Sharing a preprint laying out a new theory of the origins of self-awareness. In this theory, our human capacity for self-awareness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the interplay between interoception and ostension, during the first year of life 👶. osf.io/preprints/ps...

European Research Council grants to‪ @vhsouthgate.bsky.social, Peter Brodersen, @adler-nissen.bsky.social and Christian F. Rostbøll: uniavisen.dk/en/four-univ...

Human cognition is often altercentric, and human infants seem to have an altercentric bias. Is this cognitive stance uniquely human or might it be shared with other species? There are arguments both ways and we explore them in this paper. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob... If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏 openletter.earth/open-letter-...

A big thank you again to Athena Demertzi and Emmanuel Stamatakis for organising a wonderful ASSC conference @assc28.bsky.social @theassc.bsky.social! See you all in Chile next year @assc2026.bsky.social !

This paper really is developmental science at its best. Empirically convincing and theoretically rich. Shows once again that we cannot assume that the adult state is the default state.

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

👶Do babies read minds? @vhsouthgate.bsky.social at the University of Copenhagen challenges the idea that infants mentalise. Instead they may be “altercentric”, focused on what others pay attention to. 👉 buff.ly/My4EpbB 🎧 buff.ly/9j5ZeF8 #TheoryOfMind #FrontierResearch #EU2025DK @eu2025dk

"Nosek also wants academia to create clear career paths for people doing replication studies—it should be something that university bosses admire and want to promote." Also NO. This is someone's pet theory for how science works, not actually how science works.

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity!!! The Toronto Early Cognition Lab (@UofT) is hiring a postdoc to study early optimism in infants & young children. Work w/ multi-method approach, amazing undergrads & grads. Start: Fall 2025 or later. Details: [email protected] RTs appreciated 💫

This @erc.europa.eu Advanced Grant will test a novel mechanistic model of how human infants might acquire a concept of a self. We’ll investigate the interaction between interoception and ostension, not only in the lab but in infants in both Vanuatu and Japan! www.linkedin.com/posts/univer...

Really stimulating interdisciplinary discussion meeting at the Royal Society in London. I shared some developmental data and new theoretical ideas on the origin of the self and heard some excellent talks.

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨 We're looking for a postdoc to work on EEG and fNIRS projects with 3-18-month-old infants, looking at whether/how/when infants represent affordances: careers.ceu.edu/job-invite/8... Part of the @simonsfoundation.org SCENE project: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...

Choose Europe for Science: ERC welcomes new budget for 'super grants'. Might be a particularly interesting opportunity for US researchers thinking of relocating to Europe 🇪🇺

This is what you call two different readouts of the same meeting. Go Denmark, Go Greenland!

Really enjoy CogSci but I will not be traveling to the US until the US resumes normal service.

Some thoughts on Adolescence and what it reveals about our failure to protect childhood.

"I want to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship." Philosopher Jason Stanley is leaving Yale and taking up a position at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

I was a middle class, middle of the road, middling person, muddling along. Shocks of Brexit,Trump, Ukraine and Gaza jolted me out of complacency. We must fight for our values every day, never take democracy for granted. I no longer think Bernie and AOC are “radical”; they’re principled and feisty. 👍

I am begging, pleading in fact, for my fellow academics to find some courage and start speaking up. Because you can't just keep your head down and ride out this storm. And even if you could, is that really what you want being a scholar and educator to be?

It’ll be social media posts next. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Here is a model for the USA. What are the democratic leaders doing?

There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the opposing side, but because if you do not speak, they have changed you.

Boycott everything Elon: Tesla, Neuralink, X, etc! betakit.com/its-done-its...

Please lecture us more about free speech in Europe.

I’m confused by all the headline references to a “shouting match.” I saw one side shouting and the other side getting shouted over when he tried to talk.

Love this from Denmark

If you still believe, after today‘s UN resolution, that Trump will change his mind, just as soon as the Europeans finally spend more on defence, I can‘t help you. Of course Europe must spend more on defence. But not as a gesture to please Trump. To protect ourselves & stand on our own 2 feet.

United for freedom ✊

Looking forward to this Royal Society discussion meeting in London on the self. Registration is free! royalsociety.org/science-even...

I’m George Takei and I approve of this message.

The fact that only 2% of professors identify as fascists shows just how insular and out of touch universities have become.

WOMEN and FEMALE are red flag words. (Men, male are not on the list). Let that sink in.

Really enjoyed being part of this symposium at #EWCN2025 in Brassanone (or Brixen) in the beautiful Dolomites, organized by @smfleming.bsky.social.

New paper reporting work led by @dkampis.bsky.social showing an altercentric bias in 14-month-old infants' memory. Using an ERP measure of semantic mismatch, we show that they remember better the identity of an object as it was seen by someone else, than as it was seen by the infant alone.

Our department has just announced a new permanent associate professor position in developmental psychology, come join us at @uio.no! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

*** JOB ALERT *** Tenured Associate Professor position in Developmental Psychology at the University of Oslo. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... Deadline: March 3rd, 2025. Please reach out in DM for details and repost widely! #openscience experience a plus! #DevSci #devpsy

Technically I live just outside this utopian neighborhood but I get to enjoy this 5-minute-city and agree that this is what good ‘human’ living looks like. Few cars, beautiful spaces and seeing familiar faces whether it’s swimming and in the sauna, or grocery shopping.

Now published in Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. This is a review of what we know, and what we don't yet know. In it, I argue that the origins of our self-awareness must lie in interoception, and offer some thoughts on how social interactions might provide a mechanistic link in infancy.

About a year ago, I wrote about our lab's adventure in building a novel eye-tracker to give us superior data and novel functionality. Now, we are lucky to have been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant so that we can develop it further and see if it has any commercialisation potential 👀

Over the last year, we have been building something new in our lab: dual pupillometry & eye-tracking, led by pioneering post-doc Velisar Manea. Here we are using it to measure infant and caregiver pupil and gaze response simultaneously to the same event. Baby in red, mum in blue.

Every Tweeter arriving at Bluesky

Katalin Karikó on the status economy of academia. She’s the hero we don’t deserve. Source: josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-...

Hi #CogSci #PsychSciSky #SciSky! I study the early development of self, and it's role in developing cognition; mainly infants. I'm a professor at the University of Copenhagen where I direct the Centre for Early Childhood Cognition (psychology.ku.dk/ecc-en/).