science of human information-seeking. Cambridge University Press. [PDF]
Refereed Conference Proceedings
2026
Ham, H., Arumugam, D., Correa, C.G., Zhao, B., Griffiths, T.L., & Vélez, N. (accepted). Rational teachers should "lie" to bounded students. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2025
Fascendini, B., Zhao, B., & Vélez, N. (2025). Are toddlers intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence?, Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Ham, H., Russek, E.M., Griffiths, T.L., & Vélez, N. (2025). Collaborative encoding of visual working memory. Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.
Zhao, B., Mieczkowski, E., Arumugam, D., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T.L. (2025). Discovering hidden laws in innovation by recombination. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Mon-Williams, R., Taylor-Davies, M., Mieczkowski, E., Vélez, N., Bramley, N. R., Wang, Y., ... & Lucas, C. G. (2025). Partner modelling emerges in recurrent agents (but only when it matters). Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. [preprint]
2024
Mieczkowski, E., Turner, C., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T.L. (2024). Many hands don't always make light work: Explaining social loafing via multiprocessing efficiency. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [related publication]
Zhao, B., Vélez, N., & Griffiths, T.L. (2024). A rational model of innovation by recombination. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
2023
Witt, A., Vasama, J., Vélez, N., & Wu, C. M. (2023). Playing to win or playing to learn? Human performance in a social card game task. In L. Hunt, C. Summerfield, T. Konkle, E. Fedorenko, & T. Naselaris (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. Oxford, UK. [PDF]
Pre-2023
Vélez & Gweon, H. (2020). Preschoolers use minimal statistical information to infer the preferences and group membership of new individuals. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Vélez, & Gweon, H. (2019). Neural mechanisms underlying the computation of socially inferred rewards. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. Berlin, DE. [PDF]
Vélez, N., Wu, Y., & Gweon, H. (2018). Consistent but not diagnostic: Preschoolers' intuitions about shared preferences within social groups. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Vélez, N., & Gweon, H. (2017). Integrating incomplete information with imperfect advice. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. [related publication]
Vélez, N., Bridgers, S., & Gweon, H. (2016). Not all overlaps are equal: Social affiliation and rare overlaps of preferences. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [related publication]
Vélez, N.*, Leong, Y. C.*, Pan, C., Zaki, J., & Gweon, H. (2016). Learning and making novel predictions about others' preferences. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]