Brianna Hunter

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Maria Loconsole1*, Silvia Benavides-Varela2,3, Lucia Regolin1 Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of this association, and whether it is unique to humans, we tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby domestic chickens (Gallus gallus). as a precocial species, chicks can be tested shortly after hatching, allowing us to control their pretest experiences. Similar to humans, both 3-day-old [experiment 1 (exp. 1)] and 1-day-old (exp. 2) chicks spontaneously choose a spiky shape when hearing the “kiki” sound and a round shape when hearing the “bouba” sound. results from naïve young animals suggest a predisposed mechanism for matching the dimensions of shape and sound, which may be widespread across species.

main fig from the paper showing the association between bouba/round and kiki/spiky in newborn chicks

the new paper on bouba/kiki in chicks is utterly compelling

canonical, elegant method from comparative cogsci & its partner in developmental science, ultra-simple design, ultra-clear effects, no need for fancy analyses, machine learning, or AI

it appeared in an appropriately badass venue (Science)

From a Baby’s Point of View: How Infants’ Face Diets Shape Their Face Perception - Charisse B. Pickron, Laurie Bayet, 2026 Individual variations in face-perception expertise become apparent by the second year of life. We propose that infants’ “face diet”—the nature and quantity of t...

New paper! Had lots of fun writing this with @lauriebayet.bsky.social There is so much more to say about extrinsic and intrinsic experiences which shape infants' face perception and learning, hopefully this keeps & starts conversations about a topic we love!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Why do children struggle to recognise objects in cluttered scenes more than adults? Our new paper looks at the development of visual acuity and crowding across childhood, and the way the visual system fine tunes our ability to see detail: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience If you are a current Barnard College employee, please use the internal career site to apply for this position. Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience The Barnard Visua...

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

This is good news for NIH-funded behavioral scientists and for the public; it resolves an unfortunate Catch-22 situation that inflated administrative burden and occasionally excluded basic behavioral science from funding opportunities:
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Deep learning in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into everyday tasks and work environments. However, its adoption in medical image analys…

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research

@lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

Sharing a new article aimed at students and early career scholars on how to do a good peer review in developmental psychology. We offer a framework for a good peer review and suggestions on how to navigate challenges, including AI. The article is open access. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Holistic and Analytic Attention in Infancy: A Cross‐Cultural Study in Sweden and Zimbabwe This pre-registered eye-tracking study assesses whether there are differences in infants' attention allocation across diverse cultural contexts while taking several social-environmental factors into ...

Tu et al. (2025) studied 9mo infants in Sweden & Zimbabwe via eye-tracking: attention allocation is diff in these cultures in infancy, but each culture has a unique dynamic attentional style that includes holistic & analytic components #EarlyYears #Attention #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

When the System Shrinks: Living Through a Contraction in Science Five hundred people.

substack.com/inbox/post/1...

The development of spatial perception with and without visual experience

Review by Monica Gori, Maria Bianca Amadeo & Andrew J. Bremner

go.nature.com/49iRXH9

Merry Explaining How the Academic Job Market Is Going to Non-Academic Family Members Eve to all who celebrate!

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
🧵 1/14

A Quarter Century Review of Research on Infant Behavior and Development
www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

YouTube video by 10 Seconds To Air How to Build a Healthy Relationship With Your Kids with Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar

I had a fantastic conversation recently with the 10 Seconds to Air podcast.

We tried to think about parenting, the philosophy of parenting, and how to know if you are doing a good job at it--or is that even the right question.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1sE...

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]👇

Relating Infant Fixations to Adult Cortical Activation Patterns Using the Natural Scenes Dataset Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-o.....

Read the full open-access paper here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Big thanks to my co-authors and the team of research assistants at the UC Davis Infant Cognition Lab ( @ucdavisicl.bsky.social ).

Feel free to reach out with any questions!

These finding support the conclusion that higher-order visual areas may play an increasing role in guiding visual attention across infancy, reflecting a developmental shift toward a more abstract representation of the environment

We found that younger infants' fixation patterns were significantly related to patterns of activation in low-level regions of adult visual cortex. Older infant's fixations were related to both low- and mid-level regions, similar to the pattern of results of a comparison group of adult subjects

We used representational similarity analysis to compare this adult fMRI data to younger (5-7 mo) and older (10-12 mo) infants' fixation patterns as they viewed a subset of the NSD scenes from the NSD in our lab

Testing this idea empirically has been challenging, given difficulties in measuring visual cortex in infancy. We therefore leveraged the Natural Scenes Dataset (naturalscenesdataset.org), which contains high quantity and high quality fMRI data from adults viewing thousands of scenes

Infants' attention is increasingly guided by higher-level stimulus features, suggesting that the gradual maturation of higher-level visual cortical areas may increasingly support gaze control

YouTube video by Brianna Hunter Relating infant fixations to adult fMRI data using the Natural Scenes Dataset

🚨 New paper out in Developmental Science!! 🚨

Relating Infant Fixations to Adult Cortical Activation Patterns Using the Natural Scenes Dataset
doi.org/10.1111/desc...
by Brianna Hunter, John Kiat, Steve Luck, & Lisa Oakes

View video abstract here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIV...

Governor: New Mexico to provide universal access to child care Currently, the state’s child care assistance program covers costs for families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level.

NEW: Starting Nov. 1, New Mexico will become the first state in the nation to offer no-cost child care to every family, regardless of income. This is projected to amount to an average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.

Yes, policy meeting people's needs is possible.

A woman and baby sit together reading a colorful book in a cozy room with shelves behind them; text overlay discusses babies' attention and communication cues. Text on image says, “Babies Pay Attention Longest When Words and Gestures Combined.”

Words and gestures help tune infant attention before they can speak. New UC Davis study finds babies focus longer when object labels ("bear") are paired with spatial words ("here"), and even longer when paired with gestures like pointing. ucdav.is/4lYtXgL

Writing this paper has reminded me how grateful I am to be part of the vibrant infant attention community 👶

Huge thanks to co-authors @shannonmklotz.bsky.social @juliemarkant.bsky.social @lisaoakes.bsky.social + Christian & Erim

We can’t wait to see what the next 25 years of research will reveal!

We hope that future research will increasingly incorporate 1) longitudinal and multisystem approaches that track infants’ attention over time in the context of other developing skills; 2) ecologically valid stimuli and measures; and 3) samples that reflect a broader range of diversity in experience.

We've also learned infant attention is context-dependent. Infants’ focus shifts based on the complexity of the environment and the social or emotional relevance of stimuli.

We now know that infant attention is a complex system. Attention reflects interactions among multiple dynamically changing processes such as memory, perception, and motor development.

For years, attention was described as a progression from bottom-up to top-down control. With use of modern tools, we've learned that attention development isn't quite so simple. A dichotomy between bottom-up vs top-down control cannot fully explain how infants attend.

I wrote a paper with some of my favorite people synthesizing the last 25 years of research on my favorite topic: the development of visual attention during infancy 👶👀

doi.org/10.1016/j.in...

#infantcognition #development #visualperception #visualattention