🚨NEW PAPER 🚨

Nonverbal rationality? 2-year-old children, dogs, and pigs show unselective responses to unreliability but to different degrees

Open access here: doi.org/10.1111/cdev...

A few weeks ago, I presented a poster at the Society for Philosophy & Psychology at Cornell University on my work titled, "Unlike Father, Like Son: The End of History Illusion Across Generations." #SPP2025 @socphilpsych.bsky.social 1/3🧵

New paper!

We develop a framework for understanding how reflective belief revision could emerge from unreflective responses to evidence, integrating epistemology and developmental psychology.

Epistemic Rationality Begins Unreflectively
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#DevPsych #Epistemology

Check us out at #SRCD tomorrow! Great work led by @feceozkan.bsky.social and @khblakey.bsky.social

Excited to be organizing this symposium with @samuelronfard.bsky.social's support! 😊 Check out our session #SRCD25, Friday, 11.30 am, and hear from Joshua Confer, @anahidmodrek.bsky.social, and @lucaspbutler.bsky.social! @janengelmann.bsky.social

“I like preregistration for science for the same reason that architects like to build scale models before designing the building. Preregistration helps me form my expectations, allows me to make more reasonable design choices, and makes it easier for me to be surprised in useful ways.” (in comment)

New paper in Cognitive Psychology with first author Vivian Liu! We investigate U.S. children's and adults' perceptions of discrimination. authors.elsevier.com/c/1kEp32Hxod...

Age related improvements between 5- and 8-years-old in understanding that emotions can cause intrusive thoughts and that those intrusive thoughts make it harder to pay attention and learn.

Bonus: Want your kids to better understand the downsides of intense positive emotions? Our lab created this wonderful video for you to watch together! (Credit to Faith Toreno)

youtu.be/aHNy_uIje1M?...

Recognizing the sweet spot for cognitive performance
seems to involve two paradoxical intuitions: emotions can bolster motivation to tackle demanding tasks, but if too intense, they can also disrupt attentional focus by pulling the contents of the mind toward their source or origin.

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In their verbal responses, children and adults mention motivation at similar rates. However, with increasing age, children are more likely to reference intrusive thoughts as a source of distraction (e.g., “She will be thinking about what made her happy instead of listening to the teacher”).

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5yos think that the happier you are, the easier it will be to pay attention. In contrast, adults believe attentional performance peaks in a mildly positive mood.

With age, children become increasingly skeptical about the benefits of intense positive emotions for cognitive performance. Why?

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5yos and adults reason similarly about emotional valence: they believe paying attention is easy if you’re happy and hard if you’re sad. By age 5, they also understand that intensity matters: the sadder you are, the harder it will be to focus.

However... 🧵3/6

We asked 5- to 8-year-olds and adults to predict which of two characters would be better at paying attention to a new topic (Study 1) and how easy or hard it would be to pay attention in different emotional states (Study 2).

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Have you ever wondered what’s your optimal mood for staying focused? 🤔 Our new paper in @Developmental Psychology explores how children and adults think about this question (w/ Brandon Goulding and @samuelronfard.bsky.social )

doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

Here is what we found...👀
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