as an introvert with severe social anxiety, my deep enjoyment of teaching seems kind of odd...?

Apply to work as an interdisciplinary Beckman Institute postdoc at Illinois. beckman.illinois.edu/opportunitie...

🪧Registration closing in a week!

This is going to be an incredible event celebrating Alan Leslie's amazing career. Speakers include Susan Carey, Lisa Feigenson, Randy Gallistel, Ori Friedman, Zsuzsa Káldy, Ágnes Kovács, Sydney Levine, Sandeep Prasada, Brian Scholl, Luca Surian (and me!) Join in person at Rutgers or livestream

➡️ New webinar on NSF EDU funding Have questions about this new solicitation? Or about other NSF funding for research on STEM learning? Ask and hear from NSF program officers next Thursday. Sept 4, 1:00-2:30 pm ET. Register here: nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/regi...

It's innate! @theitsinnatepc.bsky.social! Especially empiricism 😆

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

lil blogpost ab a cool paper led by the amazing @erinecampbell.bsky.social thnx to NSF. also features a coda ab the very active threat to science funding we’re facing (cc @standupforscience.bsky.social) & a ht to @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social’s good work. thnx @infantstudies.bsky.social!

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

📢 Come join us on Sunday, November 9th for the Rutgers Symposium of Learning with an amazing list of speakers and great company! More details: sites.rutgers.edu/symposium-le...

I once thought that to prove my worth as a reviewer, the only way is to destroy the paper I review. I learned from others how wrong that was. We do not float up by pushing others down - we float up by building the boat together. If we all reject each other for working on the same topic, we all sink!

Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.

excited to be chatting with a fellow CMU'er

We're ecstatic to be talking today with Dr. Vlad Ayzenberg (‪@vayzenb.bsky.social‬) about his recent paper in Science Advances exploring the mechanisms that underpin object recognition in young children and adults. Stay tuned!

Nooooo…. I love Google Scholar

📢 Come join us on Sunday, November 9th for the Rutgers Symposium of Learning with an amazing list of speakers and great company! More details: sites.rutgers.edu/symposium-le...

🚨 New ep! We talk w/ Professor Kiley Hamlin (@jkileyhamlin.bsky.social‬) about her dev sci path, training w/ legends (Woodward, Wynn, Bloom, Santos), & her Nature Comms paper showing 5-day-olds prefer helpers over hinderers. Plus: reconciling ManyBabies & replication woes. itsinnate.fireside.fm/31

Want to know what makes today so special?! We get to chat with the inimitable Professor Kiley Hamlin (@jkileyhamlin.bsky.social‬) about her science journey, her recent paper in Nature Communications showing that sociomoral evaluation may be innate, and more! Stay tuned for the episode!

Out today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Super fun conversation about learning, development, curiosity, and more -- with my youngest (and most precocious) interviewer yet. Check out the Ehsan Adouane STEM Podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO5m...

Cogsci and AI: two different approaches as articulated by Josh Tenenbaum #cogsci2025

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

out now in Open Mind: the expanded Natural History of Song Discography, an audio resource with 1007 songs in many languages + their metadata open-access paper: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... open-access audio corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216 from @milabertolo.bsky.social, Marty Snarskis & many others

Today we open-sourced a new project for developing behavioral experiments online. It is called Smile. Announcement of v0.1.0: todd.gureckislab.org/2025/07/22/s... Smile has been used internally in my lab for several years and has substantially increased our productivity.

🚨 New Episode! 🚨 We're thrilled to release another installment of "A conversation with a luminary," featuring *over 2 hours* with Professor Rebecca Saxe. We discuss her early life, science journey, mentorship under Nancy Kanwisher, her Theory of Mind work, & more! So fun! itsinnate.fireside.fm/30

... and we could have kept going!

An inspirational and fun conversation with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social!

In case you missed it, our discussion with Professor Rebecca Saxe (@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social‬) is live! Give it a listen, why don't ya?

The good times keep rolling (at least for the pod)! We're so thrilled to be chatting today with Professor Rebecca Saxe (‪@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social‬) about her scientific journey, remarkable career, and much more. This will be another installment of "A conversation with a luminary". Stay tuned!

Just sent this as an email to my department but figured I'd share more broadly in case it is useful. This describes the procedure happening now for science funding in Congress (@davidimiller.bsky.social can correct me if I got this wrong). Importantly, there are still actions that can be taken.

Reupping this ↓ Oh, and spoiler: we'll be chatting with the inimitable Dr. Kiley Hamlin (@jkileyhamlin.bsky.social‬) on Aug 6 about that new Nature Comms paper showing that 5-day-olds are sensitive to helping & hindering! Could sociomoral evaluation (or its ingredients) really be innate?!

New paper! Here (in Nature Communications) we (Ale Geraci, Luca Surian, Lucia Gabriella Tina, & I; work led/run by Ale) show that 5-day-old newborns selectively attend to two distinct forms of prosocial over antisocial action: approaching versus avoiding and helping versus hindering. rdcu.be/evorW

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks, @deontbenton.bsky.social and @jinjingjenny1.bsky.social for letting me talk about my career and my beloved mentors 🙂

🚨 New Episode! Our recent chat w/ Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy (@zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social ) is up! We chat about her cog sci journey, her work on infant working memory, and a recent paper in which she argues that attention and working memory work in concert to pursue goals. So much fun! itsinnate.fireside.fm/29

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.

Another fun one to record!

The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) now features over 100 published articles! Editors-in-Chief @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social share their vision for this open, online reference developed to guide the next generation of exploration in cognition & intelligence:

Such a cool project - good people doing great work that benefits all of us.

Super fun to do! Thanks @theitsinnatepc.bsky.social

This was such a fun one to record!

Want to join the madness that is the It's Innate! podcast?

This is an especially great fit for someone interested in science communication & public outreach. *Apply by July 15 here*: forms.gle/E4b2Ee6bMFFZ... Please share widely with your networks!

Wondering when the next episode is going to drop? Fair question. We’ve got great convos waiting to be released, & we just need help getting them out! This is why we're looking for a PhD student in developmental cognitive science (or related field) to join our team as an editor!

the psych department at Waikato (in Hamilton, New Zealand) is recruiting at the junior level, in developmental and/or perception/cognition (in NZ 'lecturer' means 'assistant professor', and is a permanent role)

Here’s a video I made to be shared among students, on how to use cognitive psychology to study better. Covers several memory principles, but—although bite-sized enough for TikTok—it’s probably on the long side to share in class. Feel free to share.

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...