A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/ www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

📣 #CogSci2026 submissions now OPEN! 🔍 Review the submission guidelines ⬇️ Download the required templates 📅 Make note of key deadline dates cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/

some parents, esp white parents, fail to answer their children's questions about race or provide colorblind messages ("race is not important"). but are these effective? 🗣️ we find they aren't! structural explanations seem to be more constructive (1/5) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse. 👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Are you a US-based PhD student WITHOUT summer funding who is interested in adolescent development, trans youth, and/or gender? Reach out to me about applying to join my lab in Summer 2026 for the VIPS program! psych.princeton.edu/diversity/vi...

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

Shopping for a hot take on nativism? Here's an argument that "strong nativist" accounts of concepts (here, numerical concepts) often fail to explain ontogenesis because they lack an account of "rational causation" - i.e., how innate contents are brought to bear in experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

New article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.

Excited to announce DID lab's first paper! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... We find that children as young as 6 show political ingroup preference! First paper of very talented @annie-schw.bsky.social! In JEP: General's special issue on political development (1/3)

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

New work! Kristin Shutts and I review how help can in some cases backfire and lead to detriments in children’s self-views, views of others, and motivation, especially when help is distributed unequally. Check it out here (open access!): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Excited to share a new paper in Current Directions on the theme of merging in close relationships, with @emmamcgorray.bsky.social, @erinhughes.bsky.social , and @abdoe.bsky.social! In the paper, we discuss merging in the domains of selves, goals, processing, and reality. tinyurl.com/ynbedzys (1/4)

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

A new piece - well, almost a whole book! - by our team, reflecting more than a decade of work.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

⭐ Out now in Developmental Science ⭐ "Sounds of Hidden Agents: The development of causal reasoning about musical sounds" (by Minju Kim and me) causal reasoning, music/auditory cognition, event reconstruction, kids' integration of information... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

I'm hiring a full-time #labmanager for my new Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at UCSB! The start date is flexible, but could be as early as August 1, 2025. Application review begins July 17th and will continue until the position is filled 👶🪴 recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02992 #academicjobs

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Excited that this paper is finally out (in collaboration with @zoeliberman.bsky.social @saraburke.bsky.social & Brenda Major) in PSPB! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper with past honors student Vanessa Chao and @zoeliberman.bsky.social in press at JECP: “Children can consider social relationships when evaluating liars” By the early elementary school years, people judge it as worse and meaner for a friend (vs. classmate) to lie. doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

1. New paper first-authored by former post-doc Young-eun Lee (currently at MIT with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social) now in press at JECP! More info in thread below, full text here: columbiasamclab.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/.... 🧪 #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #CogPsyc @socphilpsych.bsky.social

New paper from Laura Lewis and Jan Engelmann et al. (including me) with a clever new method. Chimps and kids will forgo reward to get a chance to look at social interactions royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

🥳🥳 New paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com: “When development constricts our moral circle." Contrary to popular belief, younger kids may start out with broader moral circles than older ones. Check it out here 👉 rdcu.be/eoaSe w/ @mattiwilks.bsky.social @karrineldner.bsky.social & Lucius Caviola

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research. NSF Astronomy was cut by 53% Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79% Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO. #GiftLink ⚛️🔭 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

bit of good news: approved technical staff position! link below. please be in touch if this matches your skills & interests! drive.google.com/file/d/16J2J... (hr listing posted harvard-internal now; external soon, per guidelines), happy for ?s & plan on quick turnaround! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

New preprint! Despite ongoing efforts to combat gender bias in education, our work reveals a striking and under-explored challenge: By the time children enter elementary school, children already expect adults to hold gender stereotypes and approve when adults act on them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

#SRCD25, I and my lab are here! Come see @rtompkins.bsky.social on social reasoning from sleep arrangements-Th 10-11:20am talk 3, room 200B; R Santiago on how children use objects’ placements to learn about people-Fri 10:50 Poster 90; & K Han on the origins of dance in infancy-Sat 10:30, Poster 52!

I'm sad to miss #SRCD2025 but @rtompkins.bsky.social is there and one of his presentations is on work we've been doing together: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ever wonder what children think about caregivers who stop kids from doing dangerous things? Go to his talk (Thurs 11:50 am session) to find out!

Check out our symposium on *parents' lay theories of cognitive development* at #SRCD2025! Ft. work by @reutshachnai.bsky.social, @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social, @dominicgibson.bsky.social, and yours truly, discussed by @andrewshtulman.bsky.social !

Come check out our symposium at #SRCD2025: "Navigating social groups and relationships"! There'll be talks by Sarah Ramsey, Rongzhi Liu, @rtompkins.bsky.social, and me. Thursday at 10 am.

Come check out the UChicago Social Kids Lab (PIs Katherine Kinzler and Alex Shaw) at #SRCD2025. My labmates have lots of exciting projects I can't wait to watch them present.

How do adopted and donor-conceicved kids reason about nature vs. nurture? They hold *reduced* genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived kids, according to our new paper (in press at Dev Psych)! I’m really proud of this one. A🧵… osf.io/preprints/ps...

New Peekbank preprint! A snapshot of what we've learned so far about developmental change in word recognition using the large-scale repository of infant eyetracking data we've been building (~ 2000 infants; ~3500 individual test sessions)

Do kids prefer to play with helpers? Our paper on children's trait attribution and partner choice is out! doi.org/10.1111/cdev... We wanted to know if kids, after observing other agents' behaviors, spontaneously (!) interpret them in terms of traits and choose cooperation partners accordingly. 🧵...

I am delighted to announce my student Beyza Cifti's first publication, with me and Gergely Csibra, out today in Royal Society Open Science! (1/6) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSci #DevPsych

The last chapter of my dissertation is out now in Child Development! 🎉 OA: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/KEAHK8...

Interested in children's developing understanding of linguistic register? Check out a new paper-- led by past undergraduate lab member, Ishaan Ambrish (currently working with Ariel Starr at UW) and grad student @shreyasodhi.bsky.social