Brandon Woo
LightNews LightNews
banner
brandonwoo.bsky.social
Brandon Woo
@brandonwoo.bsky.social
1.5K followers 460 following 52 posts
Cognitive scientist studying the development of the social mind. Assistant professor at UCSB. 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 (he/him)

bmwoo.github.io
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Brandon Woo
brialong.bsky.social
The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!

Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.
January 30, 2026 at 11:21 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
ndersen.bsky.social
🚨 🚨 Publication alert🚨 🚨
Great work led by the brilliant @drelenamiu.bsky.social.
Using agent-based models, we show that age-structured learning (kids explore broadly; adults refine/exploit) boosts long-term cultural payoffs vs. using the same strategies in random order. shorturl.at/rdlhv
The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution
Abstract. The societal effects of children’s learning in cultural evolution have been underexplored. Here, we investigate using agent-based models how a pr
royalsocietypublishing.org
January 22, 2026 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
candicemmills.bsky.social
The Journal of Cognition and Development is looking for a new Editor-in-Chief. Please consider applying or spreading the word to someone who you think would be a great fit!
cogdevsoc.bsky.social The Cognitive Development Society (CDS) @cogdevsoc.bsky.social · 12d
The Journal of Cognition and Development, the official journal of the Cognitive Development Society, is seeking nominations for the Editor-in-Chief, with the term to begin on July 1, 2026.

Application materials are due February 16.

For more information, visit: cogdevsoc.org/journal/
Journal - CDS
cogdevsoc.org
January 20, 2026 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
shirleybwang.bsky.social
We're hiring! The Computational Clinical Science Lab @ Yale is seeking a full-time lab manager/research coordinator to start in early summer 2026.

For more information about the position and to apply: forms.gle/LtQwVgPUfaGk...

Please share widely & consider applying!
forms.gle
January 13, 2026 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
miriam-hauptman.bsky.social
New paper with Marina Bedny out in eLife (elifesciences.org/articles/101...). Main takeaway: Different kinds of causal knowledge are supported by different semantic brain networks - consistent with the "intuitive theories" framework from developmental psychology. 1/
Animacy semantic network supports causal inferences about illness
Making causal inferences about illness, compared to making causal inferences about mechanical breakdown and reading causally unconnected sentences, activates a semantic brain network implicated in the conceptual representation of animate entities (e.g. people, animals).
elifesciences.org
November 20, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
ebonawitz.bsky.social
Kimele Persaud: The MC2 Lab (lnkd.in/d3EiHP6f) at Rutgers is hiring a postdoc to work on an NSF-funded project assessing surprise & expectation-driven learning in preschoolers & adults.

If you are interested in memory, computational, & cognitive development, apply! jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/267...
Post-Doctoral Associate
As a Post-Doctoral Associate, your primary role will be to oversee research activities outlined in NSF Grant 2520154 “Understanding Expectation-Driven Learning in Early Childhood: An Experimental and ...
jobs.rutgers.edu
January 15, 2026 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
laurendinicola.bsky.social
** Recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher! **

We are seeking a postdoc to help examine how brain networks might change within individuals across transitional times, such as adolescence & pregnancy!
Please share widely and apply at the link! #NeuroJobs

uva.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UVAJobs/job/...
Research Associate in Psychology
The Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia invites applications for a postdoctoral research associate position to work in the DiNicola Lab. The DiNicola lab uses a precision neuroscien...
uva.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
January 6, 2026 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
socphilpsych.bsky.social
The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20

📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣
January 9, 2026 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
tomerullman.bsky.social
a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?
January 6, 2026 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
mcxfrank.bsky.social
Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵
title line screenshots from the nine tasks
December 18, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
perfors.net
I have been emailing with a student offering advice about navigating the post-PhD job market and it struck me that the advice was general enough that more people might benefit. So here you go!

tl;dr: Figure out what you want your contribution to be, and make choices that can make that happen.
Q: When I think about what will set me up for a university job, what should I evaluate potential post-docs based on? Should I consider things like the institution and where it's based? Is it about the subject matter of the project and the kind of papers I'll publish and the skill set I'll use? Or is it more about the connections that I'll have the opportunity to make and going to conferences and that kind of thing? A: I think the main things are: (a) the kinds of papers you'll end up being able to publish; (b) the skill set you'll acquire; and (c) the connections you can make. But all of these are contextually dependent -- really what matters is that they pave the path that you want to take and support your narrative of what you do and how you fit (because once a candidate passes a certain bar for quality, hiring decisions are usually made on the basis of skills and fit). To illustrate: if you want to be the kind of researcher whose contribution to your school/field (and narrative) is that you have certain skills, or a certain area of expertise, then you want your postdoc to be one that develops those skills/expertise, where you write papers that showcases that you have those skills/expertise, and where you create connections with people who care about those skills/expertise. That's why it's so important to figure out your narrative and what you want to do: it all starts from there. So the question is not: how do I set myself up to get a university job? It is what kind of university job do I want, and how do I set myself up for that? Some people are like, I don't care, I just want any job! But people don't want to hire people who have no "why" for what they do beyond just getting money -- people hire people who have a contribution to make. So figure out what contribution you want to make, and then choose a postdoc that will best set you up to be able to make it. (And you can always change direction, people do that often, but you want to start with a direction).
December 18, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
roxanegay.bsky.social
Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.
December 13, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
alisongopnik.bsky.social
New paper with Junyi Chu, Tomer Ullman et al showing that kids think more difficulty is more fun!
Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
December 14, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
mjcrockett.bsky.social
New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/
Abstract When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences ground "thick empathy", a form of empathy that has been largely overlooked in the psychology and neuroscience literature. Consider how a mother, empathizing with her daughter about to give birth, can draw on her own experience of childbirth, and her relationship with her daughter, to deeply grasp what her daughter is going through in a way that others who lack those experiences cannot. I argue that thick empathy deserves more empirical attention because it is associated with well-being and helps us build networks of effective mutual social support. My analysis highlights novel risks and dilemmas posed by "empathy machines" that promise to enhance or even replace human empathy and are becoming increasingly popular as a potential solution to widespread loneliness. Even when empathy machines provide value to individuals, their widespread adoption risks imposing collective emotional and epistemic costs that ultimately make it harder for us to empathize well. Keywords: empathy, understanding, experience, thick description, ethnography, phenomenal knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots
December 11, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
hyogweon.bsky.social
Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds
The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...
www.annualreviews.org
December 10, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
mekline.bsky.social
This is a fundraising post!

An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure!

giving.mit.edu/search/node/...

Details below...
Fund Search Results | Giving to MIT
giving.mit.edu
December 8, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
wywywa.bsky.social
Canada is announcing program details for science talent recruitment from abroad. The first one across my desk this morning is support for 600 doctoral students and 400 post-docs. Research investment is greatly appreciated, especially trainees and early career. www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/research_tra...
NSERC - Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards: Q&A
NSERC - Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards: Q&A
www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca
December 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
jsphillips.bsky.social
🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
December 4, 2025 at 8:40 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
lkfazio.bsky.social
Just finished my last class of the semester🎉Reminded of how much I love teaching this academic writing class for grad students. We focus on improving our writing but also reducing anxiety and becoming a more consistent & productive writer

Some of the students favorite writing tips/learnings below:
December 5, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
marthaalibali.bsky.social
New job opening in social psychology at UW-Madison! at the associate prof level.
jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/associa...
Associate Professor - Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Current Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...
jobs.wisc.edu
December 4, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
chriskrupenye.bsky.social
🚨Job Alert plz RT!

Johns Hopkins Psych & Brain Sciences is looking for a new colleague using behavioral or computational approaches to study cognition!

We are excited about many areas of (esp higher) cognition in human adults, children, or nonhuman animals

Open-rank

apply.interfolio.com/178146
December 2, 2025 at 2:54 AM
brandonwoo.bsky.social
My first time taking my cat to work:
A cat sitting in front of a notebook A cat at a glass board
December 1, 2025 at 10:15 PM
brandonwoo.bsky.social
The weirdest recommendation letter question that I’ve seen so far: “If you fast forwarded 10-20 years, who would this student most closely resemble?”
A question asking: If you fast forwarded 10-20 years, who would this student most closely resemble? There are pictures of people who have been influential, in various domains (e.g., tech, politics, etc.).
November 26, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
shariliu.bsky.social
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology
Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:14 PM
Reposted by Brandon Woo
jfkominsky.bsky.social
Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU!

cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission

Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students!

#PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych
Applications Are Now Open for Academic Year 2026-2027 | Department of Cognitive Science
cognitivescience.ceu.edu
November 24, 2025 at 10:48 AM