Kids will likely conflate size w/ quantity but I think it’ll do the job!

Ooh interesting! I’m not sure if I have seen a numerical scale used with children that young (prob bc they’re still acquiring number words). But I suspect you could ask “how many blocks will it take to make the blicket detector go” and have visuals of 1, 2, 3 or 4 of the same object / shape?

New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending

osf.io/ucxra_v1

Reading the room: Children integrate multiple social factors to predict and interpret objects' locations Abstract. Adults infer social information from objects' locations by integrating multiple causal factors, which is often challenging for children. To test

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...

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

Challenges in Navigation Research This open access book explores navigation across species using a multidisciplinary approach to address challenges in research and clinical applications.

This book has just been published, open access, edited by Ken Cheng and me. It contains multiple chapters originating in a wonderful Strungmann Forum held in Frankfurt around a year ago.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The ancient reason there are 60 minutes in an hour A mysterious 5,000-year-old decision led directly to how we still count time today.

A short history of time - and why we have 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hour days and a seven day week. fascinating piece on how everything about time is a human construct www.bbc.com/future/artic...

🎉Our paper was just accepted in Cognition!🎉 Title: Training “Zero” in Preschoolers: Fast Referential Learning, Slow Relational Integration
Authors: Yanfei Yu, Marianna Thorne, David Barner
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social @drbarner.bsky.social

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...

Some calendar systems really are transparent in this way!!!

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Research plug: we're currently seeking (bilateraly, congenitally) blind adults & Deaf adults for a *paid* online research study (screen reader compatible) on how individuals experience words across perceptual modalities. Ping bergelsonlab@fas.harvard.edu if interested! Reposts welcome! #Blind #Deaf

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚

“Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).”

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

Counting without end: A cross-linguistic exploration of infinity beliefs in English and Hindi learners Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes throu…

Very cool new article by @urvi.bsky.social, Jessica Sullivan and @drbarner.bsky.social comparing English and Hindi speaking kids' ideas about infinity, showing a subtly more complicated view of how numerical morphological opacity relates to infinity beliefs.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ph.D. Programme in Philosophy - Ashoka University The PhD in Philosophy programme conforms to all Ashoka PhD programme guidelines. Additional guidelines specific to the Philosophy PhD programme […]

We're starting a PhD programme in Philosophy at Ashoka! Anyone can apply by April 15 for admission this year, and we will ensure that admitted applicants receive enough funding to support them for the 5 year programme. More info here:
www.ashoka.edu.in/programme/ph...

It never ends (you’ll see): another paper from @urvi.bsky.social this time on how language structure impacts children’s intuition that numbers are infinite (see?)!

Lots of open questions remain…perhaps infinitely many?! Maybe we’ll get to some of them soon!

Fin.

I like this design bc compared English and Hindi learners within India, so children had similar socio-cultural, religious and educational backgrounds. The few infinity believers in the sample are somewhat surprising when compared to US studies, that said. 6/n

That said, children’s ability to count to high numbers was globally predictive of their infinity beliefs, suggesting that experience w/ number words facilitated the belief that numbers are infinite. 5/n

We found that Hindi learners struggled to count to high numbers, and were delayed in their understanding of successor relations between numbers, relative to English learners. Somewhat surprisingly, overall proportion of infinity believers did not differ but were generally low in the sample. 4/n

Here compared English to Hindi, a language w/ a relatively opaque counting structure - e.g., it’s hard to see how do (2), paanch (5), & das (10) combine to make pachhis (25) or baavan (52). So, numbers upto 100 must be memorized in Hindi, and it may be harder to see the +1 relations b/w them. 3/n

In English, the structure base-10 counting is fairly transparent - once you know the numbers upto 20, you can keep adding 1-9. Previous work by @pierinaski.bsky.social & @junyi.bsky.social has found that children’s understanding of the +1 structure of counting predicts their infinity beliefs. 2/n

Counting without end: A cross-linguistic exploration of infinity beliefs in English and Hindi learners Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes throu…

By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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.

Really cool new project from @urvi.bsky.social that finds that kids are much better at temporal reasoning than previously reported, if we test them with REAL passing time, rather than hypothetical past or future events and differentiate past and future at 3 years old.

This little thing really is my fav project from grad school so far (don't tell my other projects), and I'm so excited to share it! And if you are interested in how kids learn 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', we've got you covered in this companion paper: bsky.app/profile/urvi...

Fin!! 7/n

We argue that when children complete spatial timelines or hypothetical tasks, they may rely on different cognitive abilities beyond temporal reasoning, which may underestimate their comprehension of temporal language. 6/n

We found that even 3yos understood that yesterday refers to the past, and tomorrow refers to the future when tested on real events, roughly 1-2 years earlier than previously thought. But even 4yos struggled on the hypothetical reasoning task. 5/n

(3) children heard a story about a character playing with different toys, and identified toys associated with y/t in the story (hypothetical events). 4/n

As a case study, we tested children's comprehension of 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' (y/t) on 3 tasks: (1) Children played with toys on 2 consecutive days, and identified y/t toys (real events), (2) They also marked the words on an L-to-R timeline (spatial timeline). 3/n