The preconferences were a huge success! Looking forward to Day 1 at #CDS2026. Of course all our talks are in the same Friday PM slot but you can catch most of them if you hop strategically between rooms ;-)
What I like about this paper: The results make us think twice about what looks like "suboptimal" learning decisions (e.g., avoiding challenges, perseverating on impossible tasks rather than ask for help). If your environment isn't supportive & help isn't available, that's a reasonable thing to do.
Officially out TODAY in Child Development! It's good to try challenging tasks and explore on your own, but not when it might be too hard and help isn't available. Children get that. w/ Kat Shannon, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Willem Frankenhuis, @mcxfrank.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...
In sum, these findings suggest that even 4- and 5-yr-olds have a theory-like understanding of how "insider knowledge" about people is shared through (or contained within) certain social connections. For more details, take a look at the paper!
(3) Converging measures: Beyond self-reported surprise, we found consistent patterns of changes in facial expressions and memory error depending on who knew what. Children can also "explain away" these anomalies by appealing to plausible communication ("Maybe she heard from my mom") :-)
(2) Fun method: Aaron hopped on a Zoom call to chat with kids, but this "casual convo" was actually a controlled experiment. He'd mention things like: "Your mom said your fav food is pizza" or "My mom said your fav show is Bluey" Children were surprised when Aaron's mom knew their favorite things!
What I love about it:
(1) We’ve all felt it—it’s a little creepy when someone unexpected knows something personal about us. While intuitive, detecting this requires knowing that some information is shared only within close relationships. Children already have a surprisingly early grasp of this!
Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123
Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
Hello bsky! Excited to share this paper as my very first post / repost :-) We show that children are sensitive to whether an adult offered promised help, and strategically consider this to decide what task to pursue (easy or hard?) and whether to explore vs. seek help!