The visual learning lab at UCSD is attending the Cognitive Development Society 2026 conference. There are three poster presentations: Relating changes in children's descriptions and line drawings of visual concepts across childhood by Nicole Sahrling at poster session 1 on Friday April 10, Examining the precision of infants' visual concepts by leveraging vision-language models and automated gaze coding by Tarun Sepuri at poster session 2 on Friday April 10, and Children's integration of visual concepts via line drawings of hybrid categories by Haoyu Du at poster session 4 on Saturday April 11.

Exciting work from the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD will be at @cogdevsoc.bsky.social #CDS2026! Come chat with us about children's drawings, visual knowledge, and leveraging computational models for developmental research.

www.vislearnlab.org

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

Laboratory Coordinator - 138788 Laboratory Coordinator - 138788 | Careers at UC San Diego

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...

Schedule of speakers for a morning pre-conference workshop at the 2026 meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Attending CDS 2026? Consider joining us at the morning pre-conference workshop on intuitive theories of care and protection in development @cogdevsoc.bsky.social

What People Learn from Punishment - Scientists For Palestine Wednesday, February 11, 2025, 7 pm Palestine time Prof. Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Title: What People Learn from Punishment Abstract: In human society, punishment can so...

The amazing Rebecca Saxe @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social speaks tomorrow Wed at noon east coast time in the Bisan Lecture Series.
Title: What People Learn from Punishment

Register here to get the Zoom link!:
us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

scientists4palestine.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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.

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories.

In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

Figure 1 showing alignment pipeline using CLIP models on BabyView data.

Figure 2: human judgments are correlated with CLIP scores.

Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out!

New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824

山坡羊•潼关怀古 峯巒如聚，波濤如怒，山河表裏潼關路。 望西都，意躊躇。 傷心秦漢經行處，宮闕萬問都做了土。 興，百姓苦； 亡，百姓苦！ Reflections on the Past: At Tong Pass (to 'Sheep on the Hillside') The peaks of Mount Hua muster in, The waves of the Yellow River rage. Threading through mountain and river it runs: The road up to Tong Pass. I pause and gaze west toward the capital that was: Where Qin and Han and Tang passed through, And every one of their palaces turned to dust. Dynasties rise: the little people suffer. fall: the little people suffer.

A photo of a woman in pink in a wheelchair. She has an intubation for oxygen. She looks up at the viewer. Words: This is Alice's friend Sandy Ho, posting. Per Alice's wishes, this message is being shared at the time of her passing Hi everyone, it looks like I ran out of time. I have so many dreams that I wanted to fulfill and plans to create new stories for you. There are a few in progress that might come to fruition in a few years if things work out. I did not ever imagine ! would live to this age and end up a writer, editor, activist, and more. As a kid riddled with insecurity and internalized ableism, I could not see a path forward. It was thanks to friendships and some great teachers who believed in me that I was able to fight my way out of miserable situations into a place where I finally felt comfortable in my skin. We need more stories about us and our culture. You all, we all, deserve the everything and more in such a hostile, ableist environment. Our wisdom is incisive and unflinching. I'm honored to be your ancestor and believe disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don't let the bastards grind you down. I love you all. may her memory

I am gutted to learn of @sfdirewolf.bsky.social (Alice Wong’s) passing. She was always a warm friend, a wonderful spirit, and someone who fostered my own growth. She helped me see that, as a #disabled person with chronic illness, I matter—I am whole. I’ll be posting some of Alice’s work. ❤️ forever

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain"

with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social

Summary 👇

1/8

infant data from experiment 1

conceptual schema for different habituation models

title page

results from experiment 2 with adults

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Congratulations, Simon! The view is quite something.

LOVE the profile pic!