Meltem Yucel

Thank you @erinwestgate.bsky.social for the best tour of Florida!!

Yesterday, I gave a talk to the University of Florida's Social Psychology area. Many thanks for your engaging questions and warm weather ☀️🐊🛶

WOHOOO!!! Double congrats, Shauna!

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Experimental participants to us

Dr Laura K. Taylor receives ERC Consolidator Award to explore how identity can influence peacebuilding

Now hiring at @ucddublin.bsky.social in #psychology

✅ Postdoc: search job ref 019423 here: my.corehr.com/pls/ucdrecru...

✅ 4-year fully funded PhD, details: www.ucd.ie/graduatestud...

Part of @helpingkidslab.bsky.social

Funded by @erc.europa.eu ERC Consolidator Award
www.ucd.ie/research/new...

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

I am on the job market!

Looking for postdocs and/or teaching-focused roles

I study explanations for inequality & what motivates civic engagement, at the intersection of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology with philosophy and policy

I appreciate any leads! lewry.princeton.edu/home

Great new paper in The Review of Economic Studies using randomized incentives to detect non-response bias, using administrative data to provide ground truth for comparison. While incentives increased participation, they didn't reliably reduce NR bias

academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Is childhood exposure to local wealth inequality associated with upward income mobility achieved in adulthood? Yes! Check out my new paper, just published in @natureportfolio.nature.com here: doi.org/10.1038/s414... #EconSky #Sociology #Demography

Results show a marked relationship between increases in local wealth inequality and reduced mobility for children in the lower half of the income distribution.

Federal funding for US biomedical research is moribund.

Since October 1 2025, NIH is -80% in new grants and -70% in values (total dollars).

Labs are closing down and researchers are leaving science.

To what end?

#SPSP26 #SPSP2026

Come join me today, as I present our exciting new work on 4- to 12-year-old children's application of religious norms across 14 countries and 32 cultural/religious groups!

Emily is one of our first @moralmindslab.bsky.social RAs and I'm so excited that she'll continue her studies at Western Michigan University's Occupational Therapy doctoral program!

Many thanks to the University of Minnesota's Early Language & Experience (ELE) Lab for inviting me to chat!

I Falsified the Data in My Bestselling Book Everyone Poops It was all lies. Everything that I put forth as true in my book was fabricated, and I can’t keep the secret balled up inside of me anymore. I’m let...

"Most people, probably, but everyone? Nobody can know that. Not me, not you, not even God. Yet that didn’t stop me from writing that I poop, you poop, and God poops every Sunday and on the major holidays. It was crazy that nobody flushed out the truth."

🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Ok. Admittedly I didn't read this. But hey. Look at that chicken.

Have you noticed how navigation apps include walking & waiting for public transit, but excludes parking & walking for driving? After being late a few times 😅, we finally did. We got curious: what if these apps account for parking?

Have some good gibbon news, why not 😊

🚨 New paper! Think of a place you feel deeply attached to. When you're in that place, do you feel like your life is more meaningful? New work from @ashleykrause.bsky.social suggests you probably do!

Just accepted at Journal of Environmental Psychology, we find places can give our life meaning 🧵

Fun etymology fact (which is maybe obvious but I just learned!)—

The word “galaxy” comes from the Greek “galaksias” meaning “milk” (same root as “lactose”).

The Greeks thought our galaxy looked like a ring of spilled milk, which is also why we (& others) call it the Milky Way, but metaphors vary!

Egocentricity in infants’ play with familiar objects in caregiver–child interactions Abstract. The current study explored the dynamics of parent–child coordinated attention to novel and familiar objects during a play session, to examine whe

2 new papers: Madhavan et al study the dynamics of episodes of joint attention in caregiver-infant interactions. We find that infants initiate more episodes of joint attention and more often to familiar objects. Mothers follow infants' attention to label familiar objects more doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

New paper with @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social exploring responses to unequal distributions in Hadza hunter-gatherers. Equal distributions were more like to come from people *taking* from peers with more rather than giving to peers with less.

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings:
"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Polite Greeting
Name
Relevant Personal Link
Manage Expectations

Keep it BRIEF.

Figure 11, original image decomposed into shape, light source, shading, and reflectance.

Preparing for class and remembering how brilliant this essay is: persci.mit.edu/pub_pdfs/sha... - "The perception of shading and reflectance" (Adelson & Pentland, 1996). Early and beautiful description of Bayesian perception theories.

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch - Nature Human Behaviour Vaziri et al. examined how humans detect changes in auditory pitch, revealing that listeners rely on correlations in sound intensity over frequency and time, processing that is reminiscent of visual m...

Great to see this crazy psychophysics of pitch perception paper out, basically showing that the brain does a 'motion detection' of spectrotemporal correlations to infer pitch sometimes.

lead author: Parisa Vaziri

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University

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