Melissa Kibbe

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.

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

Computational Cognitive Development Lab Presents at CogSci 2025 Learning from thought experiments in early childhood Igor Bascandziev, Garvin Brod, Patrick Shafto, and Elizabeth Bonawitz Poster Number: P1-B-9 In Person Poster Session 1 - Thursday, July 31 1-2:15 PM Salon 8 Stumped! Learning to think outside the box in 3-7 year old children Junyi Chu, Misha O’Keeffe, Silvia Kancong Liu, Elizabeth Bonawitz, and Tomer D. Ullman Talks 27.3: Learning and Development 2 Friday, August 1 1-2:30 PM Salon 6

CoCoDev @ CogSci!
Come check out cool work by Igor & @junyi.bsky.social

I couldn't read past “My experiences have led me to believe that one of the best things that men in a professional field can do for feminism is to learn to take sexual and romantic rejection well.” Immediately gave me the ick.

big "they mention Jerry Fodor in the first fifteen minutes of the first day of class" energy

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

where do they FIND these people?!

You can access the paper from our website as well www.bu.edu/cdl/files/20...

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

How was it? It's been on my to-read list for a while...

Newly accepted in PSPB! We examined whether Asian and Black Americans perceived one another through a zero-sum lens. Inspired by the SCOTUS affirmative action decisions, I wanted to know if Asians thought they were losing to Black people and how this mindset affects coalition
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Lot's of fun doing this interview! Thanks so much to Brinleigh and the Science To People team for giving me the opportunity to talk about curiosity and question asking.

More ways to listen and/or watch:
YouTube : youtu.be/2qTdI9Q82ck?...

Substack: sciencetopeople.substack.com/p/born-curio...

Excited about this in large part because Raphael is the absolute best

Happy to share this updated Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on 'Associationist Theories of Thought' with
@ericman.bsky.social. Among other things, we included a new major section on reinforcement learning. Many thanks to Eric for bringing me on board!

plato.stanford.edu/entries/asso...

The self-reference memory bias is preceded by an other-reference bias in infancy - Nature Communications A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

book cover of course manual

People asked me often over the years... now it's over but finally sharing it: Course manual — including readings, instructions on how to write essays and give presentations — for the course AI as a Science that I taught from 2020/21 to 2024/25 in the School of AI. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Ahh can't wait to listen to this!!

A happy little dance between attention and working memory (with Zsuzsa Kaldy)

🚨 New Episode! Our recent chat w/ Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy (@zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social ) is up! We chat about her cog sci journey, her work on infant working memory, and a recent paper in which she argues that attention and working memory work in concert to pursue goals. So much fun!

itsinnate.fireside.fm/29

Ok, #Booksky your Prime Day assignment: You've got a friend or family who still uses Amazon for all their books? Get them a Gift Certificate to your favorite bookstore and then make a date to go shopping/hanging out there with them.

a cartoon of spongebob squarepants holding a hammer while laying on the ground . ALT: a cartoon of spongebob squarepants holding a hammer while laying on the ground .

When it's a long set of radio buttons with dozens of funding agencies and you have to check "None of these"

I have the immense privilege of working with young adults every day, and it's one of main things that gives me hope for the future.

THE KEWL DOWN IS COMING RED BAR GRAPH AGAINST BLACK BACKGROUND SHOWS UPCOMING TEMPERATURES WEDNESDAY: 93 DEGREES THURSDAY: 71 DEGREES FRIDAY: 68 DEGREES SATURDAY: 71 DEGREES SUNDAY 81 DEGREES GREEN LINE SHOWS AVG TEMP OF 79 DEGREES

/ THE KEWL DOWN IS COMING
/ JUST 1 MOAR DAY IN THE 90S
/ & THEN ITS TIME
/ 4 THE KEWL DOWN
/ TEMPS IN THE LO 70S HI 60S
/ O ISNT THAT SO SPESH?
/ SPESH ENOUGH 4 U 2 REPENT 2 UR WEATHER LORDS?
/ SPESH ENOUGH 4 U 2 STOP UR POWERS & OLIGARX FROM DESTRUXTING U & UR PLANET?
/ REPENT 2 UR WEATHER LORDS

In the second most important election happening today, I'm on the slate for potential new members of the governing board for the Cognitive Science Society! If you're a member, check your email for a link to vote and #DontRankCuomo

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

The idea that there is a very small number of "qualified" candidates is comforting to those who want to believe that academia is a true meritocracy where only the "best" succeed.

Great thread.

I'm inclined to think there are just a TON of people who are qualified enough to be tt profs of philosophy. What the phil AI job explosion does, is move the "who gets a job" cone away from one small part of that large group (top-10 golden boys) to another (top-30 golden bois who can say "AI").

Image of a Cambridge Public Library card featuring a photo of a stone carving of a person picking up books, taken from the building facade

CPL still has cool cards! The classic CPL logo with he buildings is on the other side.

And now we know this poster won Best Poster at the SPP, once again proving the old adage: scream your poster at the program co-chair at a bar, win a poster award.

(The best poster award was decided by popular vote.)