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

NEW PAPER with Bethany Lassetter, @nataliehutchins.bsky.social, & @andreicimpian.bsky.social out now in Cognition! Open access link (free until late August): authors.elsevier.com/a/1nNS02Hx32... Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? 🧵 🧵 🧵 below:

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

🚨 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...

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

New paper in Cognitive Psychology on how people combine visual 👀, auditory 👂, and haptic information 🖐️ to make causal judgments. Led by Elyse Chase (www.elysechase.com), with Kevin Smith, and Sean Follmer. 📜 authors.elsevier.com/a/1nHnI2Hxok...

1/16 Do other species understand death? In this study with cockatoos, we approach this question from its foundation, by studying one of its central components: sensitivity to the permanent loss of a function. I will explain it in this thread (with videos) (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.

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

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hi everyone! My paper on cognitive representations of relationships and their developmental origins is finally out! I had a blast responding to the commentary and was honored to be able to engage with people who laid the foundation for my research program. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Building on our Nature Comms framework, we show that feedback shapes risk preferences across the lifespan—not always improving decisions, but sometimes inducing age-specific biases, including gambler’s fallacy in adults. osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵

1/ Relational ability — the ability to compare situations and discover common relations — is key to our capacity for higher-order cognition. But when and how does this ability emerge? Our new paper in Cognition tackles this question.

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. 🧵

A now annual Mother's Day tradition: celebrating this image and the poignant words of @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social about the complexity of identity and culture — and to the experience of motherhood. Thank you for it, Rebecca. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

is anyone going to cogsci this summer and would be up for proposing some kind of 🏳️‍🌈queer affinity group meetup🏳️‍🌈?

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...

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New preprint: "Social-information seeking in development: The child as experimental psychologist" (w/ Azzurra Ruggeri). osf.io/preprints/ps... We review literature on how children use their information-seeking and hypothesis-testing skills to learn about other agents, & ask whether...

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Introducing Datapages, a new project from Mika Braginsky and me. Datapages are open-source templates for creating interactive websites that make research datasets easy to find, explore, and reuse. No coding required for the basic setup. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/data...

Social structure as a form of collective intelligence In our framework, we argue that social structure is a form of collective intelligence shaped by and shaping individual decision-making Out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org w/ J Brooker, E van Leeuwen royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

I am excited to share my first publication in Behavior Research Methods! 🚀 We’ve released ChildLens: 109 hours of open-access, annotated egocentric video/audio from children (ages 3–5). Paper: rdcu.be/fdfAI

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...

nice 'journal club' piece from @rtompkins.bsky.social in this month's Nature Reviews Psych, on one of my fave social cognition findings (and not just because i'm married to the person who came up with it)

Please share! The Rijeka Cognitive Sciences Symposium 2026 is open for registrations and talk/poster submissions by Masters and PhD students! 13 and 14 July - This year's topic is Social Cognition The event is free!

in 2017, we were painting protest signs in the department hallway because the orbán government was kicking our university out of the country. so many lives made so much worse under this illiberal regime. finally, finally, finally it's done. 🇭🇺❤️‍🔥

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

What a beautiful moment.

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

a female family member led birth assistance and that after delivery, all individuals oriented toward and helped lift the newborn, taking turns in a coordinated, cross-kin effort. Despite historically observed foraging segregation, kinship barriers dissolved as all unit members contributed”

How do people search for information to make efficient decisions? Our new theory, now out in Psychological Review, suggests that an efficient search rule is (at the core of) the answer. And eye-tracking data support our theory. Check out here (it's open access): psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

New paper with Ben Morris and Alex Shaw out last week in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We find that children are sensitive to who has better evidence when evaluating how people behave in disagreements. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/3

Far too long in the making.. but finally out in #AnimalBehaviour @asab.org: Orang-utans and chimpanzees #cooperate strategically based on the partner’s incentives. doi.org/10.1016/j.an... w/ @elisafelsche.bsky.social , Josep Call & @federicorossano.bsky.social

Not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow: Children are more open to possibility in the future than the past 
🚨Work by Umang Khan & Christina Starmans

New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...

Well, in more pleasant news, the Fish Doorbell is back... 🧪

New article out exploring great ape name recognition! We find partial evidence that zoo-living chimps & bonobos know each other's names 👀 Huge thanks to Animal Behavior and Cognition (a great open-access journal) & co-authors for your collaboration!🎉🐵 unsvr1.com/web/abc/work...