🚨 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...

New @sfb1528.bsky.social and @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social publication. We show that mothers are worthy of the pedagogical assumption: they preferentially sample information that fills their child's knowledge gaps and children learn best from maternal sampling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

ManyBabies8: Screen Use 📱 MB8 aims to document early screen use across diverse cultural contexts & examine links to language & socio-emotional development in children under 3. We’re inviting you to join! Interested? 🔗 Fill out our short survey: forms.gle/7ASVadD7LT4j... More: manybabies.org/MB8/

Language learning as ontogenetic adaptation Opinion by Manuel Bohn (@elmanubohn.bsky.social) & Marisa Casillas tinyurl.com/48pdbv5b

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

When something doesn't work properly, can your dog tell if the object is broken or if you just don't know how to use it? I'm pleased to share my group @jhu.edu's first study with pet dogs (!!), now out in @plosone.org Led by Amalia Bastos: Do dog rationally infer the causes of failed actions? 1/4

I always thought preschoolers were too egocentric to do well on communication tasks where they had to talk about novel referents. Old papers reported they'd say stuff like "this one looks like my uncle's hat." @vboyce.bsky.social shows that this is wrong! osf.io/preprints/ps...

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉 rdcu.be/e24jT Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

This study was an amazing collaborative experience. I'm really really grateful to all the wonderful people who contributed and made this happen. It's the closest I have ever come to finding something like a "universal" in human cognition.

Very excited that this paper is out! www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

Great apes may use playful teasing to learn about their social relationships. In a new paper, Erica Cartmill & I propose a bond-testing hypothesis for ape teasing. Out today in Phil Trans Biology: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko