If you read the paper and have any thoughts we'd love to hear them! Ps. the copy-editors accidentally changed the exact month at which infants succeed in a couple of papers. We'll post the fixed version to the same link as soon as we have it.

We think this is a major part of development that's partially learned through parent-child conversations! (and it connects to ideas that Lio Wong, Dan Greco, and others have made about adult cognition!).

the idea is that adults are constantly building restricted scope models--simplified context-specific models that make reasoning tractable. Infants don't know how to do this, so they only succeed in tasks where the experiment itself gives them the restricted model (e.g., through familiarization)

There's two puzzles we've been thinking about: Why are infants so smart in the lab and seemingly dumb in real life? And how can the Bayesian reasoning models that explain infant and adult social cognition scale up to the messiness of the real world? We think both puzzles have the same solution

The paper tries to unify a lot of studies on social development by breaking them down into basic computational primitives and processes. Beyond the review side we have a couple of new ideas in there that I'm excited about.

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

We have an open-rank position in quantitative psychology at Yale! Please apply if this describes you: apply.interfolio.com/171903

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️!

We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺
🔗 minds-making.github.io

June – July 2024, free & open to the public
(all career stages, all disciplines)

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Now out in JPSP ‼️

"Inference from social evaluation" with Zach Davis, Kelsey Allen, @maxkw.bsky.social, and @julianje.bsky.social

📃 (paper): psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
📜 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...

My new piece in @theguardian.com

Techno-optimism is human pessimism.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele,
@alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here:

www.amacad.org/daedalus

Now hiring for two lab manager positions at Stanford! Hyo Gweon and I are coordinating joint searches since our labs collaborate frequently. Please join us!

careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc...
and
careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/lab-coo...

🚨 Finally out! My new @annualreviews.bsky.social in Psychology paper:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵

New paper in Open Mind! What does it mean to help? What is the goal of a helping action? We wanted to probe infants' & preschoolers' helping concept - specifically, whether they think helpers reduce others' action costs. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to [email protected] by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

🔊 New paper just accepted in JPSP 🥳

In "Inference from social evaluation", we explore how people use social evaluations, such as judgments of blame or praise, to figure out what happened.

📜 osf.io/preprints/ps...

📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

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I'm hoping to hire a postdoc this year to join our growing lab at Yale! Looking for someone interested in EMA/digital phenotyping, formal theories, complex systems, & computational psychiatry.

If this sounds like you, please reach out! Official ad coming soon.

Oooh I just skimmed that and looks cool! Will read carefully soon!

This is work with Paula Rubio-Fernández and @marleneberke.bsky.social

But we think this is possible (and easy!) because we’re using lightweight mentalistic representations that don’t look like what people think about when they think about ToM (big propositional attitudes), but they fit nicely with advances in computational models of ToM!

This paper might seem radical to some. We think there’s so much ToM happening in language all the time. Otherwise, we’d struggle with the most basic things like how to use adjectives, definites (a/the), and demonstratives (this/that).

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Six more days to submit a grad application to the Harvard Psychology Department! I'm reading applications this year. My lab studies how people think about social relationships, usually with babies and children!