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/...

The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience | PNAS

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

pnas.org

Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If you know anyone (18+) that lives in US, and is of Jamaican descent, please share this survey! Thank you. ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #AcademicSky

Don’t let people tell you AI killed the academic essay. We ran a structured essay process in class this year, with successive problem finding, literature search, multiple drafting, and peer review sessions. It worked, and the vibe in class was the best I’ve seen in a long time. Repeat next year.

Esther Mondragón@e-mondragon.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The 'multiversity' ethic and the spirit of Capitalism, AI version. With apologies to M. Weber for a terrible paraphrasing. "When a student can produce a plausible term paper in twenty minutes using Claude Opus or Google Gemini,... 1/n www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiv...

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship

People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...

news.mit.edu

I’m giving a talk on this at #VSS2026: Sun May 17, 8:30am, Talk Room 2 (Object Recognition, 31.22). My first VSS! www.visionsciences.org/talk-session... Thanks to coauthors @tarunsepuri.bsky.social @alvinwmtan.bsky.social, @khaiaw.bsky.social, @mcxfrank.bsky.social, and @brialong.bsky.social!

Category organization: We found stronger within-superordinate clustering in the child’s view than in a curated dataset (THINGS). We also find this pattern in data from individual children. Maybe this provides a way for children to parse the “blooming buzzing confusion” of their visual world!

Content: huge variation in viewpoint & format — including lots of depictions (esp. animals—examples below!!. Children are learning about many categories from these kinds of “child-directed” visuals rather than real-life exemplars.

What did we find? First, we found that a few categories dominate — across all domains! Children see some categories much more often than others, replicating prior work.

We analyzed the objects in view in 868 hours of egocentric videos from the BabyView dataset—from 31 children (5-36 months old). We used an object detection model to extract object categories from >3M frames—pipeline below. And more about the BabyView Project here! babyview-project.github.io

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

How would you categorise these images? What features would you use? Preprint just went live looking at how we make sense of things we’ve never seen before (i.e., drawings just like these!). If that sounds interesting, read on or check out the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

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

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

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

Attending CDS 2026? Consider joining us at the morning pre-conference workshop on intuitive theories of care and protection in development @cogdevsoc.bsky.social

The amazing Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social speaks tomorrow Wed at noon east coast time in the Bisan Lecture Series. Title: What People Learn from Punishment Register here to get the Zoom link!: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi... scientists4palestine.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?...

What People Learn from Punishment - Scientists For Palestine

Wednesday, February 11, 2025, 7 pm Palestine time Prof. Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Title: What People Learn from Punishment Abstract: In human society, punishment can so...

scientists4palestine.us2.list-manage.com

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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.

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories. In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space

Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

academic.oup.com

Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out! New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824

I am gutted to learn of @sfdirewolf.bsky.social (Alice Wong’s) passing. She was always a warm friend, a wonderful spirit, and someone who fostered my own growth. She helped me see that, as a #disabled person with chronic illness, I matter—I am whole. I’ll be posting some of Alice’s work. ❤️ forever

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social