Job alert! @brandonwoo.bsky.social and I are searching for a new lab manager. We are excited to add a new member to our awesome community of soc cog dev researchers! Spread the word :)
Full ad here: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03106
New paper in Child Development!
When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way!
academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...
Thanks @mehr.nz for the heartening shoutout!
I reviewed Alia Martin et al's "What you want versus what's good for you: Paternalistic motivation in children's helping behavior."
I owe a great deal to the authors––they were some of the first to inspire me to study care and protection (:
Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;)
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Check out our lab #CDS2026! Talks on early intuitions about democracy, consequences of household inequality, and cross-cultural data on intuitive beliefs about social exclusion.
A list of talks and poster presentations to be given by Rodney Tompkins (Thursday preconference, Friday talk in symposium on when helping backfires, poster in Saturday lunch session), Bill Pepe (poster Friday evening), Coxi Jiang (poster Friday evening), and Tori Hennessy (poster Saturday evening, to be presented by co-author Angela Liu)
Members of the SoCal lab are presenting their work at #CDS2026! Check out where to find us below
A new Teaching Current Directions highlights a paper from @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social and @reutshachnai.bsky.social and offers an opportunity to teach students about cutting‑edge research on #parenting. #Psychology #Teaching
A good summary of my salon in Hollywood with film-makers about the real dangers and benefits of AI (as opposed to the ones in the movies)' Part of the NAS science-entertainment exchange and a really great group to talk with.
www.templeton.org/news/what-if...
New paper with Ben Morris and Alex Shaw out last week in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We find that children are sensitive to who has better evidence when evaluating how people behave in disagreements.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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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...
Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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
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....
💥New paper alert! Dyadic Decisions About Effort: How Caregivers Shape Young Children’s Persistence (with @reutshachnai.bsky.social)
One of my favorites! If you’re curious about what we’ve been up to in @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social, take a look!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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...
#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch
New paper out by Paolini et al. on habit-ruptures in intergroup contact
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
(If you like that, our also team has a related paper in press at American Psychologist, led by Rose Meleady)
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
🧵 New preprint with my advisor, Alex Shaw!
We asked: What does “popularity” actually mean? Is it a distinct status category with specific features? We turned to elementary-schoolers, who have just begun to experience their own "popularity hierarchies," for some answers.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.
A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.
Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Promotional graphic for CogSci 2026. The top left shows the conference logo with three interlocking gears and the text: ‘CogSci 2026 – Cognitive Inefficiency – July 22–25, Rio de Janeiro.’ On the right, large text reads ‘Call for Submissions.’ Below, the message says: ‘Review the submission guidelines, download the templates, and make note of key deadline dates.’ The background is a dark teal color, and the word ‘Submissions’ appears in large lime-green letters.
📣 #CogSci2026 submissions now OPEN!
🔍 Review the submission guidelines
⬇️ Download the required templates
📅 Make note of key deadline dates
cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/
some parents, esp white parents, fail to answer their children's questions about race or provide colorblind messages ("race is not important"). but are these effective? 🗣️ we find they aren't! structural explanations seem to be more constructive (1/5) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
In the running for greatest human accomplishment.
Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies
👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.
👩🏻💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...
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Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
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We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!
Are you a US-based PhD student WITHOUT summer funding who is interested in adolescent development, trans youth, and/or gender? Reach out to me about applying to join my lab in Summer 2026 for the VIPS program! psych.princeton.edu/diversity/vi...
We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!
More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...
Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
