📖Continuing with my "What am I reading series": I've just finished reading Prof Celia Heyes' (celiaheyes.bsky.social) book, Cognitive Gadgets, for the second time, and boy what a damn good book it is. The central thesis is that cognitive gadgets—that is, distinctively human cognitive mechanisms

Celia Heyes (@celiaheyes.bsky.social)

Theoretical psychologist studying the evolution of human cognition. All Souls College, University of Oxford https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/

celiaheyes.bsky.social

I like Sam but I absolutely disagree with this Absolutely post your papers, especially especially if you're a junior professor, people don't really know you or your work, you're a member of a marginalized group whose work can get overlooked. At the very least, I want to see what you've done!

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 8mo ago

🚨BREAKING 🚨 if you tweet your new paper in red-alert emojis, and the paper has not actually cured cancer, then you should reevaluate your perceived self-importance

I'm half tempted to respond to these requests by agreeing but then giving them a book review worth $1.56/hr

Michelle Greene@mgreenephd.bsky.social · last wk.

Got an absurd book review request: 16 chapters, 121k words, 15-day turnaround. For $25 in book credits from the publisher. Seriously? It would take 8 hours for a first read. Whole review, if carefully considered, twice that. Sorry, my time is worth more than $1.56/hr.

Those who've recently submitted to Developmental Science, is this the new format for reviewer comments?

🚨 Officially out at Child Development! A few years ago in Science, Ashley Thomas (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and colleagues argued that saliva could be a cue infants use to infer the strength of social relationships. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

An associative learning account of how saliva becomes a cue for comfort

Abstract. A recent study by Thomas et al. (2022) showed that 8.5- to 10-month-olds use saliva sharing as an indicator of relationship closeness: infants ex

academic.oup.com

I *love* reading outside my area & so thought I might periodically share what I'm reading. On today's menu: Mayor, J., & Plunkett, K. (2010). A neurocomputational account of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning. Psychological Review, 117(1), 1–31. doi.org/10.1037/a001...

official ad to follow soon but heads up: 1-2 postdocs slots in my lab, hopefully w/fall start! reposts welcome, details to follow. babies! word learning! cognitive & linguistic skills! #CogSciSky #DevPsychSky 🐦🐦 (lab info: bergelsonlab.fas.harvard.edu/prospectives) also recruiting grads this fall!

Damn vandalism

Lisa Fazio@lkfazio.bsky.social · last mo.

Did I walk 30 minutes in the DC heat just to see and laugh at the reflecting pool? Yes, and it was worth every second!!

always fun to chat with my dear friend!

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New ep! 🚨 Deon chatted with Dr. Ryan Lei (ryanlei.bsky.social) about his academic journey, his work on intersectionality & intersectional invisibility, & SLACs. Plus, we discuss how race impacts kid's gender categorizations. And of course, plenty of mechanism talk! itsinnate.fireside.fm/41

Interested in SLACs? The difference between them & R1s? Intersectionality prototype development? Then you're in for a treat! Tomorrow we get to chat with the inimitable Dr. Ryan Lei (ryanlei.bsky.social) about these very things! Jenny is away, so Deon will be flying solo for this one. Stay tuned!

If this site ever goes down, you can now find us on Facebook! www.facebook.com/profile.php?...

fun fun in the (summer) sun!

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New ep! 🚨 We chatted with Dr. Shari Liu (shariliu.bsky.social) about her recent Nature Reviews Psychology paper. How do infants make sense of other people's minds? According to Shari, part of the answer lies in understanding the physical world. itsinnate.fireside.fm/40

Paper acceptances are the best kind of acceptances. Can't wait to share my new paper in Child Development, "An Associative Learning Account of How Saliva Becomes a Cue for Comfort." I was fortunate to co-first-author this work with my brilliant colleague, Dr. Justine Hoch.

Newborns' preference for faces is learned rather than based on a innate face-like template academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

What can face preference in newborns tell us about their face representation? Contrasting learned familiarity with inherent bias accounts

Abstract. Possible mechanisms behind newborn face preferences are debated, including innate templates, top-heavy bias, focus on eyes, and rapid learning ex

academic.oup.com

We are SO excited to chat with Dr. Shari Liu (@shariliu.bsky.social) about her scientific journey and, most importantly, about her recent Nature Reviews paper entitled "How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world"!

I just love folks who tell long-winded stories and take two weeks to get to the punch line.

managed to cut 40 pages. Almost there!

Deon T. Benton@deontbenton.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Just finished writing my disserta — I mean a theory/modeling paper I've been working on for the last couple of months. 121 pages (excluding refs). Time to cut cut cut

was fun to wax poetic about the virtues of "small" models, among other things

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

NEW EPISODE 🚨 Part II is here! Jenny & Deon continue their discussion of Bayesian models and number cognition, including how Lee and Sarnecka used the same Bayesian model to test two competing theories of how children acquire number knowledge. itsinnate.fireside.fm/39

Love this. This also explains why, during graduate school, I struggled to wrap my head around the "theory" part of dynamic systems theory. I feel a similar way about developmental cascades* *I'm a huge fan of both frameworks btw!

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

Love this pod, and I especially love when they have Dan on!

Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast) @epthepod.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This week, we talk to @dconroybeam.bsky.social about sex and gender. youtu.be/MwB7cemCfgM podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-xiemw...

Just finished writing my disserta — I mean a theory/modeling paper I've been working on for the last couple of months. 121 pages (excluding refs). Time to cut cut cut

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

Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos ...

arxiv.org

I'm a whole assistant professor and I've *just now* discovered that you don't have to eyeball the cells of a created table to make them the same size in Word. Distribute Columns is my new friend

🎉🥳

Viridiana L. Benitez@viribeni.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This week I was promoted to Associate professor with tenure! I have many feelings and many things to say but I’ll only say two here: I am grateful for my mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family who have supported me along the way. Only 2.4% of Associate professors are Latina women.

🔥

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New ep! 🚨 In Part I of this 2-part episode, Jenny & Deon discuss connectionist modeling, developmental change, developmental tasks, one-hot vs. distributed representations, the give-N task, Bayesian models, Marr’s levels, & more. Stay tuned for Part II! itsinnate.fireside.fm/38

Some might call it the Fly-end Effect

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I think we’re entering a period of what you might call “cognitive obesity,” akin to what the development of processed food and car culture systematically did to our bodies at the population level. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

what will be especially fun about this one is that it'll combine Jenny's expertise (on all things number development) with my own (on connectionist modeling).

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The fun continues! In an upcoming episode, Jenny and Deon discuss connectionist modeling, then dive into Lee & Sarnecka (2010), their Bayesian model of the give-N task, and what a more mechanistically-oriented (in Marr's algorithm sense) connectionist version might look like

lang dev researchers in my bsky -- yesterday on the NYT's podcast The Daily, an AI-powered device was described as popularly available in China that allows parents to wear a "translation mask" to teach their young children English at home. Is. this. real?? I need to know more! 🤪

This was an especially fun one, not least because we got to discuss one of my all-time favorite dev psych papers with none other than the first-author herself!

The It's Innate! Podcast@theitsinnatepc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New ep! 🚨 We chatted with our editor Jenna's PI, Dr. Katie Graf Estes, about her academic journey, mentorship, and dealing with failure. We also discuss her Psych Science paper, "Can Infants Map Meaning to Newly Segmented Words?: Statistical Segmentation and Word Learning." itsinnate.fireside.fm/37