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?
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 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...
Job alert! @brandonwoo.bsky.social and I are searching for a new lab manager. We are excited to add a new member to our awesome community of soc cog dev researchers! Spread the word :)
Full ad here: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03106
This study investigated whether children exhibit gendered expectations and evaluations of empathy, exploring the developmental origins of stereotypes observed in adults. A sample of 112 children (M...
doi.org
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Abstract. Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have
🎉 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...
Alexis Smith-Flores
Lindsey Powell
Zoe Liberman
Alison Gopnik
This study investigated whether children exhibit gendered expectations and evaluations of empathy, exploring the developmental origins of stereotypes observed in adults. A sample of 112 children (M...
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
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life.
What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like?
New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990
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
Fun new collab coming out in TICS (w/ Haley Weaver & Sudha Arunachalam) digging into the assumptions underlying the use of eye-gaze methods to study vocabulary development. Working on this paper really got us thinking - we hope it does the same for our readers! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
