Excited to share that my lab will be accepting applications for our very first PhD student to start in Fall 2026! Interested applicants can learn more about the lab here: wordpress.lehigh.edu/littlelearne... And Lehigh’s graduate program here: psychology.cas.lehigh.edu/graduate

Move over frogs, we’ve got our own spirit animal #NoKingsSanDiego

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.

Extremely disappointing decision from the NSF today to exclude second-year graduate students from eligibility for the GRFP. I and many other second-year grads purposely held off from applying in our first year to be able to do so now...

Big news: FIT'NG 2026 will be held in Panama City next year, right after #ICIS2026!! Can't wait for this awesome week of infant science coming next July 👶🧠

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

New episode!! 🎙️📣 A chat w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social & @dorsaamir.bsky.social about childhood across cultures. Humans everywhere go through childhood—a time of learning, growth, and play. But this universal stage of life can look very different in different places. Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper from Qi, Vul and Powell introduces a clever way to measure a participant's Welfare-Tradeoff Ratio in a single trial: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New CogSci paper! In "Taking others for granted: Balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection" we propose a computational model explaining why people favour self interested behaviour when they believe others to trust them. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/Vbtesh/takin...

Preprint of data from my first project as a postdoc with With @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social and Liz Spelke. Data and writing from 2019, figures are new :) osf.io/preprints/ps... First, we replicate @lindseypowell.bsky.social 's finding that infants reach for imitators using a very different setup.

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

This was so fun! Thanks for organizing @rtompkins.bsky.social!!

Yesterday @asmithflores.bsky.social successfully defended her PhD and became Dr. Smith-Flores! Then she celebrated with her fantastic committee and lab members :) Congratulations, Alexis!!

I'm sad to miss #SRCD2025 but @rtompkins.bsky.social is there and one of his presentations is on work we've been doing together: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ever wonder what children think about caregivers who stop kids from doing dangerous things? Go to his talk (Thurs 11:50 am session) to find out!

FIT'NG 2025 is happening in Dublin this September, and submissions are due in one week -- come tell us your recent findings about the fetal, infant, or toddler brain! Also, for the first time this year we are accepting symposium submissions. Find all the details at the link :)

Do kids prefer to play with helpers? Our paper on children's trait attribution and partner choice is out! doi.org/10.1111/cdev... We wanted to know if kids, after observing other agents' behaviors, spontaneously (!) interpret them in terms of traits and choose cooperation partners accordingly. 🧵...

The last chapter of my dissertation is out now in Child Development! 🎉 OA: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/KEAHK8...

🚨RT! The Social & Cognitive Origins group at @jhuartssciences.bsky.social (social-cognitive-origins.com), directed by Dr. Christopher Krupenye, is recruiting a full-time research assistant or lab manager to begin Summer 2025. The position has a one-year minimum, w/ the possibility of extension. 1/

Searching my name in this database of Meta's stolen training library reminded me that the most popular works by Lindsey Powell are actually a bunch of steamy romance novels written by an author in the UK

This is Bill's first first-author paper! Keep an eye out, though, more coming soon on how both infants and kids use an actor's past helping to predict future helping & what that says about early representations of social relationships vs. dispositions

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us! careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc... and careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

colleagues and friends, don't go home for the weekend without remembering that this is still happening

🎉 I'm hiring a lab manager to start August 2025 and help build my lab at Lehigh. Submit a CV, cover letter, transcript, and 2 reference contacts by March 14th. The full job description is linked below. Please share with any students or mentees who might be interested! #devpsy tinyurl.com/33vtvy79

I have recently launched the relational cognition lab at UC Irvine: relcoglab.org! We study learning and memory in mind, brains and machines. I am open to collaborations and hiring a lab technician (lab manager/junior specialist). Job ad & application here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09400.

I could not be prouder of @asmithflores.bsky.social. I was so lucky to have her around to help me start a lab at UCSD, and I'm so excited to see all the things she does in her lab. Keep your eye out for the chance to join her!

Out now! @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that Hindi kids learn yesterday & tomorrow earlier than English kids, despite having only word 'kal' to reference both the past and future. We argue that kids rely on tense info (over associations w/ events) to learn. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We are hiring a post-bacc RA in infant cog neuro 👶🧠! Join us in DC and contribute to projects investigating how infants grow visual cognition & social communication skills. Apply w/ CV, cover letter, and contact info for 2-3 refs american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/AU/job/Main-... 🌸 #DevSci #CogSci 1/2

🥁 FIT'NG is thrilled to announce our 2025 destination is 🌎 Dublin, Ireland. Join us next fall September 7 - 8, 2025! 🌐 Learn more about this beautiful and historic city by visiting: fitng.org/destination/ #FITNG2025 #RSNA2024 #BrainDevelopment

Six more days to submit a grad application to the Harvard Psychology Department! I'm reading applications this year. My lab studies how people think about social relationships, usually with babies and children!

Congrats to Dr. Wenhao (James) Qi on his beautiful dissertation defense yesterday! 🥳 Very proud of this first PhD from the SoCal Lab and excited to see what he does next!

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...

🚨 Curating advice for my resources website as I move through this process myself: Advice/recommendations/do's/don'ts from tenured faculty for the final year leading up to tenure material submission? Please re-post and share in replies below! (Also AH can't believe it's time to submit in spring!)

Don't miss the Nijmegen Lectures, a unique 3-day series of talks & discussion by renowned psychologists @fernandaedi.bsky.social & Victor Ferreira, Jan 7-9, 2025! Topics will span the psycholinguistic continuum from intention to articulation. More info & registration here: www.mpi.nl/events/nijme...

Switched up my pet situation for the week 🐈‍⬛

I am recruiting a 2 year postdoc! See elc-lab-ucsd.com/prospective-.... This is an NSF-funded collaboration between UCSD, Harvard, and Rutgers-Newark (co-PIs: @ebonawitz.bsky.social, @patrickshafto.bsky.social, Igor Bascandziev) examining cognitive mechanisms underlying children’s conceptual change.

truth, but also no regrets

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab! Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org

Looking forward to #ICIS2024! Especially excited about presenting with @lorijn.bsky.social @shariliu.bsky.social and @mzettersten.bsky.social in our symposium on Drivers of Infant Attention (S.61)! Stop by Thursday at 3! @infantstudies.bsky.social

New work from @asmithflores.bsky.social! She asked how kids evaluate people who do vs. do not feel empathy. Unsurprisingly, children think empathy is good and empathizers are nice. But she also investigated more complicated cases (e.g. empathy vs. helping; empathizing with moral trangressors) 👀

I dearly hope Helen lives long and well — in part, but only in part, to bring the philosophical vision described here to full fruition helendecruz.substack.com/p/a-manifest...

🚨Early bird registration for the #FITNG2024 Annual Conference is now open! 🌇 Join us in Baltimore, MD from Sept 25 – 26, 2024 to discover how researchers from across the globe 🌎 are pioneering new frontiers in understanding the developing brain 🧠 Register here: fitng.org/registration/

Some very exciting news... after many, many, winter beards, I'm overjoyed to be joining sunny @UCSDPsychology as an Asst Prof in Jan 2025! Looking to recruit folks interested in doing some fun science, while building some cool (and useful) toys! Details: eshinjolly.com/lab/

I’m hiring a postdoc to start in Fall 2024 (or later) at UCSB! The ideal candidate should be interested in how babies and children make sense of others’ actions, minds, and/or relationships. Please share! recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02765

Dev cog neuro folks! FITNG 2024 (@fitngin.bsky.social) is Sep. 25 & 26 in Baltimore, and submissions are due May 15th! We've got a great list of invited speakers, including Lauren Emberson, Kathryn Humphreys, & Mark Blumberg. Send us your work & come to the conference! It's gonna be a blast :)

I'm hiring a lab coordinator for my new lab at UCSD CogSci. This is a great position if you're interested in gaining research experience before applying to graduate school. Apply by May 2, flexible start late summer start date (~Sep 1). Details below! employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

For years, I’ve been saying it was interesting that I would probably hear back about whether I would get tenure (or not) just around my 40th birthday. Well — the best version of this just happened.

Folks, I’ve got news. Good news. The best news. This summer, I’ll be joining the faculty of Duke University as an Assistant Professor of Psychology! 🎉 Could not be more excited to be a part of the Duke community and make Durham our new home.

We came, we saw, we conferenced. Proud of this team & inspired by our field. Looking forward to Montreal!

Looking forward to CDS 2024! Come hear about: Kids’ perspective-taking over video chat (Chaolan Lin); hearing water temperature (Tanushree Agrawal); expectations about shared sleep arrangements (Rodney Tompkins); and social reasoning about placement of possessions (Rob Santiago)!