Liz Simpson

What can face preference in newborns tell us about their face representation? Contrasting learned familiarity with inherent bias accounts Abstract. Possible mechanisms behind newborn face preferences are debated, including innate templates, top-heavy bias, focus on eyes, and rapid learning ex

What can face preference in newborns tell us about their face representation? Contrasting learned familiarity with inherent bias accounts doi.org/10.1093/chid...

Evidence for representation of pretend objects by Kanzi, a language-trained bonobo

Animals experience joy. Scientists want to measure it Scientists have long focused on quantifying fear and other negative emotions in animals. Now they’re trying to measure positive feelings — and it’s a challenge.

A lovely read about researchers who make animals happy for a living 😊 A day spent playing the sounds of baby bonobo laughter is surely a day well spent

www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Neonatal Mimicry of Caregivers at Home: Feasibility of an Asynchronous Online Paradigm While early life sets the stage for later learning, comparatively less is known about newborns' cognition than that of older infants. A striking example is the lack of consensus regarding the extent ...

Neonatal mimicry of caregivers at home: Feasibility of an asynchronous online paradigm #OpenAccess by @lauriebayet.bsky.social & team! doi.org/10.1111/infa...

US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

NATURE has done a terrific (if depressing) job of summarizing the devastating cuts to science during Trump's first year. At this point, only the willingness of the House and Senate to restore research budgets prevents scientific extinction. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Male and female empathy across 24 countries and 60 latitudinal degrees #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1016/j.pa...

Impact of Surgical Masks on Newborns' Spontaneous Face Processing Skills
doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Check out our new paper on the #development of #gaze-following in wild #chimpanzees, led by @kris-sabbi.bsky.social, @zeppypearl.bsky.social, & Isabelle Monroe!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

In all red: "Science fight club, established 2025". With a fist holding a beaker.

2025 sucked.
In 2026, we are taking back our science!

We are excited to launch our Substack: The Science Fight Club.
Read our first post, written by @cdelawalla.bsky.social, a review of 2025, a preview of 2026, and a big call to action.

open.substack.com/pub/sciencef...

There’s a fantastic developmental science resource called Children Helping Science, at MIT (childrenhelpingscience.com). Researchers run child studies online, Parents sign up & participate with their kids. CHS got an offer from an anonymous donor: matching gifts up to $100K through December!

Big ideas in 180 seconds The 10th Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition showcased graduate students across the University of Miami presenting research in fields ranging from medicine and computer engineering to literature an...

Congrats, Dr. @tiffany6390.bsky.social! 👏

news.miami.edu/stories/2025...

Individual differences in sick face sensitivity: females are more sensitive to lassitude facial expressions than males - @tiffany6390.bsky.social

Free for the next 50 days: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Coalitionary intra-group aggression by wild female bonobos

A Quarter Century Review of Research on Infant Behavior and Development
www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

University of Miami joins international study on autism risk in young children Psychologists in the College of Arts and Sciences are monitoring the development of infants and toddlers whose parents have a sibling with autism.

We are starting a new longitudinal study at the University of Miami! news.miami.edu/as/stories/2...

Our amazing department (Psychology) at U-Miami is hiring in their Adult division, with open topic / focus area! Come apply and check out the job ad here: umiami.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMFaculty/jo...:

Drawing of an infant getting an ABR screening, and two different waveforms shown, one for typical and one for infants later dying of SIDS, pointing towards early detection risk identification and potential intervention, showing a baby sleeping.

Stage 2 report now out! Newborn Auditory Brainstem Response and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome doi.org/10.1002/jnr.... #OpenAccess

A&S - Psychology - Assistant Professor to Assoc. Professor - Child Clinical/Family Current Employees: If you are a current Staff, Faculty or Temporary employee at the University of Miami, please click here to log in to Workday to use the internal application process. To learn how to...

We're hiring at the University of Miami! The Department of Psychology is looking for a Child Clinical Psychology faculty member. As search chair, my contact info is in the job ad if anybody would like to discuss the position further umiami.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMFaculty/jo...

No, I don’t think so. Thanks!

(PDF) Automated detection of mouth opening in newborn infants PDF | Automated behavioral measurement using machine learning is gaining ground in psychological research. Automated approaches have the potential to... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

Email me (simpsone at miami dot edu) for a full-access copy. Or download the preprint here.

dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG....

Automated detection of mouth opening in newborn infants - Behavior Research Methods Automated behavioral measurement using machine learning is gaining ground in psychological research. Automated approaches have the potential to reduce the labor and time associated with manual behavio...

First human newborn paper from my NSF CAREER Award! Automated detection of mouth opening in newborn infants - with our amazing @umiamipsych.bsky.social team: Guangyu Zung, Yeojin Amy Ahn, @tiffany6390.bsky.social, @semaylott.bsky.social, Arushi Malik, @dmessinger.bsky.social doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Exciting new work from former team members Eric Romero, Cwyn Solvi, Fei Peng and colleagues makes the cover of Science: affective contagion in bumblebees! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Register your endorsement docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Autistic children deprioritize faces in arrays of images? psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... autistics "tend to visually explore images containing social and nonsocial information in a more heterogeneous way than NT individuals, whose visual attention is rapidly and homogenously captured by faces"

Functional connectivity in the social perception pathway at birth is linked to attention to faces at four months #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1016/j.bp...

A wonderful mentor & impactful research area! Our collaborator @dmessinger.bsky.social is accepting new grad students. #DevSci

Initiation of Affiliative Interactions and Visual Engagement During Mother-Infant Interactions in Humans, Great Apes and Small Apes - International Journal of Primatology Maternal care is crucial for primate offspring development, particularly in species with prolonged developmental periods, such as humans and other primates. In this study, we used a cross-species and developmental approach to assess the role of mothers and infants in initiating bouts of affiliation (i.e., proximity and grooming) and visual engagement (i.e., unidirectional and mutual gaze) in humans (N = 10), great apes (N = 18) and small apes (N = 20). We observed mother-infant dyads when the offspring was 1, 6 and 12 months of age, using focal sampling. Our results showed that mothers were generally more likely than infants to initiate grooming, unidirectional and mutual gazes, but not proximity. As infants got older, mothers became even more likely to initiate unidirectional and mutual gazes, but infants also started to initiate proximity and unidirectional gazes more frequently, with infant-initiated mutual gazes peaking at around 6 months of age. Moreover, human mothers were more likely to initiate proximity than great ape mothers, and especially more than small ape mothers; in contrast, infants in great and small apes initiated proximity more frequently than human infants. These findings highlight important similarities between humans and other apes in the initiation patterns of affiliative interactions and visual engagement.

Initiation of Affiliative Interactions and Visual Engagement During Mother-Infant Interactions in Humans, Great Apes and Small Apes #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1007/s107...

Changing views of evaluating species differences in comparative psychology - Primates Primates -

Changing views of evaluating species differences in comparative psychology #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1007/s103...