New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

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...

This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...

A Perspective in Nature Reviews Psychology reviews research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides evidence for the interaction between psychological and physical reasoning systems. 🔒

NEW EPISODE OUT! In this episode, Adani @adani.bsky.social chats with Dr. Susan Engel from Williams College about curiosity, invention, her journey into developmental psychology, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children! 🎧LISTEN NOW: open.spotify.com/episode/06WD...

Cool new work by rising star Kosta Boskovic on children's reasoning about age - super fun paradigm, check it out!!

In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor. osf.io/preprints/ps... People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵

lots of invigorating discussion this year at #BUCLD2025. Unsurprisingly, LLMs as models & as tools made many appearances w/a wide range of views/claims/caveats ab what they can(not) tell us ab language development I'm still chewing on a few things that seemed to get short shrift 1/4 🐦🐦

#BUCLD50 Symposium: “Innateness is not a dirty word: Reframing the origins of language development”, by Shanley Allen, Marisa Casillas, Alejandrina Cristia, Michael C. Frank, Caroline Rowland, Leher Singh, and Paul Bloom! Learn more at: www.bu.edu/bucld/ #Innateness #LLM #LanguageDevelopment

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026! The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io Due Date Dec 1

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology: “A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.” Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @themanybirds.bsky.social

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Seems like a particularly cruel change to make without warning given the stress that reviewers often put on applicants' publication record. Presumably many strong students waited based on this apparent criterion, not because they didn't already have great ideas to propose.

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share: phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I wrote an R package that creates standardized R project structures that are compliant with @mekline.bsky.social's psych-DS...ish. It also creates additional features for reproducibility and teaching like a readme, license, .gitignore and Quarto templates + can validate existing projects

My final project from grad school is out now in Dev Psych! Mombasa County preschoolers were more accurate on object-based than picture-based vocabulary assessments, whereas Bay Area preschoolers were equally accurate on object-based and picture-based assessments. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Job announcement 📢 @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction! Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions! apply.interfolio.com/165809

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

🚨 Calling all dog behavior & cognition researchers - ManyDogs Project is launching ManyDogs 2! 🔍🐕‍🦺We're studying overimitation: Do dogs copy irrelevant actions just b/c their favorite human does them? Email [email protected] to collaborate globally and contribute to reproducible science!

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656 And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Enjoyed this interesting discussion with Rhodri Cusack & co-author team about their foundation model perspective on infant development! Both the letter by @marielgoddu.bsky.social, Ruthe, and I (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... and a thoughtful response from the original authors are now officially out.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Check out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets. With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!

New paper out now asks: Why do we bother remembering *how* we learned something? With @antoniafl.bsky.social, Dilara Keşşafoğlu, Winuss Mohtezebsade, @celestekidd.bsky.social, Aylin Küntay, @janengelmann.bsky.social, and Bahar Köymen dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

New episode!! 📣🎙️ A conversation w/ @renemottus.bsky.social about the science of human personality. The "Big Five" model of human personality has been enormously generative and influential. But what does it miss? What does it mask? Where should the field go next? Listen: disi.org/the-big-five...

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

New lab preprint (presented last Sunday as a VSS talk) from Zekun Sun: "Dissociating low-level visual features from high-level event structure in action segmentation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint w/ @christophvoelter.bsky.social et al. Individual differences in great ape cognition across time and domains: stability, structure, and predictability 48 apes 🦍, 10 tasks 🧠, 10 sessions📊, 1.5 y📅 ✅ Stable individual traits ❌ No g-factor 🤝 Social ≠ non-social 🔗: osf.io/preprints/ps...

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

bit of good news: approved technical staff position! link below. please be in touch if this matches your skills & interests! drive.google.com/file/d/16J2J... (hr listing posted harvard-internal now; external soon, per guidelines), happy for ?s & plan on quick turnaround! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

Our R01 was part of yesterday's "mass termination" at Harvard; 1 of ~1000 NIH grants in Trump's "fight". The irony of how many Jewish (& non-Jewish) researchers/scientists/physicians/patients/students will be harmed in the name of "fighting antisemitism" is sickening.deliberately cruel. #AcademicSky

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

What motivates people to take action and share info about climate change? We tested 17 psychological interventions in a tournament—Discover the winners in our new paper! Out now in @pnas.org w/ @falklab.bsky.social, @michaelemann.bsky.social, & team. Thread ⤵️ 1/9 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My book reveals the mostly hidden effects of talking *on talkers.* Talking boosts focus & learning, regulates emotions, changes perception, & more. The reason lies in how utterance planning for talking works. It's a book for gen'l audiences, but w scientific claims for production & its consequences

A few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below. First, up "mountain calendars"...

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)

1/ New Preprint (also my first time posting on BlueSky haha)!!! How do individual differences in habituation shape dishabituation magnitude? Work with Qiong Cao, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A lot of students are not sure what career they want to pursue. To help with this, we've started recording videos with lab alumni in different careers and grad programs. Links below. Hope your students find them helpful! #STEM #ADVISING