I had a fantastic conversation recently with the 10 Seconds to Air podcast. We tried to think about parenting, the philosophy of parenting, and how to know if you are doing a good job at it--or is that even the right question. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1sE...

Gee, thanks for this "clarifying" diagram~

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

THE MOON

Had the incredible opportunity to discuss impacts of federal research funding cuts on @fluxsociety.bsky.social Sensitive Periods podcast with @tcheng.bsky.social @scott-delaney.bsky.social and Gabriel León. Listen and share! sensitiveperiods.buzzsprout.com/2024695/epis... #sciencecuts #NIH #NSF

On election day, I wanna announce that I am recruiting social psych PhD students for my lab at UIC. My lab focuses on racial identities (esp Asian, Latino, MENA Americans) and intra-minority conflict/ coalition. So please tell your students to pick me! All details on my website: www.pbandjlab.com

🗳️It's Election Day in Massachusetts! Polls are open until 8pm, so grab your loved ones and neighbors, and make a plan to vote. Find your polling location at WhereDoIVoteMA.com.

📣📣 A recent paper by Léa Tân Combette et al. in JCD: "Cats, Bats, and People: Cultivating Children’s Understanding of Genes and Trait Inheritance" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

SEVERE DROUGHT HAS ENTERED UR COMMONWEALTH

Got the feet to fill Dennett's shoes? New junior position in Philosophy of Mind/Cog Sci at Tufts. philjobs.org/job/show/29606

Our entry (with @ericman.bsky.social ) for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, “The Language of Thought Hypothesis”, is now out. doi.org/10.21428/e27...

Come join the Moral Minds Lab as a grad student at MSU! Brand-new lab equipped for child & adult testing, with motivated undergrads in a happy department. 🤩 Learn more: www.moralmindslab.com/join-our-tea... (P.S. @tedmond.bsky.social is also taking a student!) @msupsychology.bsky.social

🪧Registration closing in a week!

Call for Editorial Fellows at Developmental Psychology! *Early Career (w/i 10yrs PhD) *Commitment to addressing the needs of underserved populations or increasing access to psychological knowledge & publishing *1-yr term; $1,000 USD www.apa.org/pubs/journal... @apajournals.bsky.social

New book— just got my copy! I know people often don’t read book chapters but I think that’s a mistake. They are usually much more reflective and wide ranging than journal articles.

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation. We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

🚨From Alessandra Geraci, Luca Surian, Lucia Gabriela Tina & J. Kiley Hamlin: Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions

Nice piece by @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social where he implies that the only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those at SPP (@socphilpsych.bsky.social). I agree! A big shoutout to @levelsof.bsky.social & @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social for putting together a conversation-inspiring SPP 2025!

I agree with @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social 100% - The Society for Philosophy & Psychology annual meeting is absolutely the best conference there is.

I wrote a paper with some of my favorite people synthesizing the last 25 years of research on my favorite topic: the development of visual attention during infancy 👶👀 doi.org/10.1016/j.in... #infantcognition #development #visualperception #visualattention

Everyone figure out where all their classes are? Great! We're welcoming back Boston's college students with a sale! Show a student ID & get 10% off your purchase & 20% off college essentials like notebooks, stickers & PSB merch. Then join us on Friday! portersquarebooks.com/event/2025-0...

This is going to be an incredible event celebrating Alan Leslie's amazing career. Speakers include Susan Carey, Lisa Feigenson, Randy Gallistel, Ori Friedman, Zsuzsa Káldy, Ágnes Kovács, Sydney Levine, Sandeep Prasada, Brian Scholl, Luca Surian (and me!) Join in person at Rutgers or livestream

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)

📢 Come join us on Sunday, November 9th for the Rutgers Symposium of Learning with an amazing list of speakers and great company! More details: sites.rutgers.edu/symposium-le...

The Manybabies4 paper is out! Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1000 babies tested in 37 labs; "Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition"

This is going to be an incredible event celebrating Alan Leslie's amazing career. Speakers include Susan Carey, Lisa Feigenson, Randy Gallistel, Ori Friedman, Zsuzsa Káldy, Ágnes Kovács, Sydney Levine, Sandeep Prasada, Brian Scholl, Luca Surian (and me!) Join in person at Rutgers or livestream

Nice write-up of work led by Igor Bascandziev, & with @carenwalker.bsky.social & @adani.bsky.social on a recent project from our Caplan grant. Thought Experiments Can Enhance Science Learning! Thanks to Jill Anderson at Usable Knowledge for the interview. www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable...

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future 📣 Work by Esra N. Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe

Standard works in the philosophy of perception that exclusively focus on vision got me like:

generating examples for my fall undergrad Perception students on why they should not use LLMs as study aides...

If you’re teaching my book in a course, I’ll try to join you on Zoom to discuss. If your book club is reading the paperback of the book (out next week), I’ll try to guest-visit your class for Q&A. I’d love to join some conversations! Just let me know-

The BlackInNeuro Conference is almost here 📢 Featuring keynote @timnitgebru.bsky.social + amazing speakers across neuro, tech & equity. EVERYONE is welcome to register for 8️⃣ livestreamed events! BIN members can register to attend in person in Washington DC! See you at #BINW25! 🔗 tinyurl.com/BINW25

Super fun conversation about learning, development, curiosity, and more -- with my youngest (and most precocious) interviewer yet. Check out the Ehsan Adouane STEM Podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO5m...

Want to know what makes today so special?! We get to chat with the inimitable Professor Kiley Hamlin (@jkileyhamlin.bsky.social‬) about her science journey, her recent paper in Nature Communications showing that sociomoral evaluation may be innate, and more! Stay tuned for the episode!

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

CoCoDev @ CogSci! Come check out cool work by Igor & @junyi.bsky.social

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

where do they FIND these people?!

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

Newly accepted in PSPB! We examined whether Asian and Black Americans perceived one another through a zero-sum lens. Inspired by the SCOTUS affirmative action decisions, I wanted to know if Asians thought they were losing to Black people and how this mindset affects coalition osf.io/preprints/ps...

Lot's of fun doing this interview! Thanks so much to Brinleigh and the Science To People team for giving me the opportunity to talk about curiosity and question asking. More ways to listen and/or watch: YouTube : youtu.be/2qTdI9Q82ck?... Substack: sciencetopeople.substack.com/p/born-curio...

Excited about this in large part because Raphael is the absolute best

Happy to share this updated Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on 'Associationist Theories of Thought' with @ericman.bsky.social. Among other things, we included a new major section on reinforcement learning. Many thanks to Eric for bringing me on board! plato.stanford.edu/entries/asso...