Victoria Southgate

This theory formed the basis of a new ERC Advanced Grant where we will test some of the ideas in this paper, over the next few years.

Sharing a preprint laying out a new theory of the origins of self-awareness. In this theory, our human capacity for self-awareness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the interplay between interoception and ostension, during the first year of life 👶. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Never even heard of this journal!

Four University of Copenhagen researchers awarded major EU grants Next five years to see breakthroughs in plant immunity, political morality, geopolitics and childhood self-awareness

European Research Council grants to‪ @vhsouthgate.bsky.social, Peter Brodersen, @adler-nissen.bsky.social and Christian F. Rostbøll: uniavisen.dk/en/four-univ...

An evolutionary perspective on altercentrism Putting oneself, mentally, in someone else’s shoes is traditionally considered a late-developing, cognitively demanding skill thought to critically un…

Human cognition is often altercentric, and human infants seem to have an altercentric bias. Is this cognitive stance uniquely human or might it be shared with other species? There are arguments both ways and we explore them in this paper.

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

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful. • Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves. • Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety. • Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces. • Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

A big thank you again to Athena Demertzi and Emmanuel Stamatakis for organising a wonderful ASSC conference @assc28.bsky.social @theassc.bsky.social! See you all in Chile next year @assc2026.bsky.social !

This paper really is developmental science at its best. Empirically convincing and theoretically rich. Shows once again that we cannot assume that the adult state is the default state.

Before, they are altercentric and remember better things that are relevant for others; afterwards, they shift towards egocentrism, remembering better things that are relevant for themselves - as we also do as adults.

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...

👶Do babies read minds?

@vhsouthgate.bsky.social at the University of Copenhagen challenges the idea that infants mentalise. Instead they may be “altercentric”, focused on what others pay attention to.

👉 buff.ly/My4EpbB
🎧 buff.ly/9j5ZeF8

#TheoryOfMind #FrontierResearch #EU2025DK @eu2025dk

"Nosek also wants academia to create clear career paths for people doing replication studies—it should be something that university bosses admire and want to promote."

Also NO. This is someone's pet theory for how science works, not actually how science works.

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity!!!
The Toronto Early Cognition Lab (@UofT) is hiring a postdoc to study early optimism in infants & young children.
Work w/ multi-method approach, amazing undergrads & grads.
Start: Fall 2025 or later.
Details: jessica.sommerville@utoronto.ca
RTs appreciated 💫

And Copenhagen on the way! Would love to have you give a talk.

I dag modtager fire KU-forskere hver et Advanced Grant fra European Research Council (ERC)! | Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen I dag modtager fire KU-forskere hver et Advanced Grant fra European Research Council (ERC)! 🥳 De fire forskere er: Professor Christian Rostbøll, Institut for Statskundskab Projekt: Moralizing Politic...

This @erc.europa.eu Advanced Grant will test a novel mechanistic model of how human infants might acquire a concept of a self. We’ll investigate the interaction between interoception and ostension, not only in the lab but in infants in both Vanuatu and Japan!

www.linkedin.com/posts/univer...

Thank you!!

Really stimulating interdisciplinary discussion meeting at the Royal Society in London. I shared some developmental data and new theoretical ideas on the origin of the self and heard some excellent talks.

Post-doctoral Researcher (f/m/d) Post-doctoral Researcher (f/m/d)

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨

We're looking for a postdoc to work on EEG and fNIRS projects with 3-18-month-old infants, looking at whether/how/when infants represent affordances: careers.ceu.edu/job-invite/8...

Part of the @simonsfoundation.org SCENE project: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s...

Choose Europe for Science: ERC welcomes new budget for 'super grants' The Scientific Council of the European Research Council welcomes the offer of substantial additional budget from the European Commission for the development of a new ERC funding instrument offering la...

Choose Europe for Science: ERC welcomes new budget for 'super grants'. Might be a particularly interesting opportunity for US researchers thinking of relocating to Europe 🇪🇺

Quite apart from the obvious not-worth-the-risk, I just think there’s enough great meetings this side of the pond and I don’t want my personal or grant money to be spent in a country acting this way

The post by Marco Rubio Met with Danish Foreign Minister Rasmussen in Brussels today to talk about the defense priorities shared by our two nations. We discussed the importance of increasing burden sharing within NATO and addressing threats to the Alliance.

A post by Lars Løkke Rasmussen Honest and direct meeting with @SecRubio yesterday. I made it crystal clear that claims and statements about annexing Greenland are not only unacceptable and disrespectful. They amount to a violation of international law.

This is what you call two different readouts of the same meeting.

Go Denmark, Go Greenland!

Really enjoy CogSci but I will not be traveling to the US until the US resumes normal service.

What Adolescence reveals about our society's failure to protect childhood Netflix’s Adolescence was a brilliantly crafted, yet harrowing look into the causes and consequences of serious crimes committed by children.

Some thoughts on Adolescence and what it reveals about our failure to protect childhood.

Stanley from Yale to Toronto - Daily Nous Jason Stanley, currently professor of philosophy at Yale University, will be moving to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Professor Stanley is well known...

"I want to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship." Philosopher Jason Stanley is leaving Yale and taking up a position at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

I was a middle class, middle of the road, middling person, muddling along. Shocks of Brexit,Trump, Ukraine and Gaza jolted me out of complacency. We must fight for our values every day, never take democracy for granted. I no longer think Bernie and AOC are “radical”; they’re principled and feisty. 👍

I am begging, pleading in fact, for my fellow academics to find some courage and start speaking up. Because you can't just keep your head down and ride out this storm. And even if you could, is that really what you want being a scholar and educator to be?

We already have many great conferences in Europe so it's an easy decision not to travel to the US anymore.

It’s shocking and now just not worth the risk to travel to the US for conferences.