We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659
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
Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! Itโs a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapesโperhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors โ fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty โย across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Imagination in bonobos!
I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org
We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative
youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
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!)โwith flexible summer start dates.
In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
๐ฃ Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro ๐ง ๐ฌ๐๏ธ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048
We are pleased to announce that the first LEVANTE data release is now publicly available!
To access and download the pilot data, follow instructions on researcher.levante-network.org/data. This data release accompanies the preprint linked in the thread.
As an aside, this is my second experience with the reviewed preprint route at @elife.bsky.social and it is great! We will likely revise our paper thanks to thoughtful feedback from reviewers, but I am very happy that it is accessible in the meantime. I strongly recommend this model!
Oh, and while you're at it, also check out this spiffy refresh to the Peekbank website, courtesy of the unstoppable @adriansteffan.bsky.social : peekbank.stanford.edu
Very excited that this is now published at eLife - the first outcomes from a huge effort from the Peekbank team to see what we can learn about children's lexical development from collecting and standardizing lots and lots of looking-while-listening data. Check it out, and stay tuned!
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.
This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
Curious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., โstatistical learningโ) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning
Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide ๐ ๐ฌ ๐ ๐ฌ ๐ ๐ฌ:
๐ doi.org/10.31234/osf...
This is a fundraising post!
An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure!
giving.mit.edu/search/node/...
Details below...
A Perspective in Nature Reviews Psychology reviews research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides evidence for the interaction between psychological and physical reasoning systems. ๐
NEW EPISODE OUT!
In this episode, Adani @adani.bsky.social chats with Dr. Susan Engel from Williams College about curiosity, invention, her journey into developmental psychology, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children!
๐งLISTEN NOW:
open.spotify.com/episode/06WD...
Cool new work by rising star Kosta Boskovic on children's reasoning about age - super fun paradigm, check it out!!
In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/๐งต
lots of invigorating discussion this year at #BUCLD2025. Unsurprisingly, LLMs as models & as tools made many appearances w/a wide range of views/claims/caveats ab what they can(not) tell us ab language development
I'm still chewing on a few things that seemed to get short shrift 1/4 ๐ฆ๐ฆ
#BUCLD50 Symposium: โInnateness is not a dirty word: Reframing the origins of language developmentโ, by Shanley Allen, Marisa Casillas, Alejandrina Cristia, Michael C. Frank, Caroline Rowland, Leher Singh, and Paul Bloom!
Learn more at:
www.bu.edu/bucld/
#Innateness #LLM #LanguageDevelopment
Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026!
The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io
Due Date Dec 1
๐๐จ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ ๐ซ๐๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐๐ง๐ญ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ฌ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ญ๐ข๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ฅ ๐๐๐๐จ๐ซ๐ญ ๐ฅ๐จ๐จ๐ค๐ฌ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ค๐? ๐จ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ฉ๐ธ๐ช
Hereโs the proof! ๐๐๐๐ฒ๐๐๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community ๐
arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159
๐ฆ Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology:
โA large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.โ
Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries ๐
๐ journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
@themanybirds.bsky.social
infant data from experiment 1
conceptual schema for different habituation models
title page
results from experiment 2 with adults
Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:
A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
Seems like a particularly cruel change to make without warning given the stress that reviewers often put on applicants' publication record. Presumably many strong students waited based on this apparent criterion, not because they didn't already have great ideas to propose.
New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Iโm hiring!! ๐ Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. Weโll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo
Abstract of the paper.
Title page of the paper.
The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org
New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...
