Psychology PhD student at UC San Diego, interested in what younger and older humans think about care and protection. Also a meerkat enthusiast.
https://sites.google.com/view/rtompkins/
Rodney Tompkins
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Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1
Here is the specific link to our paper with Eunice Yiu, Shiry Ginosar and Kelsey Allen, how to construct causal models through intrinsically motivated action, something kids do and LLMs don't. The whole issue on world models is very much worth reading.
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...
New review paper on the development of friendship psychology/ cognition (w/ @zoeliberman.bsky.social):
By age 6, children appear to recognize friendship as a ranking-based relationship with outstanding social expectations and obligations.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Yay for publishing null results!
We didn't find an effect of *character* gender on kids' expectations or evaluations of empathy, but we did find one effect of participant gender: girls valued empathy more than boys in character evaluations. Maybe a clue about about the origins of later stereotypes?
Across the lifespan, friends are critical social partners. Prominent evolutionary theories—such as the Banker's Paradox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996)—propo…
What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary.
Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks.
🧵 experimentology.io
🎉 New paper w/ honors student Majo Guerrero & @lindseypowell.bsky.social:
4–7-year-olds did not expect girls to be more empathic than boys, nor did they judge girls more harshly for counter-empathizing, suggesting stereotypes about empathy may emerge later in development.
doi.org/10.1080/1524...
