Huh, apparently there was never an S at the end of Caldor, Lechmere, or JC Penney...

Sadly I will not be at VSS this year, but here's what our lab is up to! (In solidarity with many VSS attendees, however, I may be foregoing many hours of sleep -- not for long walks on the beach but due to the anticipated arrival of a second child any day now...)

New work from my lab! Young children find it easier to represent mutually-exclusive possible identities of an object than possible locations of an object - an early object-rep-architecture limitation on possibility reasoning! Work led by @esranur.bsky.social recently accepted in Open Mind ✨

New work from my lab! Young children find it easier to represent mutually-exclusive possible identities of an object than possible locations of an object - an early object-rep-architecture limitation on possibility reasoning! Work led by @esranur.bsky.social recently accepted in Open Mind ✨

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

How much does it matter whether children think science is about stereotypical tools like microscopes and beakers—or about seeking evidence and building explanations for how the world works? New paper w/ @debkelemen.bsky.social suggests these ideas shape how children learn science.🧵 bit.ly/4u5FsYi

Had a great time sharing my work with @levelsof.bsky.social on visual imagery variability in children at CDS in Montreal! So excited to get this measure out soon so it can be put to use! And… can’t wait to see what we (with @jorge-morales.bsky.social, Sam Ling, and Michaela Klimova) find in the 🧠.

The Think Lab will be at #CDS2026 in Montreal! Join us!

Do say if you'd like to be added. You don't need to be a professional philosopher or to have actually been part of the old Twitter philosophy community. You just need to share a love of friendly, supportive philosophical discussion, without ego or competitiveness!

Check out our lab #CDS2026! Talks on early intuitions about democracy, consequences of household inequality, and cross-cultural data on intuitive beliefs about social exclusion.

Can't wait for #CDS2026! My lab is excited to share some of our ongoing work featuring collaborations with Madison Pesowski's KIDS Lab at UFV! I hope you'll stop by and chat :)

Looking forward to #CDS2026! Come learn about the work that my students and I are doing @emmayu23.bsky.social @cogdevsoc.bsky.social

🚨 Job alert! 🚨 Baruch College is hiring a TT Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies program! philjobs.org/job/show/31197 Home dept can be: Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Literature, and Modern Languages. Review of applications begins in a week. Apply now! (FYI: we don't need letters yet).

Please stop by our posters and say hi at CDS 2026 in Montreal! #CognitivePsychology #DevelopmentalPsychology #DevPsyc

Nothing but bangers coming out of Rebecca's lab. Can't wait to hear more about this work at CDS!

New ep! 🚨 We chat with Dr. Richard Prather (pratherlab.bsky.social) about his path into cognitive science, numerical development, & computational modeling—plus a deep dive into why the field needs a more 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 approach & what that actually means for researchers today. itsinnate.fireside.fm/35

Registration deadline tomorrow! Come join our workshop! 😃✨

Great news! It's Innate! is now available on Apple Podcasts! Listen and subscribe here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Foundation 3 is led by UCSD postdoc Yanfei Yu, and a preprint can be found here: osf.io/re39y If you'd like to become a ManyNumbers site, feel free to reach out. Contributing data to Foundation 1 also opens the door to Foundation 3 (which uses overlapping data) and to various exploratory studies.

Happy to announce that the RR for ManyNumbers 3 was accepted (in principle) at Developmental Science today. This project will investigate the socio-demographic correlates of preschool numeracy in US sites participating in ManyNumbers 1. If you're interested, it's not too late to join these projects.

i'm maximizing my reading potential so hard

I'm just so incredibly honored to receive this award from @socphilpsych.bsky.social 😭

So grateful to have my first first-author publication out in Developmental Science! Here we (@zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social @erikblaser.bsky.social) used our Shopping Game to ask whether kids use all of their memory capacity if they don't have to (they don't! 🤭) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Are you attending @cogdevsoc.bsky.social 2026? Come join us for an afternoon pre-conference workshop on motivation in development! We'll bring together developmental, educational, and computational perspectives to ask: Can we build a unified account of motivation across the lifespan? ✨

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Heavy snowfall (10-20 i.!), wind gusts up to 60mph, power outages, coastal flooding (stay off Long Wharf!) and references to the dreaded 40/70 Benchmark! Starting late Sun. or early Mon. Head out now, with grim determination, to fill your trunk with bread, eggs and milk! bostonfrenchtoast.com

I have news! After 4 fabulous years at Northeastern, this July I will be moving to Duke—with tenure! It’s hard to convey how grateful I am to everyone who has made this possible: from old professors in Mexico and mentors in the US to students, colleagues, and, of course, my amazing wife and family.

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Anyway my nous paper just came out properly if you wanna read way too much about perceptual category representations onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social! We argue that children's struggle to represent the past and future in common tests of knowledge may stem from difficulties in hypothetical reasoning about imaginary timelines, rather than a lack of knowledge about time. 1/n academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Dear infant scientist friends, What's the latest in infant eye tracking in terms of hardware? What are you using, are you happy, is there something I should consider, has there been some development in the last 10 years that I might not know about, etc etc? Thanks! #devpsy #PsychSciSky

Remember a true pre-storm French Toast run includes: Milk Eggs Bread A nice beverage as a treat from Page & Leaf cafe A beefy book or two recommended by a libromancer Candles A journal to finally start your novel Ingredients for the hex Anything less is just screwin' around at Market Basket

Great new initiative from the editors of Perception: Philosophy Corner. A forum for "accessible reflections on the conceptual foundations of sensory/perception science where empirical insight meets philosophical inquiry". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20 📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣

no they do not, thanks for coming to my tedtalk.

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, but rather underwent fission into two separate streams of consciousness which we may, for convenience, dub Lefty and Righty...

somebody at UChicago is feeding preprints to LLMs without authors' consent, in a research study they have the gall to suggest to authors they've opted-in that they volunteer to evaluate the LLMs' suggestions regarding their own work. lol, lmao even. here is the invite and my reply

18 DEGREES

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true” Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness” philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

Publication day! It’s been a long journey to get to this point, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s supported that, and to @routledgebooks.bsky.social for publishing it.

He sees you when you’re sleeping. Hmmm. He knows when you’re awake. Okay. He knows if you've been bad or good. Interesting... What else does Santa Claus know, and how does he know it?

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (seems accurate)

A theoretical physics answer to the age old question of whether God could make a rock so heavy he himself could not lift it: "The physical universe when pushed far past its natural limits does allow the creation of an unliftable rock" #philosophy #philpapers philpapers.org/rec/ANDCGM