New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize: Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP

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

Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future 📣 Work by Esra N. Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe

You can access the paper from our website as well www.bu.edu/cdl/files/20...

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

Come check out work from my lab at @socphilpsych.bsky.social SPP 2025!

Hey, people who have kids, can you please share some info about staying in academia (job search mode) + being a mom? Thanks!

Check out my personal website: www.esraturankucuk.com/about

Paper w/ Gergely Csibra now out in Psych Review! Work in CogDev often assumes that infant object representations are perceptual/spatial in origin. There is a ton of beautiful work showing that this is not always the case — e.g. they represent objects that they are only told about (1/4) (links below)

If you/ your students are interviewing for PhD psych programs in US (especially social psych), check out the resource page on my website. There are guides prepped by grad students + questions to ask faculty etc. Good luck! www.pbandjlab.com/resources

You might think that having just one word for "yesterday" and "tomorrow" would make learning harder, but we find the opposite - that children learning the Hindi word "kal" understand its use to refer to past & future events earlier than English-speaking kids understand "yesterday" and "tomorrow".

SPP 2025 will be at Cornell, June 18-21!

Boston University Philosophy Dept welcomes applications for Findlay Visiting Professorship (Assoc or Full) for a semester or year beginning Fall 2025 or Spring 2026. AOS Open. Applicant will be expected to offer 1 course & give 1 public lecture. Deadline April 7, 2025 #philsci #philsky

📣🚨From Esra Nur Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe: Three- and four-year-old children represent mutually exclusive possible identities

The official version is now online! You can access it here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... or on our website: www.bu.edu/cdl/developi... #devpsych #psychscisky #cogpsych #cogdev

New work from my lab, lead by superstar @esranur.bsky.social!! 🌟

Example #23,498 of developmental work being adorable & touching: When kids weren't sure who was going to eat snack, they prepped the favorite foods of both possible agents, b/c kids are amazing. Lovely work by @esranur.bsky.social & @levelsof.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps... #DevPsyc

🎉Our paper "Three- and Four-Year-Old Children Represent Mutually Exclusive Possible Identities" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology! You can read the preprint here: osf.io/rx4h9 (1/5)

Do infants represent collision events that violate Newtonian constraints on elastic collisions as causal? I tested this in my new paper with Susan Carey, "Infants' representation of Michottean triggering events", out today. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky #CogSci

Hey everyone! I'm excited to share that I'll be giving a talk on young children's ability to reason about multiple, mutually exclusive object identities at #SPP2024! Come check out our new work with @levelsof.bsky.social! 🗓️ Saturday, June 22 🕒 3:30 PM 📍 North Ballroom, Session 6A

We have filled two positions but one is still open. Please apply to the position ending in 305– it’s a silly HR thing. Feel free to email me directly for more info.

Interested in young children’s understanding of possibility and how they represent the actions (minds) of others’ in tasks involving mutually exclusive possibilities? Meet me at Poster P1-137, end of the room, during Poster Session 1 at 1:15. See you there! #CDS2024

Looking forward to #CDS2024! Come check out our symposium: “Reasoning about social distance and affiliation across human development”. Presenters include Caroline Cha and @hghwang.bsky.social, @lindseypowell.bsky.social, Aaron Chuey, and me. Friday at 4:15 pm.

Please come see @esranur.bsky.social 's poster at CDS! She is presenting on some very cool work examining children's understanding of others' actions on multiple possibilities. [Very annoyed that her name got left off of the program!]

Excited to share that I'm presenting at #CDS2024! 🌟 Though there's been an oversight with my name in the program, my enthusiasm is undiminished. Eager to share our work with @levelsof.bsky.social titled “Young children’s understanding of others’ actions on mutually exclusive possibilities.”

Come check out the Boston University Developing Minds Lab at the 2024 Cognitive Development Society Meeting!

New paper out in Cognition! Here, Liz Spelke, Gabe Chisholm, and I tackle debates concerning infants' and toddlers' understanding of others' minds. We find evidence for a limit to early mental state reasoning. authors.elsevier.com/a/1iif32Hx2x...

Very excited to be at CDS with my lab! Come check out our work!! @brandonmwoo.bsky.social @ashleycleung.bsky.social and blueskyless others!

Working on this together with @levelsof.bsky.social has been an absolutely fun adventure! Hope you have as much fun reading this as we had writing it!

Today I am presenting our work on young children’s ability to plan for mutually exclusive possible events in the present and future at #BCCCD24! Come and check our new work with @levelsof.bsky.social! Time: 14:30 - 16:30 CET, Poster Number: 02.

Incredibly proud of the rigorous work and thought that @esranur.bsky.social put into this project. Check out the PDF directly here www.bu.edu/cdl/files/20...

We suggest that a primary limiting factor on children's planning for possibilities may not be their ability to represent the space of possibilities for the outcome of a future event, but instead their ability to represent the space of possible future ACTIONS that could be taken on those outcomes.

We know younger children struggle with action planning, yet many tasks designed to assess conceptual competence with possibility make demands on planning. We find that showing children the set of possible actions that can be taken to prepare for uncertain outcomes helps them take optimal actions

New pub now out in Cognition! @esranur.bsky.social and I find that younger children's competence with reasoning about multiple, mutually exclusive possibilities is masked by limitations on their ability to make and deploy plans to cover those possibilities. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📣 Thrilled to share my first first-author publication in Cognition: “Three-year-olds' ability to plan for mutually exclusive future possibilities is limited primarily by their representations of possible plans, not possible events” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

2024 will be the 30th anniversary of Mapping the Mind, a collection of groundbreaking theoretical essays that have shaped cog dev science. @debkelemen.bsky.social and I are SO excited that this STAR STUDDED pre-conf is a go! Come hear where they all stand on their theories now, + lively discussion.

Still stunned that @levelsof.bsky.social and I got this "band" back together for a CDS preconf. CDS registration opens soon so register quick while seats last! 🙏🙏to Susan Gelman, Larry Hirschfeld, Scott Atran, Susan Carey, Alison Gopnik, Paul Harris, Frank Keil, Alan Leslie, Liz Spelke Henry Wellman

Top 10 reasons you should apply to the PhD program in Developmental Science at Boston University, in no particular order: #psychscisky #devsci #cogdev #philsky

This cycle, Deb Kelemen and I have openings for new PhD students! I am particularly recruiting students who are interested in early object and numerical representations, topics related to language of thought in infancy and early childhood, and the early cognitive bases of anti-fat bias.

3 tenure-track positions @UCDavisPsych (deadline Oct.1): 1) Assistant Professor in Computational Cognitive (Neuro)science (recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF05981) 2) Assistant Professor in Quantitative Psychology (recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF05942) 3) Assistant Teaching Professor (recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF05980)

Apply for a Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS+) Networking Award for Junior Scientists! Women grad students/postdocs/assistant profs submit a networking plan for #psynom23 and winners receive up to $1,000 to cover travel to Psychonomics. Deadline is Oct 6th #PsychSciSky www.womenincogsci.org/awards

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) invites applications for a full-time, tenure track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in learning and education. apply.interfolio.com/131655 Please share!

New paper! Do we represent remembered locations in vision and in action using the same coordinate system(s)? In work with Alex Forrence and @actlab.bsky.social, we say yes: there may be a common format for location representations across modalities. tinyurl.com/4e87u3ax

I’m hoping to recruit a PhD student to start fall 2024! Learn more here, along with general resources for folks applying to PhD programs in psychology: crib.psych.ucsb.edu/join-the-team Please reach out if you have any questions!

We are hiring!! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25521 TT assistant prof in the developmental science area, focus on ethnic and/or cultural influences on child development and/or the impact of structural racism on child development (broadly construed!) #devpsyc #psychscisky #neuroskyence

Let's try this for a second time! Please Reskeet. 📢I'm recruiting to take on a PhD student for Fall 2024!  I'm particularly interested in students wanting to study causal reasoning or social evaluation and the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to both. Students looking to (1/3)

I'm taking graduate students for the Fall 2024 year! Please check out this page if you are interested in applying: projects.iq.harvard.edu/ccdlab/prosp...