Assistant Professor @ Lehigh | cog dev, emotion reasoning, and social cog | she/her
https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/littlelearnerslab/
Alexis Smith-Flores
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One-year-olds watching cartoon characters help each other don’t necessarily expect a helper to also help new characters, suggesting that infants assume prosocial behavior is based on relationships rather than innate dispositions. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/6bTH50YPGUo
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
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...
CDS 2026 was full of excellent science and good times! A big thanks to all the speakers in the intuitive theories of care preconference, organized by @rtompkins.bsky.social -- so many new ideas and findings to think about!
Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;)
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Members of the SoCal lab are presenting their work at #CDS2026! Check out where to find us below
Highly recommend @cogdevsoc.bsky.social falling on your birthday week. Celebrated 30 early by giving a talk at the ECR symposium, seeing mentees present cool posters, and catching up with some of my favorite people!
Video
This project was so fun to work on with this stellar team!! It also has some cool age-related findings: older children think that people should make objects they don't like more accessible to others, but that liked objects should be protected from others by putting them in a hard-to-reach place!
🎉 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...
New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵
University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!
Across the lifespan, friends are critical social partners. Prominent evolutionary theories—such as the Banker's Paradox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996)—propo…
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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...
New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...
New paper in Child Development!
When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way!
academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...
Abstract. Adults infer social information from objects' locations by integrating multiple causal factors, which is often challenging for children. To test
