1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

"I used an LLM to help me write, but it was just to polish the style and grammar" is something you've probably come across, or done yourself. Many conferences and journals and teachers are ok with this. But does it...? Just focus on the style and grammar...?

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

Age is correlated w/ lots of physical properties like size, facial morphology, etc., but it's not identical to them. How do kids come to understand it as a chronological process? @kostaboskovic.bsky.social explores the role of numerical cues in constructing a concept of age.

For those attending @socphilpsych.bsky.social this week, I will be presenting work which follows up on this paper's findings, asking when children represent age chronologically, in Friday's poster session! Stop by and take a peak at this paper on your travels over :)

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

Separating Cognitive Development From Language Development in the Acquisition of Negation Using International Adoption 
📣From Annika McDermott-Hinman, Samuel Zimmerman, Jesse Snedeker & Roman Feiman

Great tool for number researchers!

New paper with @mohitmukherji.bsky.social, Mona Lebrun, and @marjorierhodes.bsky.social @JEP:G! Did you ever wonder whether saying things like “boys can wear dresses too” is effective at reducing stereotypical inferences? We find that they’re probably not—check out more here: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Well, would ya look at that! NSF is going to send >10% of its current budget to industry (read: tech start ups) instead of universities…it’s as if the admin is trying to dismantle our basic science mechanism and use it as a start up fund for private companies 💁🏻‍♀️ www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/...

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990

New review paper on the development of friendship psychology/ cognition (w/ @zoeliberman.bsky.social): By age 6, children appear to recognize friendship as a ranking-based relationship with outstanding social expectations and obligations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending osf.io/ucxra_v1

There was also a chance to celebrate some good news with friends: UCSD decided to give me tenure and let me stick around! Photo credit: @carenwalker.bsky.social, Champagne credit: @adenaschachner.bsky.social

We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position! If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit. Read more about our lab here! www.vislearnlab.org

The Cognitive Origins Lab is hiring a new lab manager! I can personally vouch that this is a great place to grow and do exciting research--I highly recommend applying if you want to do comparative work!

Fellas, who has the best game in town?

You won’t find a more supportive mentor/supervisor than Martin!

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

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...

some parents, esp white parents, fail to answer their children's questions about race or provide colorblind messages ("race is not important"). but are these effective? 🗣️ we find they aren't! structural explanations seem to be more constructive (1/5) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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...

Now out in Open Mind! @drbarner.bsky.social and I find that when people hear a conditional statement like “If you mow the lawn, you’ll get $5,” they often interpret it as “only if you mow the lawn”, a pragmatic, perfected meaning. doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

Thrilled to have another CogSci in the books! Curious about how children learn what age is? Check out my poster with @drbarner.bsky.social here: qr.codes/yjFi54

Fun new paper led by Sebastian Holt, training adults on artificial number systems. Most work tests only base-10 learning; we trained adults on a range of base systems & manipulated whether numbers were learned as part of a counting system, or unordered words. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We were lucky to receive so much support from members of our Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Science, including @asmithflores.bsky.social who coined SoCal MInDS, Salih Özdemir who created our logo, and Tori Hennessy and @kostaboskovic.bsky.social who affirmed that our science is COOL! 😎

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/...