Congratulations to all of our awesome lab members who presented this year at #CDS2026! And thank you to everyone who came to our talks and preconference workshops 😊

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 ;-)

The SLL will be at #CDS2026 this week! Catch some of our talks and posters below!

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 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...

Last Friday, Junyi and Kaelin headed over to Synapse School in Menlo Park for their Interactive Lab Day to meet with families and talk about our research! At Synapse, we will be working with the team at the Brainwave Learning Center to run some new studies on children's inferences about game design!

WS14: unified-motivation.github.io/cds
join us for a set of diverse & complementary approaches to understanding motivation!

Last week, we wrapped up the end of Winter Quarter with a social on the Oval with our friends in the Causality in Cognition Lab! Lots of cookies from Antoine's were consumed 🍪. We'll be back in the Spring! 🌸💐

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!

Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...

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

This week, we welcomed our new grad student, Karla Perez, and celebrated Hyo's birthday by painting pumpkins in the courtyard!

This week, our SymSys summer interns (Christine Zhao, Felicity Chang, and Chris Seo) presented their work at the Fall SymSys Poster Session!