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

If a student reads a typical psychology paper, picks an experiment, and tries to replicate it, they have roughly a coin-flip chance of success. That's the punchline of a decade of metascience, and it's the focus of Ch 3 of Experimentology. 🧵 experimentology.io

Brilliant! In part b/c it holds up happiness as an illustration of what’s what 😉. But more seriously: IF YOUR SO CALLED THEORY DOESN‘T MAKE TESTABLE PREDICTIONS IT’S A FRAMEWORK. #TheoriesAreTheGoal Excellent example of an influential framework-not-a-theory here: experimentology.io/002-theories...

Love this. This also explains why, during graduate school, I struggled to wrap my head around the "theory" part of dynamic systems theory. I feel a similar way about developmental cascades* *I'm a huge fan of both frameworks btw!

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

This is the definition I use when I work with teams too!

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990

So excited about Jane's new work with our BabyView data!

In our latest paper on how multimodal interaction supports language acquisition, Zhang, Dong et al use head mounted eyetracking technology to demonstrate (!) the role of demonstratives (this/that) in helping children identify the correct referent in a complex visual scene osf.io/preprints/ps...

We recently taught a methods course supported by Experimentology + various primary readings. Experimentology was a truly fantastic resource! psych-methods.netlify.app

Many of us were taught experiments are for testing hypotheses. In Ch 1 of Experimentology, our free, open methods textbook, my coauthors and I argue differently: experiments are for estimating the magnitude of causal effects. This reframing has important consequences. 🧵 experimentology.io

How we use computer adaptive testing to help with cross-cultural adaptation in LEVANTE - new blogpost! levante-network.org/when-your-ru...

Out today in @science.org: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @lingfeiwu.bsky.social, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

Oldie but goodie from @mcxfrank.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's increasingly clear to me that scholarly publications need AI disclosure statements! Here's a very thoughtful proposal about how this should be done, based on CRediT: crln.acrl.org/index.php/cr... @ocul-libraries.bsky.social

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

Salad dressings are perhaps the foods that have the most vivid names relative to the information they give about taste. Thousand island, ranch, green goddess… they sound so much more interesting than they are!

Introducing Dr. Mercedes Muñoz! It has been such a privilege to work with you over the past five years. I am so incredibly proud of everything you’ve achieved and the scholar you’ve become. You’re going to be a phenomenal professor. Congratulations! ⭐️

Just found this impressive multi-site study on race and social judgment in childhood: really nice work by Mercedes Muñoz and an all-star collaborator team online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

Fun new collab coming out in TICS (w/ Haley Weaver & Sudha Arunachalam) digging into the assumptions underlying the use of eye-gaze methods to study vocabulary development. Working on this paper really got us thinking - we hope it does the same for our readers! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This was one of the most enjoyable collabs I've had. Grateful for any and all feedback.

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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...

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...

Yay Bobby!! Congratulations!!!

Nice “centrist” take on the pros and cons of using AI as a research tool. Gotta keep a careful eye on all those caveats though. (And some day I’ll write up the story of how an academic essay I wrote two years ago, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social reviewed, was spiked for not being pro-AI enough)

I think “centrist” is a good description of what I was going for!

nice post from @mcxfrank.bsky.social; i'm 100% on board w/thinking=writing, keep it human. my key worry is those using AI *without* sufficient knowledge to know when output is wrong/how to tell (esp. trainees). Things that are obviously 6-fingered people to an expert look just fine to a novice.

Just wrote a new blogpost trying to summarize my thoughts on the question of how and whether to use AI for research in psychology and cognitive science: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/usin...

Nice one, Mike! I very much agree, and I think you are at least partially tapping into the process/product distinction that I made here. As always, it all depends. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

Just wrote a new blogpost trying to summarize my thoughts on the question of how and whether to use AI for research in psychology and cognitive science: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/usin...

I think we finally made really significant progress on the biggest unsolved "developmental AI" problem: learning from human-scale data. Key idea: zero-shot world models that support concept extraction via approximate causal inference. amazing collab w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @khaiaw.bsky.social

So excited about this work using our data of children’s first-person experiences to train efficient, flexible visual learning models!

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

Nevermind this one's better

Reminder! The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) hosts summaries of what we know vs don't about a host of fascinating issues. All freely available. What a terrific alternative to doomscrolling: learning about (e.g.) The Mind-Body problem, Delusion, or Free Will. oecs.mit.edu

The SLL will be at #CDS2026 this week! Catch some of our talks and posters below!

Come join us! We have two research coordinator positions open with the Stanford IRISS predoctoral program, a program designed to mentor students for graduate study: LEVANTE: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p... BabyView: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p... (deadline 5/1)

Super thrilled that my article "Prosody" is now available to read in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science! oecs.mit.edu/pub/1w4cqquc... Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for the opportunity and for creating such an amazing resource for our community!

New paper! Had lots of fun writing this with @lauriebayet.bsky.social There is so much more to say about extrinsic and intrinsic experiences which shape infants' face perception and learning, hopefully this keeps & starts conversations about a topic we love! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

In which we discuss... - reference and the symbol grounding problem - LargeLMs vs BabyLMs - jabberwocky and pattern matching - the Platonic representations hypothesis - Quine's topiary - poverty of the stimulus arguments - the data efficiency gap between LLMs and human children - etc.!

As LLMs acquire language, they also develop an understanding of space, math, causality, and more. What does this tell us about where our own abilities come from? Just one of the topics discussed in our latest episode, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @glupyan.bsky.social! Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...

What a fun conversation! @mcxfrank.bsky.social @kensycoop.bsky.social !

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation w/ @glupyan.bsky.social & @mcxfrank.bsky.social. Questions swirl about what AI will mean for work, education, and society. But cognitive scientists can't help but also wonder: What will AI mean for our understanding of the mind? Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...

Loved working on this paper with Kat (lead) and Hyo!

Officially out TODAY in Child Development! It's good to try challenging tasks and explore on your own, but not when it might be too hard and help isn't available. Children get that. w/ Kat Shannon, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Willem Frankenhuis, @mcxfrank.bsky.social academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

After about 5 years (!) of keeping secrets, I am so excited that Disney Pixar's Hoppers is finally coming out on March 6th! Back in 2021, Pixar emailed me asking if I could give a talk about my research to their employees. Then another talk. And another. 📸 Disney/Jesse Grant/Getty Images