Adani Abutto

Now out in Cognition, work with the great @gershbrain.bsky.social @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social on formalizing self-handicapping as rational signaling!
📃 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lo8f2Hx2-...

Global Collaboration to Capture Variability in Child Development - Levante Ensuring that children around the world can flourish is one of the most important goals of our time. Developmental science has made major strides in understanding how children grow, learn, and thrive ...

A first blogpost from the LEVANTE team, introducing our global project perspective.

A good intro if you're interested in learning more about cross-cultural developmental data collection using LEVANTE.

levante-network.org/global-colla...

Check out our full paper’s preprint here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

It's been lovely working on this with such an awesome team: Igor Bascandziev, @ebonawitz.bsky.social, @carenwalker.bsky.social! They took me in as a mentee when I first came to the U.S. two years ago, and they continue to shape my thinking and work in many ways :)

...learn just as much from thought experiments as from 'real' experimental demonstrations—except you don't need any fancy equipment, the child's mind alone is enough!

And it turns out that when, in early physics instruction, you engage children in thought experiments to help them grapple with tricky ideas like tiny things and air having weight, they can...

Thought experiments—imagining and thinking through outcomes—aren't just the morbid-amusing trolley problems you may have seen; they've played a vital historic role in our scientific progress in domains like physics!

So cool to see our project, spearheaded by Igor Bascandziev, featured in Harvard's 'Usable Knowledge'!

That sounds like a really exciting space to be working in! Congrats on the new role :)

LOL so that's what you were wearing! So good

The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #cogsci2025 💪

Congrats Yang! Hope to catch you there :)

Presentation list for language and cognition lab at CogSci 2025.

Looking forward to #cogsci2025 next week - here's a list of presentations from my lab!

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.

Delighted to announce our CogSci '25 workshop at the interface between cognitive science and design 🧠🖌️!

We're calling it: 🏺Minds in the Making🏺
🔗 minds-making.github.io

June – July 2024, free & open to the public
(all career stages, all disciplines)

Woo, congrats :)

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

We are seeking a Research Scientist for a large-scale project on developmental data collection with children ages 2-12 called LEVANTE (Learning Variability Network Exchange). LEVANTE is a global research network to improve our understanding of variability in learning and development through coordinated data collection. The project is funded by the Jacobs Foundation; learn more at http://levante-network.org. This position is a mix of scientific work and work with a software development team: we are looking for someone to act as the interface between the scientific goals of the project and our team of ~6 software engineers who work to implement different aspects of our web platform including researcher management, tasks and surveys, and data processing. We expect the role to be ideal for someone with technical experience from their scientific work and an interest in building good tools for other scientists through software development. This position is appropriate for recent PhD grads and candidates with postdoctoral experience; exact title and compensation will be relative to experience post-PhD. The RS will contribute to – and have the opportunity to lead on – research products including papers and presentations. The LEVANTE team is a large and lively group pushing the boundaries of cross-cultural developmental measurement through a combination of technical innovation and psychometrics. The RS will also be part of the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford, a broad interdisciplinary group interested in using data to understand human development.

Requirements for the position include: - some kind of scientific software development experience (examples include developing experiments, computational models, or complex data analyses) - theoretical knowledge of psychology or a related discipline (e.g., cognitive science, neuroscience), ideally doing behavioral measurements of some kind - project management experience on a technical or scientific project with multiple participants Additional optional qualifications include: - experience with modern database-backed web applications - experience with measure development or psychometrics - R data analysis experience Applicants should submit a current CV, a short (~1 page) coverletter stating their qualifications for the position, and a link to a github account (preferred) or other code sample.

We're still accepting apps for our research scientist position with LEVANTE (levante-network.org). This position is ideal for folks wanting to be the interface between a cool scientific project and an awesome team of software developers. Think of it as a technical product manager, but for science!

The Imposter Syndrome 🧵

1. The Attack

a list of various presentations from the Bonawitz lab at SRCD

If you're at SRCD please consider checking out these talks and posters featuring members of the CoCoDev lab and our awesome collaborators.
#SRCD2025

Going viral!!!

YouTube video by MIT Quest for Intelligence Prof. Judy Fan: Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible

This is a spectacular talk by my colleague @judithfan.bsky.social 🧠 🎨 🤖

"Cognitive tools for making the invisible visible"

🎬: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3X...

150 - Kendrick Kay: Large-scale fMRI Datasets and What to Consider Stanford Psychology Podcast · Episode

HELLO Bluesky! First post here to share our NEWEST episode! This week, Elizabeth @imelizabeth.bsky.social chats with Dr. Kendrick Kay on the groundbreaking Natural Scenes Dataset and discusses the behind-the-scenes considerations that went into its creation.

open.spotify.com/episode/6cGq...

my first time joining @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social as a co-host! It was super cool to talk with Kendrick. Go listen to it 🤩

(I'm also quite conflicted about posting this during a time of such turmoil… But still want to make it a habit to share & be positive about the work that gets out!)

*explicit _in_consistencies :) (and here, by explicit we mean accessible to verbal report!)

Not a conclusive study by any means, but (hopefully) a springboard for further research! So great to have worked (and to continue working) with Igor Bascandziev, @ebonawitz.bsky.social & @carenwalker.bsky.social! And h/t to @andrewshtulman.bsky.social for all the inspiring cognitive reflection work!

In this indiv differences study, we examined this in the domain of physical reasoning. Our data supported (3): When controlling for age, EF & cog reflection, children who fared better in consistency monitoring also did better on a Piagetian interview tapping their understanding of the physical world

If such a ‘consistency monitoring’ skill *does* help, it could be that it is (1) (heavily) dependent on what we conceptualize as domain-general cognitive resources like EF, (2) it overlaps with EF-independent abilities like cognitive reflection, or (3) is sufficiently independent from both.

We also know from previous research that even when given anomalous data, children don’t always easily revise their beliefs. So, we asked: Do learners who tend to do better at spotting explicit consistencies also tend to show greater progress in their 'understanding' of the physical world?