Emily Mather

Don't worry academics, it's still only August 32nd. Still plenty of time!

continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

The “Bilingual Advantage” in Word Learning: A Meta-Analysis Hosted on the Open Science Framework

📢 Researchers in bilingualism & word learning!
I'm doing a meta-analysis on the bilingual advantage & seeking unpublished data comparing bilinguals vs monolinguals.
Summary stats or raw data welcome (confidential).
Pre-reg 👉 osf.io/6a7yg/
DM me or share if you know someone! 🙏

🧒🧠 If humans learned language like AI, it would take 92,000 years. Luckily, new research from Caroline Rowland (@mpi-nl.bsky.social) shows children learn through touch, movement & play as well.

Brains over bots 👇
www.mpi.nl/news/brains-...

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little ...

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/...

Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models Seminal work by Huebner et al. (2021) showed that language models (LMs) trained on English Child-Directed Language (CDL) can reach similar syntactic abilities as LMs trained on much larger amounts of ...

“Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models”

I’m happy to share that the preprint of my first PhD project is now online!

🎊 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23689

How Well Do Children Remember Fast‐Mapped Words? A Pre‐Registered Meta‐Analysis of Retention Following the Mutual Exclusivity Response There is widespread evidence that children display a mutual exclusivity response upon encountering new words. Children displaying this behaviour will select a novel, name-unknown object in response t...

New paper! Word learning meta-analysis out now w/ Shane Lindsay.

Building on Lewis et al. (2020), we look at retention of mappings formed via mutual exclusivity.

We find a small effect size for retention – further reduced by pub bias correction. More in the paper 👇

Non-paywalled: bit.ly/4kFvtUY

Funded PhD opportunity with @sjblakemore.bsky.social and I, at Cambridge. We are looking for someone interested in developmental science, to start in the coming academic year. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested (see details attached 😁).
drive.google.com/file/d/1RIvg...

All redundancy is awful, the fear, the sense of failure, the challenge of finding other work. It's such a common disaster in the UK most families know it.
But looking at my academic friends facing it now, it's particularly bad. They have twisted their whole lives around the pursuit of these roles >

Estimating Age‐Related Change in Infants' Linguistic and Cognitive Development Using (Meta‐)Meta‐Analysis Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological constructs change with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers ofte...

Our meta-meta-analysis is officially out! (w/ Molly Lewis, Sho Tsuji, @chbergma.bsky.social, @acristia.bsky.social, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social!)

Estimating age-related change in infants’ linguistic and cognitive development using (meta-)meta-analysis

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"How infants learn and explore: From behavior to computations" 👶⚙️

This review outlines my take on early development, mostly driven by frustration that infancy research focuses on what infants can do, not how.

Still a Preprint! Missing-literature suggestions welcome :)

osf.io/preprints/ps...

UK HE shrinking a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.

The number of UK universities actively making redundancies has now risen to 93. This will rise to 100 this summer and then get worse.
qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale

New paper out at @openmindjournal.bsky.social!!

We studied early vocab in deaf, hearing, blind, and sighted children in order to learn how sensory access (vision 👀, hearing 👂) and linguistic experiences shape how children learn words...

Read on for a quick summary! 1/N

title of paper (in text) plus author list

Time course of word recognition for kids at different ages.

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word
recognition support language learning across early
childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The loss of a legend- Kanzi, the language-competent bonobo, has died age 44.
Kanzi was exceptional in so many ways and offered us profound insights into the linguistic & cognitive capacities of great apes. He has taught us so much and will be hugely missed.
www.apeinitiative.org/remembering-...

Depiction comparing standard views of statistical learning with a sponge and the new information foraging view with an octopus

What is human #StatisticalLearning for? The standard assumption is that the goal of SL is to learn the regularities in the environment to guide behavior. In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that SL instead is provides the basis for novelty detection within an information foraging system
1/2

Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London Apply now for the Postdoctoral Research Associate role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

Advertising 2 new positions in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. A postdoc & an RA at Queen Mary University of London as part of our UKRI-funded Animating Minds Project. More details and how to apply here:
Postdoc: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLX749/p...
RA: qmul-jobs.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

Research Associate (0.65 FTE, Fixed-term for 18 months) (RA2298) in University of East Anglia | UEA View details and apply for this Research Associate (0.65 FTE, Fixed-term for 18 months) (RA2298) vacancy in University of East Anglia. Faculty of Social Sciences School of Psychology Research...

New RA position! We are looking for an excellent graduate/MSc student with some experience in developmental psy and interest in language, deafness, conceptual knowledge, infancy @psychologyuea.bsky.social

Clever study that explores the debate between those who claim that color categories are 'innate' and those who argue that they are dependent on language. It turns out that monkeys, unlike humans, do not have consensus color categories, suggesting cognitive mechanisms such as language are required.🧪🧠

Another UK university drops big Elsevier deal

The @york.ac.uk has opted out of a subscription deal with the academic publishing giant Elsevier, saying it needs to adopt a “more financially sustainable approach”, @resprofnews.bsky.social has learned.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

I think they are worn down by untalented yet arrogant men in leadership roles — cheers to you, missing ladies 🥂

TLDR: Academics from low-income backgrounds are more like to push the needle on science, but less likely to receive credit for doing so. 🥴

#econsky #academicsky

Academics from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to
- not publish
- have outstanding publication records
- introduce more novel scientific concepts
- less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards.
www.nber.org/papers/w33289

Funny cartoon of a person saying to the grim reaper “I’ve gotta check with work first”. Illustration drawn in simplistic line art style. By Amii Illustrates.

Talking to friends about this, I realised the big difference between cycling in the UK and NL is the mental load.

In the UK, I’m constantly alert, looking in every direction, navigating bad junctions, expecting drivers to put me at risk.

In NL, I can assume I am largely safe and just cycle.

Patrick Freyne: I am becoming a demotivational speaker – let’s all have an averagely productive December I keep meeting people who are extremely burned out. I meet them so often that I’m beginning to think burnout is something that exists by design

A really thoughtful piece about the madness and tyranny of productivity culture

“We must always be above average when, in reality, most of us, most of the time, can only be average by definition”

www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...