We know children make many inferences about others from their race and gender from early in development. But what about from their age, another highly salient and informative characteristic of people? We explore this question in a new pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Now out in PNAS! 🥳 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language | PNAS

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and...

pnas.org

Hope Kean@hopekean.bsky.social · last yr.

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

"I used an LLM to help me write, but it was just to polish the style and grammar" is something you've probably come across, or done yourself. Many conferences and journals and teachers are ok with this. But does it...? Just focus on the style and grammar...?

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

Conditional inference and access to alternatives: the role of QUD and speaker knowledge in conditional perfection

Abstract. Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under

doi.org

Age is correlated w/ lots of physical properties like size, facial morphology, etc., but it's not identical to them. How do kids come to understand it as a chronological process? @kostaboskovic.bsky.social explores the role of numerical cues in constructing a concept of age.

Kosta Boskovic@kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

For those attending @socphilpsych.bsky.social this week, I will be presenting work which follows up on this paper's findings, asking when children represent age chronologically, in Friday's poster session! Stop by and take a peak at this paper on your travels over :)

Kosta Boskovic@kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

Separating Cognitive Development From Language Development in the Acquisition of Negation Using International Adoption 
📣From Annika McDermott-Hinman, Samuel Zimmerman, Jesse Snedeker & Roman Feiman

Great tool for number researchers!

Khuyen Le@knle.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you study number and want a more standardized and convenient version for Give-N, consider using a digital task! New preprint 🚨 (with Kenyee Liu, Daniel Hyde and @drbarner.bsky.social): a digital Give-N task shows high knower level agreement with a physical version. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper with @mohitmukherji.bsky.social, Mona Lebrun, and @marjorierhodes.bsky.social @JEP:G! Did you ever wonder whether saying things like “boys can wear dresses too” is effective at reducing stereotypical inferences? We find that they’re probably not—check out more here: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Well, would ya look at that! NSF is going to send >10% of its current budget to industry (read: tech start ups) instead of universities…it’s as if the admin is trying to dismantle our basic science mechanism and use it as a start up fund for private companies 💁🏻‍♀️ www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/...

NSF announces $1.5B NSF X-Labs initiative to pursue generational breakthrough science efforts

nsf.gov

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

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

New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending osf.io/ucxra_v1

There was also a chance to celebrate some good news with friends: UCSD decided to give me tenure and let me stick around! Photo credit: @carenwalker.bsky.social, Champagne credit: @adenaschachner.bsky.social

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

The Cognitive Origins Lab is hiring a new lab manager! I can personally vouch that this is a great place to grow and do exciting research--I highly recommend applying if you want to do comparative work!

Stephen Ferrigno@sferrigno.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The Cognitive Origins Lab @uwpsych.bsky.social is hiring! We are looking for a full-time Research Specialist (postbac) to work on non-invasive primate + child cognition research. Full-time, 2 years, starts June 2026. Apply here: wisconsin.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UW_Madison/j...

Fellas, who has the best game in town?

You won’t find a more supportive mentor/supervisor than Martin!

Martin Zettersten@mzettersten.bsky.social · 5mo ago

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...

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

Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inferences

When encountering a novel word, adults and children as young as 12 months old often reason that it refers to a novel object rather than one with an ex…

sciencedirect.com

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

By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Counting without end: A cross-linguistic exploration of infinity beliefs in English and Hindi learners

Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes throu…

sciencedirect.com

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x

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.

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