Rodney Tompkins

New Opinion in TiCS on what babies "know"! Some argue for innate concepts of objects, number, and morality. I offer an alternative perspective: attentional biases + perceptual prediction. No less impressive, but importantly different! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Dolls are incredibly widespread but not universal cross-culturally. In addition to functioning as toys, dolls are commonly used for supernatural purposes to punish enemies, heal or protect, increase fertility, or embody spirits. New paper in EHB www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

I am pleased to announce the launch of our new diamond open access journal Psychology Across Development (accepting submissions starting today!). We are a lifespan developmental journal. (1/3) escholarship.org/uc/psycdev

Out today!

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social in Cognitive Science! We explored how kids learn the “later-greater” principle — the idea that numbers that come later in a count are greater in magnitude. Turns out this simple property governing the count system doesn't come easy! dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs... 1/6

When someone acts generously, what expectations does this create? An @openmindjournal.bsky.social study uses online behavioral experiments to test when generosity creates expectations of reciprocation: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... #OpenAccess

📣 New paper in Open Mind! How do our concepts of others’ minds connect to language and to where we expect others to look? 🤔 We link phenomenal vs. intentional mental states to gaze, one of our earliest social cues from infancy. Led by Mohit Mukherji! 🎉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Meta-analytic plot below: only 1 out of the 31 samples find evidence of the effect. Huge effort from the entire ManyBabies 3 team led by @ingmarvisser.bsky.social. Imo an important moment for reflection in infant research (esp. language development) given the centrality of this finding. 2/2

🚨 Preprint alert! 👶🧠🌊 "The Emergence of a Distinction between Things and Stuff" osf.io/preprints/ps... So excited to share my first infant study, with the wonderful Sanghee Song and Liz Spelke.🎉 Do babies expect sand to behave differently from solid objects? 🧵1/5

Our department at UC San Diego is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor. Open area, research addressing foundational issues in cogsci using modern computational methods. I love my department, and you will too. Apply!! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04633 #cogscisci #cogsci #DevPsyc #PsychSciSky

UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is hiring! Focus on social cognition, broadly construed. Come be my colleague :) I am not on the search committee but happy to talk about the campus, environment, careers, etc any time. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF10411

UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646

UCSD Cognitive Science Department is hiring an Assistant Professor incorporating novel computational approaches in the study of biological and/or artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working in this department for 10 years and the intellectual environment really is unique. 1/3

Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.

Our new paper may be one of coolest studies I've ever done. We show that the structures of visual storytelling in comics aligns with the word order of the languages of the comic authors. Here's what we did... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our newest work unifying game theoretic ideas about the evolution of cooperation with the emergence of computation itself. Self-replicating programs first emerge through random mutation and then spread by cooperating.

Excited to share the first empirical article of my PhD work! We found that roles generated social expectations that were detectable WHILE participants were still reading about them. Evidence for roles as an important part of our rapid social cognition. See if you can experience the effects below!

🚨 PhD position in human, nonhuman primate, and/or dog cognition! I am thrilled to be reviewing applicants this year for a new PhD student to join the Social & Cognitive Origins Group in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins @jhu.edu @jhuartssciences.bsky.social 1/

How does the architecture of a city shape the way we think, talk, and draw space? And how do spatial conventions travel across cultural generations? New paper in Open Mind, spearheaded by Z Alinam (w J Nölle, C Vesper, K Tylén & me): doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.380 🧵 1/

This is now out in Perspectives on Psych Science: doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Researchers in Chicago tracked neighborhood-level tree canopy over two decades and discovered something startling: “Each year-to-year percent increase in canopy was associated with around a 10 percent reduction in mortality." Keeping mature trees alive can help keep people alive -and cooler, too.

🚨New paper out in SPPS🚨 (1/3) We examined the consequences of chronic suspicion for low-income and/or first-generation Latino/a college students over their first 3 years of college. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

NSF just announced its GRFP solicitation due in October - deadline varies by field: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo... Now for the bad news... * NSF estimates they will issue 1,500 awards, down from 2,500+ last year. * NSF removed STEM Education and Learning Research as a Major Field.

Good piece on why kids beat AI at learning, with Mike Frank and me. Behind a paywall but available elsewhere. www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/24/1...

Our new paper is now out in @pnas.org! How does the (baby) brain extract regularities from sequences from what-follows-what up to large-scale network structure? What if it all came from a single mechanism? www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Why do children claim unusual events are impossible? In a new paper with Goulding, Ronfard (@samuelronfard.bsky.social), and Friedman (@orifriedman.bsky.social), we synthesize two decades of research on children's possibility judgments and propose some answers. www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

New lab preprint! AI assistants are myopically helpful. Unlike caregivers that want to empower people and grow their long term autonomy, AI assistants interrupt independent thinking and jump right to the answer.

When we started scanning human infants 13 years ago, it seemed likely that functional responses in infant cortex would be qualitatively different from adults. Instead we keep finding similarities between infants and adults. Even for scene perception, despite the slow development of navigation.

Cool finding on 'parentese' from Gaye Soley's lab: when a parent speaks to each of their two children, the sound/style of their voice indicates whether they're speaking to the younger or older one (and other kids can tell!)

new preprint: "The Humorous Hill: A U-shaped Relationship Between Humor and Quality" (by Bhattacharya, Hu, and me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

New paper! We found basic scene selectivity arises across the scene network early in infancy (i.e., by ~3.5 months old), prior to independent navigation experience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....

David R. Samson's The Sleepless Ape is now available worldwide! Discover how the unique sleep habits of early humans fostered survival, innovation, & social evolution—& how this evolutionary legacy holds insights into how we sleep today. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning last week. I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...

1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

New Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

ICYMI: The Social Science of Caregiving in Dædalus @alisongopnik.bsky.social , leader of CASBS's project of the same name, edited the issue w/ @mlevi.bsky.social & Zachary Ugolnik 16 essays rethink philosophical, psychological, political & economic foundations of care OPEN ACCESS bit.ly/3Qm49ha

One year down at Lehigh! 🎉 This year we built the lab, did some cool science, and sent out our very first newsletter (tinyurl.com/5n978emu). I'm also excited to share that I'll be recruiting a PhD student this cycle! If you know any trainees who might be a great fit, please send them my way!

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

🚨 Officially out at Child Development! A few years ago in Science, Ashley Thomas (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and colleagues argued that saliva could be a cue infants use to infer the strength of social relationships. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

New review, forthcoming in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology: "From Seconds to Seasons and Days to Decades: Timescales in Development." Let me walk you through some key points. 👇 BC its a review, these are based on many others' work. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/

I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...