Urvi Maheshwari ツ

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

Time is fleeting, ethereal, and inaccessible to perception. To test children's knowledge of the past and future, researchers use proxies like spatial timelines (mapping time to space) and storyboards (hypothetical reasoning). Here, we compared these methods to a task in which real time happens. 2/n

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...

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Super cool study led by Haleh Yazdi - a simple demonstration that applying oft-used measures to novel contexts isn’t enough for inclusive & effective cross-cultural research. Measures designed for western populations do not always capture cross-cultural variability, nor within-group patterns.

The Development of Morality and Conventionality Across Cultures: Implementing a Two‐Stage Model for Cross‐Cultural Research Establishing a shared sense of right and wrong is an essential milestone for human cooperation, raising the question of whether a universal set of moral intuitions exists. However, tests of universa.....

A common problem w/ studies testing non-WEIRD groups is they compare multiple groups using the same WEIRD measure. How can we compare groups w/ apples-apples measures w/o distorting cross-cultural differences? We explore this in this new paper! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Now accepting abstracts for MCLS 2026! Check out the announcement below for more information.

Re-upping this ad for open postdoctoral position in my lab working with longitudinal fNIRS and EEG data from preschool children--especially interested in applicants with strong longitudinal modeling skills publish.illinois.edu/danielchyde/...

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