Cool finding on 'parentese' from Gaye Soley's lab: when a parent speaks to each of their two children, the sound/style of their voice indicates whether they're speaking to the younger or older one (and other kids can tell!)

Preschoolers Infer Listeners from Age-Related Variation in Maternal Child-Directed Speech

Child-directed speech (CDS) varies systematically with the recipient child’s age. The present study examined whether children aged 3–6 years are sensitive to this within-register variation and use ...

tandfonline.com

new preprint: "The Humorous Hill: A U-shaped Relationship Between Humor and Quality" (by Bhattacharya, Hu, and me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

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

How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

David R. Samson's The Sleepless Ape is now available worldwide! Discover how the unique sleep habits of early humans fostered survival, innovation, & social evolution—& how this evolutionary legacy holds insights into how we sleep today. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning last week. I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...

What will be left for us to work on?

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

cs.princeton.edu

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

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 Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Curiosity shapes brain-like architectures and functions

How does complex cognition emerge from simpler underlying processes? We show that two components are sufficient: infant-like curiosity and brain-like biophysical constraints jointly drive the emergenc...

biorxiv.org

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

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

tinyurl.com

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

ICYMI: The Social Science of Caregiving in Dædalus @alisongopnik.bsky.social , leader of CASBS's project of the same name, edited the issue w/ @mlevi.bsky.social & Zachary Ugolnik 16 essays rethink philosophical, psychological, political & economic foundations of care OPEN ACCESS bit.ly/3Qm49ha

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!

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

🚨 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

New review, forthcoming in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology: "From Seconds to Seasons and Days to Decades: Timescales in Development." Let me walk you through some key points. 👇 BC its a review, these are based on many others' work. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/

I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

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/...

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

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

Here is the specific link to our paper with Eunice Yiu, Shiry Ginosar and Kelsey Allen, how to construct causal models through intrinsically motivated action, something kids do and LLMs don't. The whole issue on world models is very much worth reading. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

Empowerment gain and causal model construction: children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventions

Abstract. Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have

royalsocietypublishing.org

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

Yay for publishing null results! We didn't find an effect of *character* gender on kids' expectations or evaluations of empathy, but we did find one effect of participant gender: girls valued empathy more than boys in character evaluations. Maybe a clue about about the origins of later stereotypes?

Alexis Smith-Flores@asmithflores.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🎉 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...

🎉 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

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...

Fun new collab coming out in TICS (w/ Haley Weaver & Sudha Arunachalam) digging into the assumptions underlying the use of eye-gaze methods to study vocabulary development. Working on this paper really got us thinking - we hope it does the same for our readers! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking forward: eye-gaze methods in vocabulary development research

Human multimodal processing abilities have provided researchers with an invaluable set of methods for interrogating language understanding. Even young…

sciencedirect.com

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

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