I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.
Il est arrivé…
« Le Rectangle de Lascaux »rencontre le triangle des Éditions Odile Jacob !
Sortie en librairie mercredi 28 janvier.
@editionsodilejacob.bsky.social @cnrs.fr @inserm.fr @college-de-france.fr @cedricvillani.bsky.social @davidbessis.bsky.social
In the first Kempner Seminar Series talk of the semester @moiradillon.bsky.social of New York University discusses the cognitive origins of spatial and social intelligence. Watch the talk: youtu.be/YcgOj1wZVkg
#psychology #cogsci #KempnerInstitute
See the speakers for 2025-26 #KempnerInstitute Seminar Series!
bit.ly/46xphKq
@moiradillon.bsky.social @lisik.bsky.social @profsanjeevarora.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social @scychan.bsky.social @stellaathena.bsky.social @judithfan.bsky.social @engeltatiana.bsky.social @zdeborova.bsky.social
The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) now features over 100 published articles! Editors-in-Chief @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social share their vision for this open, online reference developed to guide the next generation of exploration in cognition & intelligence:
Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge. The school environment triggers a gender gap in mathematics. Line charts showing test results from all children in France who started school in 2018 reveal the trend. At the start of first year of school boys and girls similar on average with slightly more boys in highest and lowest percentiles. At the start of second year of school the gender gap becomes more exaggerated.
When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment
https://go.nature.com/4l1nC4g
I could not be more thrilled! 🧠 That the award is named in Lila Gleitman's honor makes it all the more meaningful. Thanks to the prize committee and to my lab @ldm-nyu.bsky.social, my colleagues, my mentors, and the NSF for their support. Thanks especially to all the infant and child participants! 👶
Nature research paper: Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics
https://go.nature.com/40PT3pT
Congratulations 🎉 to Shannon, for whom this is her first, first-author paper 📕, and to Deisy, who was an ICIS Founding Generation Fellow in the lab and then our lab manager 👩💻! Finally, thank you to the NSF and DARPA for funding our work and to all of the families 👩👦 who volunteered to participate!
A systematic evaluation of a set of scenarios like these is possible and promises to inform our understanding of the foundational knowledge on which human social learning is built 👩🏫, as well as to aid the building of human-like artificial intelligence 🤖.
Infants expected an imitating agent to approach a target agent only when the imitator did not also have an object goal. Infants’ attribution of social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans’ early understanding of imitation.
We used highly minimal, procedurally generated displays to challenge infants' capacities for abstraction and to tightly match the displays across conditions. These displays can also be easily adapted to test computational models 💻 (keep an eye out for our future work!).
To do so, we tested 15-month-olds' expectations about whether an imitator would approach the agent it imitated when that imitation occurred in the presence vs. absence of intentional cues like obstacles, object goals, and efficient, causally effective action.
From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. 👯♀️ In this paper, we asked what cues infants 👶 might use to infer that a social goal is driving an act of imitation.
Paper published‼️ "15-month-olds’ understanding of imitation in social and instrumental contexts" 🚼 by Shannon Yasuda, Wenjie Li, Deisy Martinez, @brendenlake.bsky.social, and me in @infantstudies.bsky.social!
And for anyone who might be interested, there is an open call for the Editorial Fellowship Program across several APS journals (due date, Feb. 7)!
Happy to share that I've taken on the role of Associate Editor 📝 for the relaunch of 🧠 Perspectives on Psychological Science 🧠 under the wonderful leadership of @draehernandez.bsky.social! Please send along your work in Developmental and/or Cognitive Psychology!
@psychscience.bsky.social
Are you curious about the latest on what infants know about geometry? 👶 📐Check out the preprint of my forthcoming chapter, "Infant Geometry," for the @oxunipress.bsky.social Handbook on Perceptual Development! osf.io/preprints/ps...
Great! Please add me as well, thanks!
Thanks to the National Science Foundation, @ldm-nyu.bsky.social, and the participating families! 🚸
These results expand the symbolic scope of prior studies on object biases in drawing 🖼️ to object biases in language 💬 (see psycnet.apa.org/buy/2020-807...), and they expand the spatial domains of prior studies characterizing the language of objects and places.
Spatial domain may thus confer specific and foundational biases for word learning that may change through development in a way that is similar to that of other word-learning biases about objects, like the shape bias.
While adults showed a specific object-over-place bias in both extending novel noun labels and matching, they did not show this bias in extending novel nouns following prepositions. Young children showed this bias in extending novel noun labels only.
We predicted that participants would think a novel noun label referred to object over place information. 🤔 In the place condition, this would mean the block in the front of the scene, but in the object condition, this would mean either the container or the block inside of it.
To dissociate specific object and place information from more general figure and ground information, moreover, participants either saw scenes with both place information (a room) and object information (a block in the room), or scenes with two kinds of object information.
Critically, our "places" were navigable 🌄🏙️🏜️, not just locations on objects, a definition of place used in prior studies.
Across six experiments, adults and 3- and 4-year-old children were asked either to extend a novel noun in a labeling phrase, to extend a novel noun in a prepositional phrase, or to simply match pictures. They were assigned to either an object or place condition.
Young children rely on various intuitions and biases when learning new words. 💬 But most word-learning studies focus only on objects and/or object properties. Here we probed word-learning biases across domains: Are novel nouns more likely to refer to objects or places?
📢 Paper published📢 "Seeing the Forest but Naming the Trees: An Object-Over-Place Bias in Learning Noun Labels" is now out in Open Mind w/ Yi Lin! t.co/UIL5Qq10CF
Thinking about pros and cons of collecting data from kids online? Our meta-analysis is out today. Effects from online testing were slightly but not significantly smaller than matched in-lab effects: d = −.05 [−.17, .07]. By Aaron Chuey, Veronica Boyce, and Anjie Cao.
direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...