Rodney Tompkins

CDS 2026: Intuitive Theories of Care and Protection in Development Intuitive Theories of Care and Protection in Development Morning Pre-Conference Workshop (8:30am–11:30am) at CDS 2026 Organizers Rodney Tompkins, PhD Student (rtompkins@ucsd.edu) Department of Psychol...

For our pre-conference summary and abstract, check out the linked doc below!

Schedule of speakers for a morning pre-conference workshop at the 2026 meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Attending CDS 2026? Consider joining us at the morning pre-conference workshop on intuitive theories of care and protection in development @cogdevsoc.bsky.social

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

💥New paper alert! Dyadic Decisions About Effort: How Caregivers Shape Young Children’s Persistence (with @reutshachnai.bsky.social)

One of my favorites! If you’re curious about what we’ve been up to in @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social, take a look!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!

Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

Back to reality: Children's early temporal reasoning applies to real but not hypothetical events Abstract. Time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are hard for children to learn, and for researchers to study, because their referents change from day

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social! We argue that children's struggle to represent the past and future in common tests of knowledge may stem from difficulties in hypothetical reasoning about imaginary timelines, rather than a lack of knowledge about time. 1/n
academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Towards a habit-rupture model of intergroup contact in everyday settings - Nature Reviews Psychology The literature assumes that intergroup contact is naturally occurring, positive and consistently associated with positive outcomes, but these premises are inconsistent with everyday intergroup contact...

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch

New paper out by Paolini et al. on habit-ruptures in intergroup contact

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

(If you like that, our also team has a related paper in press at American Psychologist, led by Rose Meleady)
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

🧵 New preprint with my advisor, Alex Shaw!
We asked: What does “popularity” actually mean? Is it a distinct status category with specific features? We turned to elementary-schoolers, who have just begun to experience their own "popularity hierarchies," for some answers.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025 Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨DEADLINE EXTENDED🚨
The extended submission deadline is January 30, 2026. Submit your work here:

Exploring the evolutionary roots of theory of mind: Primate errors on false belief tasks reveal representational limits Human adults flexibly reason about others' unobservable mental states, a capacity known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Unfortunately, the roots of this capa…

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.

A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.

Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Promotional graphic for CogSci 2026. The top left shows the conference logo with three interlocking gears and the text: ‘CogSci 2026 – Cognitive Inefficiency – July 22–25, Rio de Janeiro.’ On the right, large text reads ‘Call for Submissions.’ Below, the message says: ‘Review the submission guidelines, download the templates, and make note of key deadline dates.’ The background is a dark teal color, and the word ‘Submissions’ appears in large lime-green letters.

📣 #CogSci2026 submissions now OPEN!

🔍 Review the submission guidelines
⬇️ Download the required templates
📅 Make note of key deadline dates

cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/

How Colorblind and Structural Messages Affect Children's Reasoning About Novel Group Disparities Children experience a variety of messages about racial–ethnic socialization from their parents, teachers, and other sources, who might not answer children's questions about race, or might explicitly...

some parents, esp white parents, fail to answer their children's questions about race or provide colorblind messages ("race is not important"). but are these effective? 🗣️ we find they aren't! structural explanations seem to be more constructive (1/5) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Motivational context does not influence children’s third-party punishment in intergroup contexts Children punish to reciprocate harm (retributive motives) and to prevent future wrongdoing (consequentialist motives). Building on this idea, we wante…

Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨

How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.

👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

🚨🚨🚨
Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
🚨🚨🚨

We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Are you a US-based PhD student WITHOUT summer funding who is interested in adolescent development, trans youth, and/or gender? Reach out to me about applying to join my lab in Summer 2026 for the VIPS program! psych.princeton.edu/diversity/vi...

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!

More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...

Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

Shopping for a hot take on nativism? Here's an argument that "strong nativist" accounts of concepts (here, numerical concepts) often fail to explain ontogenesis because they lack an account of "rational causation" - i.e., how innate contents are brought to bear in experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exact numerical reasoning in blind children and adults What is the origin of exact numerical reasoning in humans? Previous studies report that innumerate humans are unable to recognize that two sets placed…

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵:

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

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

New article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social

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

When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.

Excited to announce DID lab's first paper!

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

We find that children as young as 6 show political ingroup preference!

First paper of very talented @annie-schw.bsky.social!

In JEP: General's special issue on political development (1/3)

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New work! Kristin Shutts and I review how help can in some cases backfire and lead to detriments in children’s self-views, views of others, and motivation, especially when help is distributed unequally. Check it out here (open access!):
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...