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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · 12d

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.

Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 12d

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...

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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 12d

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...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Sep 8

Big news: FIT'NG 2026 will be held in Panama City next year, right after #ICIS2026!! Can't wait for this awesome week of infant science coming next July 👶🧠

Fetal, Infant, & Toddler Neuroimaging Group—FIT’NG @fitngin.bsky.social · Sep 8

Join us next July in Panama!! #FITNG2025 --> 2026 🌴🤓

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 28

4. Rodney Tompkins finds that 4- and 5-year-old children take risk and protection into account when evaluating caregivers who help or hinder their kids. I'll also talk about this work (& other findings) in Symposium 1 on caregiving: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 28

3. Coxi Jiang finds that the strength of relationships, not just their valence, guides adults' predictions about vicarious emotional responses to others' experiences (i.e. empathy & counter-empathy): osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 28

2. Bill Pepe finds that infants expect helpers and hinderers to act the same way in a new context -- but only toward the same target, not a new one. This suggests they infer the actors' relationships, not their dispositions.
CogSci: osf.io/preprints/os...
Expanded manuscript: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 28

Here's a quick rundown of the 4 papers we'll be presenting:

1. Tori Hennessy makes the case (using unpublished, reanalyzed data from my PhD and postdoc) that infants learn to recognize conventional actions, and that these are the actions they expect group members to share: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 28

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

A list of the SoCal Lab's presentations at CogSci.

In brief:
Lindsey Powell is giving talks in Workshop 1 on July 30 at 9:30 am and in Symposium 1 on July 31.

Tori Hennessy is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition 1 session on July 31.

Bill Pepe is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition session on August 1.

Coxi Jiang is giving a talk in the Emotion session on August 1.

Rodney Tompkins is presenting a poster in Session 2 on August 1.

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Many Minds podcast @manymindspod.bsky.social · Jul 17

New episode!! 🎙️📣

A chat w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social & @dorsaamir.bsky.social about childhood across cultures.

Humans everywhere go through childhood—a time of learning, growth, and play. But this universal stage of life can look very different in different places.

Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

Instead, they learn that who the helper has positive relationships with, and what the relative strength or priority of those relationships is.

Or so we think :). Let us know what you think!

And come see Bill talk about this at CogSci! The current work grew out of this paper: osf.io/preprints/os...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

Together, this suggests infants do learn from helping & hindering, but they aren't learning who is good/nice vs. bad/mean. (At least from this pattern of initial evidence, with all helping & hindering toward one target, which is common in other studies).

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

Second, infants could make transitive inferences about the helper's strength of care. After they saw the helper help: 1) target A when A was alone, 2) target B over A, 3) target C over B, infants then saw test trials with targets A & C. They expected the helper to help C.

Figure showing events and displays from Experiment 4 of the preprint. In all events, the helper is up on a plateau at the back of the display. There are three target characters who each appear in one of three low alleyways, with one or two of them present in each trial. The targets each want a toy ball on a high shelf in their alley that they can't reach. The helper jumps down into one of the alleys to help one target get their ball, but can't help more than one target per scene. In three different types of familiarization events, the helper helps a "low value" target when that target is alone, a medium value target instead of the low value target when those two are present, and a high value target instead of the medium value target when those two are present. (Infants saw nine of these events in 1-2-3 or 3-2-1 repeating order). Test trials feature a new situation in which both the low and high value targets need help, and the helper alternates between helping each of them. Infants looked longer, indicating a violation of their expectations, when the helper helped the low value target. This suggests they used the pattern of choices in the familiarization trials to map the helpers' value for the targets onto a common underlying scale.

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

First, infants' expectations for consistent future behavior were target-specific. After they saw actors help and hinder a target in one context, they expected the helper & not the hinderer to help in a new situation that featured the same target, but not one that featured a new target.

Figure showing events and data from Experiments 1 and 2 of the preprint. In the familiarization phase of both experiments, one character helps a target up a hill and another character pushes the target down. At test, either the same target character (Experiment 1) or a new target (Experiment 2) wants to get to a bright blue platform, but the platform is blocked by a big wall. On alternating trials, the helper and hinderer from the familiarization phase push it out of the way, and the target then successfully gets to the platform. If infants think the helper and hinderer are nice and mean, respectively, they should expect the helper to help and the hinderer not to help in the test trials of both experiments. However, this is not what we found. Data showed longer looking when the hinderer, rather than the helper, helped the original target character in Experiment 1, but equal looking when the hinderer and helper helped the new target character in Experiment 2. This suggests infants interpreted the helping and hindering in familiarization as evidence of the helper and hinderer's positive and negative relationships with, or attitudes toward, that specific target character, rather than evidence of broader traits or dispositions.

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

Two patterns of evidence in infants’ expectations led us to conclude that infants take helping as evidence of a positive helper-target relationship, not a broader social or moral disposition (all expts w/ 14-15 mo old infants, N=52, preregistered):

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 17

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Jul 9

New paper from Qi, Vul and Powell introduces a clever way to measure a participant's Welfare-Tradeoff Ratio in a single trial: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · Jul 9

Thanks for the shout out :) We have high hopes that the efficiency of the measure will make it easier to ask questions that involve denser sampling, e.g. about the dynamics of WTRs or their distribution across social networks.

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Victor Btesh @vbtesh.bsky.social · May 21

New CogSci paper!

In "Taking others for granted: Balancing presentational and personal goals in action selection" we propose a computational model explaining why people favour self interested behaviour when they believe others to trust them.

📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎 github.com/Vbtesh/takin...

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Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · May 23

Preprint of data from my first project as a postdoc with With @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social and Liz Spelke. Data and writing from 2019, figures are new :) osf.io/preprints/ps...

First, we replicate @lindseypowell.bsky.social 's finding that infants reach for imitators using a very different setup.

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · May 22

💔

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · May 22

Congrats, Chujun, we’ll miss you 🥲

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Shari Liu @shariliu.bsky.social · May 20

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition"
sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

Domain Interactions | CogSci 2025

Organizers

sites.google.com

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · May 21

This was so fun! Thanks for organizing @rtompkins.bsky.social!!

Rodney Tompkins @rtompkins.bsky.social · May 21

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · May 17

Yesterday @asmithflores.bsky.social successfully defended her PhD and became Dr. Smith-Flores! Then she celebrated with her fantastic committee and lab members :) Congratulations, Alexis!!

Dr. Alexis Smith-Flores with her dissertation committee members: Dave Barner, Desmond Ong, Lindsey Powell, Adena Schachner, and Chris Oveis

A glorious cake, made by Bill Pepe, featuring Blender-style social characters and the message "Congrats Doctor Smith-Flores"

White board messages to Alexis from labmates & friends

After party festivities included a "PhDone" cake and a sign reading: "Even infants expect you to be happy for me. Have a marg and a taco!"

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · May 1

I'm sad to miss #SRCD2025 but @rtompkins.bsky.social is there and one of his presentations is on work we've been doing together: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ever wonder what children think about caregivers who stop kids from doing dangerous things? Go to his talk (Thurs 11:50 am session) to find out!

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