I am delighted to share my new paper with coauthors @mh-christiansen.bsky.social, @erin-isbilen.bsky.social, and Dan Rubenstein. We argue that multimodality safeguards signal honesty by forming a multimodal gestalt that increases complexity and facilitates social costs on dishonesty.

📣 Another BBS paper from the CSL Lab! This paper w/alumni @dr-severinehex.bsky.social and @erin-isbilen.bsky.social + Daniel Rubenstein and @mh-christiansen.bsky.social argues that multimodality is key to safeguarding honesty in communication in humans and other animals 👉 doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Huge congrats, Dr. Hex!

Congratulations to Dr. @sere-yu-wang.bsky.social for defending her PhD dissertation with flying colors! 👏

Curious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., “statistical learning”) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide 🌎 💬 🌍 💬 🌏 💬: 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025

Happy to contribute an article on #LanguageEvolution to the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science @oecs-bot.bsky.social Everything you ever wanted to know about language evolution in ~1K words—well just scratching the surface 😉 dig into the references for more info oecs.mit.edu/pub/18miikqb...

Now "The development of turn-taking skills" is officially out in Cognitive Science: dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70082 (and preprint still here: osf.io/preprints/ps...). See the thread below for a quicker insight on the findings!

🏆 Each year, outstanding early-career researchers are honored with the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Award in Cognitive Science. Meet some of this year’s winners and learn about their work! #CogSci2025 #GlushkoPrize cognitivesciencesociety.org/2025-glushko...

Thanks to Evan Kidd, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social (Eds) for organizing the awesome *Open* Encyc. of Cog. Sci. and entrusting me with/ the honor of penning the entry on "Language" (in < 3500 words, so do see other entries for much, MUCH more!) oecs.mit.edu/pub/ho9e9c80...

What is human #StatisticalLearning for? The standard assumption is that the goal of SL is to learn the regularities in the environment to guide behavior. In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that SL instead is provides the basis for novelty detection within an information foraging system 1/2

Interested in a new natural language statistical learning task? Our paper in JEP: LMC w/ Abby Laver Noam Siegelman @jimmagnuson.bsky.social & Dick Aslin presents a modified word search game that manipulates the statistical properties of words. Performance predicts key reading-related skills!

How strong is the relationship between caregiver speech and language development? A meta-analysis (Coffey & Snedeker) - important attempt to try and estimate input-uptake relationships across studies www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

How does multimodal communication in non-human animals change under environmental stress? Our new paper with Severine Hex & Dan Rubenstein shows that communicative flexibility may facilitate survival, using plains zebras as a case study! 🦓 Read more below: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New article on how dogs are using their soundboards at home is finally out! Using a large dataset (250K) of button presses by dogs and owners, we show that dogs’ presses are (i) non-accidental, (ii) non-random, and (iii) not mere repetitions of their owners’ presses. www.nature.com/articles/s41...