Martin Zettersten

#BUCLD50 Symposium: “Innateness is not a dirty word: Reframing the origins of language development”, by Shanley Allen, Marisa Casillas, Alejandrina Cristia, Michael C. Frank, Caroline Rowland, Leher Singh, and Paul Bloom!

Learn more at:
www.bu.edu/bucld/

#Innateness #LLM #LanguageDevelopment

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026!

The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io

Due Date Dec 1

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪

Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉

arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia Neophobia (the aversive response to novelty) varies considerably across species and individuals, and can impact adaptability and survival. This study assesses neophobia in 1400 subjects from 136 bird ...

🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology:
“A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.”
Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
@themanybirds.bsky.social

infant data from experiment 1

conceptual schema for different habituation models

title page

results from experiment 2 with adults

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

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.

Planning to be incremental: Scene descriptions reveal meaningful clustering in language production How do speakers plan complex descriptions and then execute those plans? In this work, we attempt to answer this question by asking subjects to describ…

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Research Coordinator, Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab in Graduate School of Education, Stanford, California, United States The Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) seeks a full-time Research Coordinator (acting lab manager) to help launch and coordinate the Minds,.....

I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

Abstract of the paper.

Title page of the paper.

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org

New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

New Open dataset alert:
🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience!

N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks!

🧵below

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4–6 years, M=4.6${\it M...

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I wrote an R package that creates standardized R project structures that are compliant with @mekline.bsky.social's psych-DS...ish.

It also creates additional features for reproducibility and teaching like a readme, license, .gitignore and Quarto templates

+ can validate existing projects

My final project from grad school is out now in Dev Psych! Mombasa County preschoolers were more accurate on object-based than picture-based vocabulary assessments, whereas Bay Area preschoolers were equally accurate on object-based and picture-based assessments.

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

<em>Child Development</em> | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather i...

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

Sketchnote of Nora Newcombe's Rumelhart Prize Talk, posing three questions and case studies for cognitive science: (1) innateness (with the geometric module as a case study), (2) representations (featuring cognitive maps vs. graphs), and (3) embodiment (featuring mental rotation)

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

doug medin finding out he is the rumelhart prize winner

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

On Wednesday: Adena Schachner, talk: "Intuitive Archeology: Social reasoning from the physical world”, W ~10 am, Fourth Level (Pacific) Room A. Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster: "How children explore and detect augmented reality filters", W 10-11 am, Fourth level (Pacific) Room E. On Thursday: Amy Nguyễn, Rodney Tompkins & Adena Schachner, poster, "When walls talk: People make social inferences from towns’ protective features", Th 1:00-2:15, P1-T-194 On Saturday: Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster, "Perceived musicality in an android increases positive social attributions", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-113 Shirley Liu, Craig McKenzie & Adena Schachner, poster, "When Default Options Explain Away Preferences: A Causal Reasoning Account of Mental State Reasoning from Default Options ", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-11

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

A white and gray dog touches a yellow dot hanging on the wall with his nose. Text says ManyDogs 2 - Join the Team!

🚨 Calling all dog behavior & cognition researchers - ManyDogs Project is launching ManyDogs 2!

🔍🐕‍🦺We're studying overimitation: Do dogs copy irrelevant actions just b/c their favorite human does them?

Email manydogsproject2@gmail.com to collaborate globally and contribute to reproducible science!

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents.
Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656
And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Ah I wish but unfortunately no (tho check out some fun work by @tarunsepuri.bsky.social & @brialong.bsky.social that will be presented there: osf.io/preprints/ps...). Hopefully next time!

Helpless infants are learning a foundation model Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the br…

And the original article is here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

‘Helpless’ infants are active, goal-directed agents: response to Cusack et al. Why are humans born ‘helpless’? In their recent article in TiCS [1], Cusack et al. propose an explanation for the limited behavioral repertoires of human infants compared with those of other animals. ...

Corrected link ; ) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Enjoyed this interesting discussion with Rhodri Cusack & co-author team about their foundation model perspective on infant development! Both the letter by @marielgoddu.bsky.social, Ruthe, and I (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... and a thoughtful response from the original authors are now officially out.

Thanks for the thought-provoking conversation, Rhodri & team! I like the way you highlighted how surprisingly complex behaviors/ knowledge can emerge from seemingly "simple" statistical learning mechanisms - I think we're on the same page there. Looking forward to future chances to discuss further!

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Disagreement drives metacognitive development Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent rese…

Check out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets.
With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!

New paper out now asks:
Why do we bother remembering *how* we learned something?
With @antoniafl.bsky.social, Dilara Keşşafoğlu, Winuss Mohtezebsade, @celestekidd.bsky.social, Aylin Küntay, @janengelmann.bsky.social, and Bahar Köymen
dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0...