Mike Frank

screenshot from symbolic systems webpage

Big thanks to the Symbolic Systems Program (if you don't know it, check it out!), @mcxfrank.bsky.social & the Wasow Scholar program for having me.

symsys.stanford.edu

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all time I believe we should talk about the mistakes we make.

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all times, Yes, I teach it to students daily, and refer to it in lots of papers. Sorry. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

To learn more about BabyView, check out our project page with other papers and information about our camera design: babyview-project.github.io

Figure 1 showing alignment pipeline using CLIP models on BabyView data.

Figure 2: human judgments are correlated with CLIP scores.

Can we use VLMs to quantify multimodal alignment in children's experiences? We analyze a large corpus of headcam videos to find out!

New preprint from our BabyView project, led by @alvinwmtan.bsky.social and Jane Yang: arxiv.org/abs/2511.18824

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...

Abstract of paper

Figure 1!

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help?

New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hello bsky! Excited to share this paper as my very first post / repost :-) We show that children are sensitive to whether an adult offered promised help, and strategically consider this to decide what task to pursue (easy or hard?) and whether to explore vs. seek help!

Abstract of paper

Figure 1!

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help?

New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thanks for the tag and the kind words! Hope the reading group is great.

Lauren’s project research team at Pizza House to start off the Fall semester right. 15 individuals are seated at a long table smiling with much pizza and garlic bread.

Feeling so proud of my 14!!! research assistants this week. Four submitted abstracts to MPA, our regional conference, yesterday and tomorrow 10 of them are joining me for a quarterly book club on @mcxfrank.bsky.social and colleagues’ fantastic Experimentology text (Chapters 1-4). What a good group.

#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

1/
Alright, this one’s been sitting in my drawer for a year now, after @mcxfrank.bsky.social and I got turned down for a public commentary.
But before I forget about it completely, here’s the preprint:
Can we harvest insights for rice theory from two state farms in China?

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford University is recruiting PhD students this cycle!

We are a supportive team who happened to wear bluesky appropriate colors for the lab photo (this wasn't planned). 💙

Lab info: cicl.stanford.edu
Application details: psychology.stanford.edu/admissions/p...

Exposing omitted moderators: Explaining why effect sizes differ in the social sciences | PNAS Policymakers increasingly rely on behavioral science in response to global challenges, such as climate change or global health crises. But applicat...

#statstab #434 Exposing omitted moderators: Explaining why effect sizes differ in the social sciences

Thoughts: Maybe our models are too simple to makdle the generalisable claims we want.

#bias #moderator #causalinference #heterogeneity #effect

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Astronaut meme: "Wait, it's all perception?" "Always has been"

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇

The science fiction science method - Nature The ‘science fiction science’ method simulates future technologies and collects quantitative data on the attitudes and behaviours of participants in various future scenarios, with the aim of predicting impacts of future technologies before they arrive.

Science fiction science, by the ever-thoughtful Iyad Rahwan: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Title and abstract of the paper

How do you measure early language development in languages where you don't have word lists?

New paper: Measuring children’s early vocabulary in low-resource languages using a Swadesh-style word list - led by @kachergis.bsky.social and @alvinwmtan.bsky.social

osf.io/njm7d_v1

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A key hypothesis in the history of linguistics is that different constructions share underlying structure. We take advantage of recent advances in mechanistic interpretability to test this hypothesis in Language Models.

New work with @kmahowald.bsky.social and @cgpotts.bsky.social!

🧵👇!

One big question is, start with songs or start with rudiments/scales/exercises! Holistic top down or bottom up foundations.

In college teaching, we have to figure out whether we want to start with the history/foundations/principles compared with compelling examples (“songs”).

In contrast, the worst have learning goals like “expose to X” or “show Y”… they’re a bit like pedagogical concerts but not like real teaching.

For example, I loved a class on playing clawhammer guitar. It was an hour long and the teacher made you do the basic clawhammer motion on the guitar literally for the entire hour to solidify a complicated motor routine. All the rest was gravy because you left having put in that practice…

The best have really clear and immediate learning goals. I liked your AC/DC example because some of the best classes I’ve taken define a learning goal that matters and take immediate steps to get you moving on it in class time.

At various times I’ve studied mandolin, guitar, bass, cello, and voice. Right now mostly mando and voice. Bluegrass and folk music has a very robust group teaching tradition (eg in camps and festivals). Often these have very uneven pedagogy.

I play music a lot and study with many music teachers. :)

Great analogy! I think a lot about transfer between music teaching and university teaching (and vice versa).

oh great - thank you!!

Bonus: full text of the paper "The Yerkes-Dodson Law Repealed" pasted below:

There is a flaw
In the evidence for the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
To call it “ubiquitous”
Is pretty iniquitous.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2...

Anyone know what the best recent evidence on the Yerkes-Dodson law is? Thanks in advance!