Martin Zettersten
Asst Prof UCSD Cognitive Science
PI LIL Lab UCSD: https://lillab.ucsd.edu
language development | cognitive development | learning
mzettersten.github.io
(he/his)
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenThe 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.
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenIn a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten📣 Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro 🧠🐬🏖️ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenWe are pleased to announce that the first LEVANTE data release is now publicly available! To access and download the pilot data, follow instructions on researcher.levante-network.org/data. This data release accompanies the preprint linked in the thread.
- 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... 🧵
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenAs an aside, this is my second experience with the reviewed preprint route at @elife.bsky.social and it is great! We will likely revise our paper thanks to thoughtful feedback from reviewers, but I am very happy that it is accessible in the meantime. I strongly recommend this model!
- Very excited that this is now published at eLife - the first outcomes from a huge effort from the Peekbank team to see what we can learn about children's lexical development from collecting and standardizing lots and lots of looking-while-listening data. Check it out, and stay tuned!
- Now up as a reviewed @elife.bsky.social preprint: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood" elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... Using data from ~2000 kids ages 1-6, we quantify links between word recognition and early vocabulary growth!
- Oh, and while you're at it, also check out this spiffy refresh to the Peekbank website, courtesy of the unstoppable @adriansteffan.bsky.social : peekbank.stanford.edu
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi... - Reposted by Martin ZetterstenCurious about the human ability to extract regularities from sensory input (i.e., “statistical learning”) and individual differences therein? #CognitiveScience #Learning Our #Consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide 🌎 💬 🌍 💬 🌏 💬: 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenThis 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenA Perspective in Nature Reviews Psychology reviews research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides evidence for the interaction between psychological and physical reasoning systems. 🔒
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNEW EPISODE OUT! In this episode, Adani @adani.bsky.social chats with Dr. Susan Engel from Williams College about curiosity, invention, her journey into developmental psychology, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children! 🎧LISTEN NOW: open.spotify.com/episode/06WD...
- Cool new work by rising star Kosta Boskovic on children's reasoning about age - super fun paradigm, check it out!!
- New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenIn our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor. osf.io/preprints/ps... People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
- Reposted by Martin Zetterstenlots of invigorating discussion this year at #BUCLD2025. Unsurprisingly, LLMs as models & as tools made many appearances w/a wide range of views/claims/caveats ab what they can(not) tell us ab language development I'm still chewing on a few things that seemed to get short shrift 1/4 🐦🐦
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten#BUCLD50 Symposium: “Innateness is not a dirty word: Reframing the origins of language development”, by Shanley Allen, Marisa Casillas, Alejandrina Cristia, Michael C. Frank, Caroline Rowland, Leher Singh, and Paul Bloom! Learn more at: www.bu.edu/bucld/ #Innateness #LLM #LanguageDevelopment
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenRecruiting PhD students for Fall 2026! The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io Due Date Dec 1
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology: “A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.” Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @themanybirds.bsky.social
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenEver wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenSeems like a particularly cruel change to make without warning given the stress that reviewers often put on applicants' publication record. Presumably many strong students waited based on this apparent criterion, not because they didn't already have great ideas to propose.
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenI’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share: phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenThe Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenPreschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by @ruthefoushee.bsky.social and colleagues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenI wrote an R package that creates standardized R project structures that are compliant with @mekline.bsky.social's psych-DS...ish. It also creates additional features for reproducibility and teaching like a readme, license, .gitignore and Quarto templates + can validate existing projects
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenMy final project from grad school is out now in Dev Psych! Mombasa County preschoolers were more accurate on object-based than picture-based vocabulary assessments, whereas Bay Area preschoolers were equally accurate on object-based and picture-based assessments. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenHappy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenJob announcement 📢 @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction! Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions! apply.interfolio.com/165809
- 📢 @markkho.bsky.social & I are recruiting a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & mental health 💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling 📅 Apps are reviewed on a rolling basis 🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNotes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenCongrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenI and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten🚨 Calling all dog behavior & cognition researchers - ManyDogs Project is launching ManyDogs 2! 🔍🐕🦺We're studying overimitation: Do dogs copy irrelevant actions just b/c their favorite human does them? Email manydogsproject2@gmail.com to collaborate globally and contribute to reproducible science!
- Reposted by Martin Zettersten📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656 And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenMy paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...
- Enjoyed this interesting discussion with Rhodri Cusack & co-author team about their foundation model perspective on infant development! Both the letter by @marielgoddu.bsky.social, Ruthe, and I (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... and a thoughtful response from the original authors are now officially out.
- Thanks to fellow defenders @clionaod.bsky.social, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, and @charvetcj.bsky.social Defending the foundation model view of infant development www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Corrected link ; ) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
- And the original article is here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenExperimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenCheck out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets. With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenIt's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!
- The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) now features over 100 published articles! Editors-in-Chief @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social share their vision for this open, online reference developed to guide the next generation of exploration in cognition & intelligence:
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew 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/...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenNew 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenUC 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.
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenWe'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!
- Reposted by Martin Zetterstenbit 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 🐦🐦
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenOur 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
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenLooking 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...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenWhat 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/...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenMy 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
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenA few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below. First, up "mountain calendars"...
- Reposted by Martin ZetterstenHow 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 👇)
