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

Raising a glass to being a tenured, associate professor at UCSD, starting this July.

There was also a chance to celebrate some good news with friends: UCSD decided to give me tenure and let me stick around!

Photo credit: @carenwalker.bsky.social, Champagne credit: @adenaschachner.bsky.social

We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position!

If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit.

Read more about our lab here!
www.vislearnlab.org

The Cognitive Origins Lab is hiring a new lab manager! I can personally vouch that this is a great place to grow and do exciting research--I highly recommend applying if you want to do comparative work!

Fellas, who has the best game in town?

You won’t find a more supportive mentor/supervisor than Martin!

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...

The role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inferences When encountering a novel word, adults and children as young as 12 months old often reason that it refers to a novel object rather than one with an ex…

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...

Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

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 decline effect (Protzko & Schooler, 2017) is an observed phenomenon where effect sizes in experiments apparently diminish in size from the first paper demonstrating the effect to later replications. This has been taken as a symptom of an unhealthy scientific ecosystem, possibly caused by the "winner's curse" (selection on significance and regression to the mean), publication bias or opportunistic analyses. I show that decline effects can arise as an artifact from a much simpler source: the original article determining the sign of the effect in a meta-analysis. Moreover, such artifactual decline effects will show correlations with some of the same experimental properties that one would expect from biases from poor behavior, such as the sample size of the original study.

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x

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.

Back to reality: Children's early temporal reasoning applies to real but not hypothetical events Abstract. Time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are hard for children to learn, and for researchers to study, because their referents change from day

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...

How Colorblind and Structural Messages Affect Children's Reasoning About Novel Group Disparities Children experience a variety of messages about racial–ethnic socialization from their parents, teachers, and other sources, who might not answer children's questions about race, or might explicitly...

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/...

New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age.
osf.io/gvb46

Exact numerical reasoning in blind children and adults What is the origin of exact numerical reasoning in humans? Previous studies report that innumerate humans are unable to recognize that two sets placed…

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Male and female for both?

Just did, thanks for sharing!

Extremely disappointing decision from the NSF today to exclude second-year graduate students from eligibility for the GRFP. I and many other second-year grads purposely held off from applying in our first year to be able to do so now...

Already Perfect: Language Users Access the Pragmatic Meanings of Conditionals First Abstract. Conditional statements often have two interpretations. For instance, the statement, “If you mow the lawn, you will receive $5”, might be understood to mean that mowing the lawn is just one p...

Now out in Open Mind!
@drbarner.bsky.social and I find that when people hear a conditional statement like “If you mow the lawn, you’ll get $5,” they often interpret it as “only if you mow the lawn”, a pragmatic, perfected meaning.
doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

Thrilled to have another CogSci in the books!

Curious about how children learn what age is? Check out my poster with @drbarner.bsky.social here: qr.codes/yjFi54

Learning a Novel Number System: The Role of Compositional Rules and Counting Procedures Humans count to indefinitely large numbers by recycling words from a finite list, and combining them using rules—for example, combining sixty with unit labels to generate sixty-one, sixty-two, and so...

Fun new paper led by Sebastian Holt, training adults on artificial number systems. Most work tests only base-10 learning; we trained adults on a range of base systems & manipulated whether numbers were learned as part of a counting system, or unordered words. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We were lucky to receive so much support from members of our Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Science, including @asmithflores.bsky.social who coined SoCal MInDS, Salih Özdemir who created our logo, and Tori Hennessy and @kostaboskovic.bsky.social who affirmed that our science is COOL! 😎

An eggcellent trip you might say

Twice Upon a Time: Children Use Syntax to Learn the Meanings of Yesterday and Tomorrow Time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are abstract, and are interpreted relative to the context in which they are produced: the word “tomorrow” refers to a different point in time now than in 24....

Out now! @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that Hindi kids learn yesterday & tomorrow earlier than English kids, despite having only word 'kal' to reference both the past and future. We argue that kids rely on tense info (over associations w/ events) to learn.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...