📢 We are honored to announce our Keynote Speaker: Takao K. Hensch!!
🧠 A leading expert on how early-life experience shapes neural circuits and critical period mechanisms (fitng.org/speakers/).
🤩 Don't miss the keynote and join us at the FIT'NG Annual Conference, July 10-11 in Panama 🌴
#FITNG2026
⏲️ 3 DAYS LEFT!!!
🏃➡️ Hurry up, submit your work now!
🌐 Posters: fitng.org/poster-oral-...
🌐 Symposium: fitng.org/symposium-su...
Deadline: February 25
#FITNG2026 #Neuroscience #Neuorimaging #MRI #Brain
Look at this great #CDS2026 preconference on the cognitive science of care that @rtompkins.bsky.social put together! If you’ll be there in Montreal, come check it out.
~2 weeks til the #FITNG2026 submission deadline! We're taking both individual abstracts and symposia again this year. And we have an exciting lineup of invited speakers, including Drs. Takao Hensch (keynote), Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Victoria Southgate, and Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh.
Join us in Panama!
~2 weeks til the #FITNG2026 submission deadline! We're taking both individual abstracts and symposia again this year. And we have an exciting lineup of invited speakers, including Drs. Takao Hensch (keynote), Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Victoria Southgate, and Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh.
Join us in Panama!
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...
International Congress on Infant Studies (ICIS) abstract deadline has now been extended to Friday December 12th!
Don’t miss this opportunity to share your research, connect with leading scholars, and experience the unique setting of Panama City. ☀️ 🇵🇦 @infantstudies.bsky.social
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
Woman in a pink axolotl costume holding a sign that says “Ajolotes against facism”
Move over frogs, we’ve got our own spirit animal #NoKingsSanDiego
Seems like a particularly cruel change to make without warning given the stress that reviewers often put on applicants' publication record. Presumably many strong students waited based on this apparent criterion, not because they didn't already have great ideas to propose.
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...
Big news: FIT'NG 2026 will be held in Panama City next year, right after #ICIS2026!! Can't wait for this awesome week of infant science coming next July 👶🧠
4. Rodney Tompkins finds that 4- and 5-year-old children take risk and protection into account when evaluating caregivers who help or hinder their kids. I'll also talk about this work (& other findings) in Symposium 1 on caregiving: osf.io/preprints/ps...
3. Coxi Jiang finds that the strength of relationships, not just their valence, guides adults' predictions about vicarious emotional responses to others' experiences (i.e. empathy & counter-empathy): osf.io/preprints/ps...
2. Bill Pepe finds that infants expect helpers and hinderers to act the same way in a new context -- but only toward the same target, not a new one. This suggests they infer the actors' relationships, not their dispositions.
CogSci: osf.io/preprints/os...
Expanded manuscript: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Here's a quick rundown of the 4 papers we'll be presenting:
1. Tori Hennessy makes the case (using unpublished, reanalyzed data from my PhD and postdoc) that infants learn to recognize conventional actions, and that these are the actions they expect group members to share: osf.io/preprints/ps...
A list of the SoCal Lab's presentations at CogSci. In brief: Lindsey Powell is giving talks in Workshop 1 on July 30 at 9:30 am and in Symposium 1 on July 31. Tori Hennessy is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition 1 session on July 31. Bill Pepe is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition session on August 1. Coxi Jiang is giving a talk in the Emotion session on August 1. Rodney Tompkins is presenting a poster in Session 2 on August 1.
The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:
New episode!! 🎙️📣
A chat w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social & @dorsaamir.bsky.social about childhood across cultures.
Humans everywhere go through childhood—a time of learning, growth, and play. But this universal stage of life can look very different in different places.
Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...
Instead, they learn that who the helper has positive relationships with, and what the relative strength or priority of those relationships is.
Or so we think :). Let us know what you think!
And come see Bill talk about this at CogSci! The current work grew out of this paper: osf.io/preprints/os...
Together, this suggests infants do learn from helping & hindering, but they aren't learning who is good/nice vs. bad/mean. (At least from this pattern of initial evidence, with all helping & hindering toward one target, which is common in other studies).
Figure showing events and displays from Experiment 4 of the preprint. In all events, the helper is up on a plateau at the back of the display. There are three target characters who each appear in one of three low alleyways, with one or two of them present in each trial. The targets each want a toy ball on a high shelf in their alley that they can't reach. The helper jumps down into one of the alleys to help one target get their ball, but can't help more than one target per scene. In three different types of familiarization events, the helper helps a "low value" target when that target is alone, a medium value target instead of the low value target when those two are present, and a high value target instead of the medium value target when those two are present. (Infants saw nine of these events in 1-2-3 or 3-2-1 repeating order). Test trials feature a new situation in which both the low and high value targets need help, and the helper alternates between helping each of them. Infants looked longer, indicating a violation of their expectations, when the helper helped the low value target. This suggests they used the pattern of choices in the familiarization trials to map the helpers' value for the targets onto a common underlying scale.
Second, infants could make transitive inferences about the helper's strength of care. After they saw the helper help: 1) target A when A was alone, 2) target B over A, 3) target C over B, infants then saw test trials with targets A & C. They expected the helper to help C.
Figure showing events and data from Experiments 1 and 2 of the preprint. In the familiarization phase of both experiments, one character helps a target up a hill and another character pushes the target down. At test, either the same target character (Experiment 1) or a new target (Experiment 2) wants to get to a bright blue platform, but the platform is blocked by a big wall. On alternating trials, the helper and hinderer from the familiarization phase push it out of the way, and the target then successfully gets to the platform. If infants think the helper and hinderer are nice and mean, respectively, they should expect the helper to help and the hinderer not to help in the test trials of both experiments. However, this is not what we found. Data showed longer looking when the hinderer, rather than the helper, helped the original target character in Experiment 1, but equal looking when the hinderer and helper helped the new target character in Experiment 2. This suggests infants interpreted the helping and hindering in familiarization as evidence of the helper and hinderer's positive and negative relationships with, or attitudes toward, that specific target character, rather than evidence of broader traits or dispositions.
First, infants' expectations for consistent future behavior were target-specific. After they saw actors help and hinder a target in one context, they expected the helper & not the hinderer to help in a new situation that featured the same target, but not one that featured a new target.
Two patterns of evidence in infants’ expectations led us to conclude that infants take helping as evidence of a positive helper-target relationship, not a broader social or moral disposition (all expts w/ 14-15 mo old infants, N=52, preregistered):
New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...
New paper from Qi, Vul and Powell introduces a clever way to measure a participant's Welfare-Tradeoff Ratio in a single trial: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Thanks for the shout out :) We have high hopes that the efficiency of the measure will make it easier to ask questions that involve denser sampling, e.g. about the dynamics of WTRs or their distribution across social networks.
New CogSci paper!
In "Taking others for granted: Balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection" we propose a computational model explaining why people favour self interested behaviour when they believe others to trust them.
📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎 github.com/Vbtesh/takin...
Preprint of data from my first project as a postdoc with With @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social and Liz Spelke. Data and writing from 2019, figures are new :) osf.io/preprints/ps...
First, we replicate @lindseypowell.bsky.social 's finding that infants reach for imitators using a very different setup.
💔
