One year down at Lehigh! 🎉 This year we built the lab, did some cool science, and sent out our very first newsletter (tinyurl.com/5n978emu). I'm also excited to share that I'll be recruiting a PhD student this cycle! If you know any trainees who might be a great fit, please send them my way!

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.

New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

🎉 New paper w/ honors student Majo Guerrero & @lindseypowell.bsky.social: 4–7-year-olds did not expect girls to be more empathic than boys, nor did they judge girls more harshly for counter-empathizing, suggesting stereotypes about empathy may emerge later in development. doi.org/10.1080/1524...

Examining Gender Differences in Children’s Reasoning About Empathy

This study investigated whether children exhibit gendered expectations and evaluations of empathy, exploring the developmental origins of stereotypes observed in adults. A sample of 112 children (M...

doi.org

New review paper on the development of friendship psychology/ cognition (w/ @zoeliberman.bsky.social): By age 6, children appear to recognize friendship as a ranking-based relationship with outstanding social expectations and obligations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Young children's friendship expectations align with evolutionary frameworks

Across the lifespan, friends are critical social partners. Prominent evolutionary theories—such as the Banker's Paradox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996)—propo…

sciencedirect.com

One-year-olds watching cartoon characters help each other don’t necessarily expect a helper to also help new characters, suggesting that infants assume prosocial behavior is based on relationships rather than innate dispositions. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/6bTH50YPGUo

Job alert! @brandonwoo.bsky.social and I are searching for a new lab manager. We are excited to add a new member to our awesome community of soc cog dev researchers! Spread the word :) Full ad here: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03106

Junior Specialist, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ap.ucsb.edu

This project was so fun to work on with this stellar team!! It also has some cool age-related findings: older children think that people should make objects they don't like more accessible to others, but that liked objects should be protected from others by putting them in a hard-to-reach place!

Adena Schachner@adenaschachner.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper in Child Development! When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way! academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

Highly recommend @cogdevsoc.bsky.social falling on your birthday week. Celebrated 30 early by giving a talk at the ECR symposium, seeing mentees present cool posters, and catching up with some of my favorite people!

CDS 2026 was full of excellent science and good times! A big thanks to all the speakers in the intuitive theories of care preconference, organized by @rtompkins.bsky.social -- so many new ideas and findings to think about!

Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Lindsey Powell@lindseypowell.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Members of the SoCal lab are presenting their work at #CDS2026! Check out where to find us below

Can't wait for #CDS2026! My lab is excited to share some of our ongoing work featuring collaborations with Madison Pesowski's KIDS Lab at UFV! I hope you'll stop by and chat :)

Looking forward to #CDS2026! Come learn about the work that my students and I are doing @emmayu23.bsky.social @cogdevsoc.bsky.social

Job ad linked below: Postdoc, Wesleyan U, Psychology Dept, to work with me & Dr. Royette Dubar. I’ll be at CDS in Montreal for Qs from potential applicants. Please share! wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

Hilary Barth@hilarybarth.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Unofficial for now, but we hope to recruit a developmental science postdoc soon to work at Wesleyan U with me (cognition + development) and Dr Royette Dubar (sleep & psychosocial adjustment, science of parenting). Particular focus on undergrad research mentoring. Keep an eye out for the official ad!

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below

Trust in leadership is essential to success A new study found that PhD students who had greater trust in their graduate advisor finished their first year more motivated, higher in well-being, and more academically successful than those with lower advisor trust. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social! We argue that children's struggle to represent the past and future in common tests of knowledge may stem from difficulties in hypothetical reasoning about imaginary timelines, rather than a lack of knowledge about time. 1/n academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Back to reality: Children's early temporal reasoning applies to real but not hypothetical events

Abstract. Time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are hard for children to learn, and for researchers to study, because their referents change from day

academic.oup.com

So excited to share this new paper, out in JEP:G with the incredible @jamieamemiya.bsky.social, Gail Heyman, and @carenwalker.bsky.social! We tested how children and adults reason about disparate impact policies: formally neutral laws or rules that are indirectly discriminatory. (1/7)

Want to contribute to the work right now and you’re in MA, NH, or PA? Call your state reps and senators about these bills!

Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · 7mo ago

"In good news, though, the year begins with three states proposing anti-book-ban/freedom-to-read bills. Those states, MA, NH, + PA, would join 13 other states in preserving the right to read in state law... States like MD... have become leaders in using the bill to curtail book bans."

Second this! I really like Owlstown for easy & effective academic websites.

Alexis Smith-Flores@asmithflores.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Academic PSA: Encourage your trainees to have some sort of online presence, or at the very least an email on the lab website, so they can be invited to give talks at other places. Sincerely, Someone who has spent a cumulative total of 3 hours unsuccessfully trying to track down email addresses

Academic PSA: Encourage your trainees to have some sort of online presence, or at the very least an email on the lab website, so they can be invited to give talks at other places. Sincerely, Someone who has spent a cumulative total of 3 hours unsuccessfully trying to track down email addresses

And that’s a wrap on my lab’s first semester 🎉 So grateful to work these wonderful folks (and Arya’s grateful that they are generous in their pets)

There’s a fantastic developmental science resource called Children Helping Science, at MIT (childrenhelpingscience.com). Researchers run child studies online, Parents sign up & participate with their kids. CHS got an offer from an anonymous donor: matching gifts up to $100K through December!

The Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UNL is hiring a Research Assistant Professor! Work with my wonderful colleague Tim Nelson on NIH-funded developmental/health projects and grow your own line of research. The DCN Lab is an amazing team with lots of opportunities and support.

I'm recruiting a grad student! My lab at NYU (psych dept) studies the computational basis of moral cognition and aims to build AI systems that are aligned with human values. Now admitting a PhD student for Fall 2026. Apps due 12/1. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs

The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

science.org

Have a student considering applying to Lehigh for graduate school? The CAS application fee is waived (!!!) if they submit their application between Nov 3rd and Nov 8th or between Dec 1st and Dec 6th! If they have questions, please direct them to email incasgrd@lehigh.edu! #psychologyphd #gradschool

Alexis Smith-Flores@asmithflores.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Excited to share that my lab will be accepting applications for our very first PhD student to start in Fall 2026! Interested applicants can learn more about the lab here: wordpress.lehigh.edu/littlelearne... And Lehigh’s graduate program here: psychology.cas.lehigh.edu/graduate

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Exact numerical reasoning in blind children and adults

What is the origin of exact numerical reasoning in humans? Previous studies report that innumerate humans are unable to recognize that two sets placed…

sciencedirect.com