excited to be at #CCN2026! come talk to our very new lab during the poster sessions 🌱 we're introducing novel computational frameworks to model human 3D vision + developing theoretical and empirical strategies for understanding these abilities say hello & let us know what you think!

One current debate about infants vs AI: how much visual experience do they each need to learn to see? Don’t miss the neat relevant evidence and calculation in @fkamps.bsky.social 's paper, and explained in 🧵 ⤵️.

Freddy Kamps@fkamps.bsky.social · last wk.

New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper by Alvin W. M. Tan, Kirsten Read, Sophia Gamboa, Janet Bang, and @vmarchman.bsky.social showing text in children's books is lexically and grammatically richer than spontaneous child-directed speech. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/9...

New preprint! How do children’s drawing abilities develop in contexts where they have relatively fewer drawing opportunities? In a study with 120 Kisumu, Kenya children, we find that children produce more recognizable drawings with age and with drawing experience. osf.io/preprints/ps...

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

Brilliant! In part b/c it holds up happiness as an illustration of what’s what 😉. But more seriously: IF YOUR SO CALLED THEORY DOESN‘T MAKE TESTABLE PREDICTIONS IT’S A FRAMEWORK. #TheoriesAreTheGoal Excellent example of an influential framework-not-a-theory here: experimentology.io/002-theories...

Mike Frank@mcxfrank.bsky.social · 3mo ago

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

Exciting analysis of objects in kids' everyday visual input (BabyView). Today's best categorization models still train on curated photos — not the long-tailed categories and non-canonical viewpoints kids actually see. A difference in kind, not just quantity, pointing to a fundamental algorithmic gap

jane-yang.bsky.social@jane-yang.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990

So excited about this new work—check it out and go see Jane’s talk on Sunday if you’re at #VSS2026!

jane-yang.bsky.social@jane-yang.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990

This is my favorite shot from Artemis II so far—absolutely stunning CREDIT:NASA

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

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...

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Introducing Datapages, a new project from Mika Braginsky and me. Datapages are open-source templates for creating interactive websites that make research datasets easy to find, explore, and reuse. No coding required for the basic setup. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/data...

Datapages for reusable (and pretty!) data sharing

Blog about fatherhood, langauge, developmental psychology, and cognitive science.

babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com

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...

Reading the room: Children integrate multiple social factors to predict and interpret objects' locations

Abstract. Adults infer social information from objects' locations by integrating multiple causal factors, which is often challenging for children. To test

academic.oup.com

Beautiful use of the BabyView dataset to train a visual learning model!

Khai Loong Aw@khaiaw.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

Laboratory Coordinator - 138788

Laboratory Coordinator - 138788 | Careers at UC San Diego

employment.ucsd.edu

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

If you’re at CDS this weekend, stop by our posters! I’m sad to miss it this year but so proud of this fantastic group ✨

Haoyu Du@preprint.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Exciting work from the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD will be at @cogdevsoc.bsky.social #CDS2026! Come chat with us about children's drawings, visual knowledge, and leveraging computational models for developmental research. www.vislearnlab.org

okay, so, what kind of data *d*o we learn from? at the very least: visual sequences, depth, and self-motion cues. @brialong.bsky.social, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and Linda Smith have done incredible work characterizing these experiences with head-mounted cameras (thank you Bria for the video! 🙇)

excited to share some recent work! neural networks trained on multi-view sensory data are the first to match human-level 3D shape perception we predict human accuracy, error patterns, and reaction time—all zero-shot, no training on experimental data arxiv.org/abs/2602.17650 1/🧠

Human-level 3D shape perception emerges from multi-view learning

Humans can infer the three-dimensional structure of objects from two-dimensional visual inputs. Modeling this ability has been a longstanding goal for the science and engineering of visual intelligenc...

arxiv.org

We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position! If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit. Read more about our lab here! www.vislearnlab.org

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science

University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

apol-recruit.ucsd.edu

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

gradient.horse

Draw a horse, watch it run!

gradient.horse

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

This platform is so important! It allows researchers regardless of their university prestige to do research! So important for leveling the playing field for many developmental psychologist scientist from under resourced institutions. Please consider donating - donations will be matched!

Melissa Kline Struhl@mekline.bsky.social · 8mo ago

This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...

This resource has been such a boon to the developmental science community broadly and to my lab specifically. One needn’t look any further than the publications that have come out of the platform to see this (lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/p...). Please consider donating!

Melissa Kline Struhl@mekline.bsky.social · 8mo ago

This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...