Some personal news: I adopted a cat! This is Bruno, and he enjoys sleeping on my desk as I’m writing

A huge thanks to my coauthors: Anushka Laha, Amelia Chen, and Carly Wolf. They've each been studying early social evaluation in the lab, and it's been a lot of fun to think about these methods with them. They’re all applying for graduate school soon, so look out for their applications!

We review evidence that infants and toddlers evaluate a wide range of social behaviors, beyond helping and hindering, and that there are multiple ways to study early social evaluation, beyond preferential reaching methods.

Our work sheds light on how children apply their theories of the mind and of relationships to navigate the social world.

This is just the start of research that my collaborators and I are doing on mental state reasoning in close relationships. More soon!

Good lab news: Welcome to Emma Yu (@emmayu23.bsky.social), our team's first graduate student! So excited to be doing science together and growing the team.

Here's a picture of some of the members of our team on a visit to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.

Looking forward to #CogSci2025! Anushka Laha and I will be sharing some of the first work from our lab

Thanks to Francis Yuen for presenting his exciting work at my lab meeting! With Susan Birch and @jkileyhamlin.bsky.social, Francis has been finding (in preliminary data) that children may better represent the false beliefs of ingroup members.

Come check out our symposium at #SRCD2025: "Navigating social groups and relationships"! There'll be talks by Sarah Ramsey, Rongzhi Liu, @rtompkins.bsky.social, and me. Thursday at 10 am.

Proud to #standupforscience with students, postdocs, and colleagues today

First team photo! We celebrated the end of the lab's first quarter

Come check out talks by members of the Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies at #CogSci2024!

Third, children also reasoned that people who are accurate about each other’s mental states are likely to be close friends.

Second, children reasoned that close friends know about each other’s minds.

I’d like to highlight three key findings. First, children inferred social closeness from physical touch.

Across experiments, toddlers preferred the agent who helped the individual who was in greater need. These findings suggest that children’s representations of cost support need-based evaluations of helping.

In three experiments, we presented 16-month-old toddlers with two individuals who sought to complete a task but differed in their ability to complete that task on their own, either because the task was objectively harder or because one individual was weaker.

Looking forward to #CDS2024! Come check out our symposium: “Reasoning about social distance and affiliation across human development”. Presenters include Caroline Cha and @hghwang.bsky.social, @lindseypowell.bsky.social, Aaron Chuey, and me. Friday at 4:15 pm.

New paper out in Cognition! Here, Liz Spelke, Gabe Chisholm, and I tackle debates concerning infants' and toddlers' understanding of others' minds. We find evidence for a limit to early mental state reasoning.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1iif32Hx2x...

The key takeaway: Three-month-old infants understand reaching is goal-directed, and they exploit variation in others’ reaching actions to infer the goals underlying those actions.