mzettersten.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

New paper out now asks: Why do we bother remembering how we learned something? With @antoniafl.bsky.social, Dilara Keşşafoğlu, Winuss Mohtezebsade, @celestekidd.bsky.social, Aylin Küntay, @janengelmann.bsky.social, and Bahar Köymen dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

New episode!! 📣🎙️ A conversation w/ @renemottus.bsky.social about the science of human personality. The "Big Five" model of human personality has been enormously generative and influential. But what does it miss? What does it mask? Where should the field go next? Listen: disi.org/the-big-five...

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

New lab preprint (presented last Sunday as a VSS talk) from Zekun Sun: "Dissociating low-level visual features from high-level event structure in action segmentation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

New preprint w/ @christophvoelter.bsky.social et al. Individual differences in great ape cognition across time and domains: stability, structure, and predictability 48 apes 🦍, 10 tasks 🧠, 10 sessions📊, 1.5 y📅 ✅ Stable individual traits ❌ No g-factor 🤝 Social ≠ non-social 🔗: osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

submitted 35 days ago • 3 comments

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!

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

bit of good news: approved technical staff position! link below. please be in touch if this matches your skills & interests! drive.google.com/file/d/16J2J... (hr listing posted harvard-internal now; external soon, per guidelines), happy for ?s & plan on quick turnaround! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

submitted 37 days ago • 1 comment

Our R01 was part of yesterday's "mass termination" at Harvard; 1 of ~1000 NIH grants in Trump's "fight". The irony of how many Jewish (& non-Jewish) researchers/scientists/physicians/patients/students will be harmed in the name of "fighting antisemitism" is sickening.deliberately cruel. #AcademicSky

submitted 40 days ago • 1 comment

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its style. How does that work? How do we see style? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 42 days ago • 1 comment

What motivates people to take action and share info about climate change? We tested 17 psychological interventions in a tournament—Discover the winners in our new paper! Out now in @pnas.org w/ @falklab.bsky.social, @michaelemann.bsky.social, & team. Thread ⤵️ 1/9 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 42 days ago • 4 comments

My book reveals the mostly hidden effects of talking on talkers. Talking boosts focus & learning, regulates emotions, changes perception, & more. The reason lies in how utterance planning for talking works. It's a book for gen'l audiences, but w scientific claims for production & its consequences

submitted 47 days ago • 3 comments

A few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below. First, up "mountain calendars"...

submitted 48 days ago • 2 comments

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)

submitted 54 days ago • 3 comments

1/ New Preprint (also my first time posting on BlueSky haha)!!! How do individual differences in habituation shape dishabituation magnitude? Work with Qiong Cao, @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 48 days ago • 1 comment

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

submitted 48 days ago • 7 comments

A lot of students are not sure what career they want to pursue. To help with this, we've started recording videos with lab alumni in different careers and grad programs. Links below. Hope your students find them helpful! #STEM #ADVISING

submitted 93 days ago • 2 comments

Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social from me, @mzettersten.bsky.social, & @ruthefoushee.bsky.social - 'Helpless' infants are active, goal-directed agents www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Cusack et al. propose 'helpless' human infants are "learning a foundation model" (à la SSL). We say,

submitted 49 days ago • 1 comment

Six months ago, I accepted a postdoc offer in a fabulous lab. Three days ago, the Trump administration terminated the NSF grant supporting the position. Today, my offer had to be rescinded, and my PhD defense is a week away. (1/3)

submitted 57 days ago • 14 comments

yesterday, my postdoc funding (salary and research funds) was cancelled by the National Science Foundation, effective immediately. I received the same generic, vaguely threatening, typo-ridden email as many of my colleagues who have had their awards terminated recently. (1/n)

submitted 60 days ago • 41 comments

As a psych undergrad in St. Petersburg 6 years ago, I never imagined I’d be starting my own cognitive science lab at one of the world’s best research environments. I’m beyond excited to share that I’ll be starting a Cognitive Epistemology Lab at @BerkeleyPsych in Fall 2026!

submitted 61 days ago • 17 comments

@katrinamillerphd.bsky.social & I took a look at over 400 active National Science Foundation grants that got killed in the past few days. Here's our story (gift link) nyti.ms/4jp4aOx

submitted 63 days ago • 30 comments

- @elenacaltmann.bsky.social @marinabazhydai.bsky.social Karadağ & @gertwestermann.bsky.social (2025) dev'd & validated the Infant & Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ), a caregiver report to capture variance in early trait curiosity #EarlyYears #DevPsySky #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments

Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟 We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!

submitted 63 days ago • 1 comment

New R package almost birthed - SemanticDistance - computes two semantic distance metrics (experiential and embedding) for any rolling chunk size (ngram-to-ngram, word-to-word, turn-to-turn, ngram-to-word). You give it your language sample. It does the rest, including lemmatize and stopword omit

submitted 67 days ago • 3 comments

Excited for this project to be out, led by superstar @erinecampbell.bsky.social!

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments

SIX YEARS after the initial blog post, this paper is finally published.. what a wild ride - the blog: bit.ly/3GbOqQa - original tweet thread: x.com/Nate__Haines... - published (open access) paper: doi.org/10.1037/met0...

submitted 69 days ago • 2 comments

New Peekbank preprint! A snapshot of what we've learned so far about developmental change in word recognition using the large-scale repository of infant eyetracking data we've been building (~ 2000 infants; ~3500 individual test sessions)

submitted 71 days ago • 1 comment

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 71 days ago • 1 comment

One major finding in our pre-print is that the journal ‘Fluoride’ publishes much larger effects than any other academic journal. Fluoride is published by the International Society for Fluoride Research which is run by anti-fluoride activists and hosts water defluoridation workshops. #metascience

submitted 78 days ago • 1 comment

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 96 days ago • 23 comments

Babies learn best from those who respond to their babbling! 👶✨ @juliaavenditti.bsky.social, @mikehgoldstein.bsky.social et al. (2025): infants form stronger social expectations when their babbling gets a timely response—even from a robot car! 🤖🚗 #infancypapers #EarlyYears doi.org/10.1111/infa...

submitted 97 days ago • 0 comments

The platform I run, Children Helping Science, is supported almost entirely by US government science funding, both directly and in collaboration with CHS researchers. Here's the note we sent to users today - we need help gathering your stories and citations! Submit here: forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZ...

submitted 107 days ago • 0 comments

JOB ALERT in #language and #linguistics! Postdoc Position at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas... We are now looking at a broader candidate pool so do consider applying! Please repost & share widely!

submitted 109 days ago • 1 comment

🆕New project approved🎉 Exciting news! We’ve just accepted our first-ever ManyLanguages Project: 📌 Perception of Fundamental Frequency Perturbations Across Many Languages

submitted 117 days ago • 1 comment

we just posted the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a corpus of audio & metadata. 1007 songs in many languages, for behavioral experiments, cross-cultural research, etc preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1 corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216 led by @milabertolo.bsky.social 1/

submitted 119 days ago • 3 comments

My new book, MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/PenguinRandomHouse) arrives 6/3! It tells the story of how we produce language & how talking shapes our lives in surprising ways. It's psyling for gen'l audiences! Info & preorders www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046/more-than-words-by-maryellen-macdonald-phd/

submitted 121 days ago • 4 comments

I am so proud and pleased to coedit this special issue of Daedalus on a social science of caregiving, a remarkable range of essays on care from birth to death (and beyond) from biology, psychology, economics, religion, policy etc. Very timely scientifically and practically www.amacad.org/daedalus

submitted 131 days ago • 0 comments

📣 Absolutely elated to announce that in 2026, I’ll be joining Rutgers-Newark as TT Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychology! Can’t wait to join this incredible community! 🤩 I’ve got some fun projects ahead as I wrap up my postdoc, but soon I’ll start recruiting at all levels so stay tuned. 1/3

submitted 135 days ago • 9 comments

Suppose you generated a sequence of 100 random numbers. Then one year later, you did it again. Do you think we could predict one sequence from the other? It turns out, we can! Now in press @ JEP:G with @samiyousif.bsky.social @actlab.bsky.social @robbrutledge.bsky.social; osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 140 days ago • 5 comments

🎉 I'm hiring a lab manager to start August 2025 and help build my lab at Lehigh. Submit a CV, cover letter, transcript, and 2 reference contacts by March 14th. The full job description is linked below. Please share with any students or mentees who might be interested! #devpsy tinyurl.com/33vtvy79

submitted 145 days ago • 2 comments

i've never advertised it but i have an rstudio plugin that will run knitr on a selection of text in your current session to preview what the text looks like with inlined results github.com/tjmahr/WrapRmd

submitted 145 days ago • 4 comments

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

submitted 150 days ago • 33 comments

📣📣📣 Applications for the 2025 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!! Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply! More info: disi.org

submitted 152 days ago • 1 comment