Author | Lightnews

Catarina Vales

@cvales.bsky.social

130 followers 130 following 21 posts

developmental scientist. not-that-kind-of-doctor. coffee lover. cat person. parent. she/her.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

so excited to share this paper where we evaluated the psychometrics of the spatial arrangement method to study children’s semantic structure!

open access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Strengthening Developmental Science With Psychometric Evaluations: An Examination of the Spatial Arrangement Method as a Measure of Semantic Structure in Children

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challengin...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

1 2 5

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Aug 23

thanks for the recommendation!

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jul 30

excited to share this work at #cogsci2025, Fri at 1p!

oral presentation titled “racial
diversity and racial representation in U.S. children’s books” to be presented by Catarina Vales on Friday 8/1 at 1p (Pacific time) during the CogSci 2025 conference.

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jul 26

this is great! here’s another (not browser specific, though slightly more work) way to remove the AI preview from google searches bsky.app/profile/cval...

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jul 1

if (like me) you’d like to remove the AI preview when doing a google search, adding “-ai” to your search should do the trick!

results of a google search “raising happy children”, with the AI overview at the top.

results of a google search “raising happy children -ai”, with no AI preview.

3 23

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · Jul 7

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

50 910 4.3K

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · Jul 6

I love—em-dashes.

75 120 1.9K

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jul 1

if (like me) you’d like to remove the AI preview when doing a google search, adding “-ai” to your search should do the trick!

1 7 12

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Rebecca Spang @rlspang.bsky.social · Jun 30

IU has the oldest Folklore Department in the country--no longer a major. Cognitive Science? gone! PhD programs also sacrificed. Full list here: www.in.gov/che/files/In...

www.in.gov

30 220 680

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Jun 25

Or here's a thought--maybe we could hire more actual human teachers, pay them better, make class sizes smaller, build in more paid prep time, and generally just invest in education instead of investing in AI.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Jun 25

Bro, what.

The AI teaching assistants, he said, will be able to monitor the classroom along with the actual teacher. They'll be able to help children when needed and "report back to the teacher." For example, he added, AI could determine a student's personal interests and suggest relevant adjustments to the lesson plan to increase the odds that the student would engage with the material.

"'Hey, I noticed Catty is not as engaged as she was yesterday,'" Khan said. "Or, 'Look, Sal is really engaged today, why don't you go praise him on this thing that he did last night you might have not noticed?' or 'Did you know that he's really into baseball? Let's make the next example about that, just for Sal.'"

"And then they're able to distill all of that and communicate to the parents, so it's not even once a term, it's almost real-time," he added.

The AI agents could then debrief with the teacher at the end of class to make a game plan for tomorrow, including identifying students who may be in need of some additional one-on-one time.

52 300 1.3K

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jun 4

“It is destabilizing, frustrating and enraging to feel like my daughter, who wasn’t even 18 months old, has done more for public health than some people who are now currently in charge of it”

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

A ‘war on children’: as US changes Covid vaccine rules, parents of trial volunteers push back

Frustration and anger mount as Trump administration contemplates new trials and restrictions for Covid vaccines

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · Apr 15

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

110 3.4K 11K

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Sylvia Perry @sylviapperry.bsky.social · Feb 24

I wrote a piece for @sciam.bsky.social about why White parents should be talking to their kids about race and racism. It was so great to work with @megha.bsky.social on this piece! Please share! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

Why It’s Important to Talk about Race with Children

Children start learning about race and racism as early as preschool. Talking about race early, however difficult, will help them become more antiracist

www.scientificamerican.com

6 90 170

Reposted by Catarina Vales

CMU Neuroscience Institute @cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social · Feb 12

Developmental psychologists and statisticians team up to investigate the accuracy and reliability of research tools used to assess how children learn. Read more about how CMU researchers statistically evaluate spatial arrangement tasks with nontraditional data in this featured article! #research

Developmental Psychologists and Statisticians Come Together To Ensure Research Tools Measure Up - Neuroscience Institute - Carnegie Mellon University

Developmental Psychologists and Statisticians Come Together To Ensure Research Tools Measure Up

www.cmu.edu

2 7

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Feb 13

we appreciate you!!

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · Feb 9

Fellow academics, I know that it can feel like capitulation to think about focusing on your work in the face of so many attacks on us right now.

Remember that knowledge is the enemy of ignorance & ignorance is the tool of tyranny.

Doing our work is now a form of rebellion. Keep rebelling.

1 10 18

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Jan 31

Don’t fall into the trap of normalizing any of this with this sort of language that we’ve seen from so many universities, falsely equating the current situation with other presidential transitions

This is unprecedented, unconscionable, and deliberately disruptive.

Have the backbone to say that.

8 140 580

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · Jan 20

New lab paper just dropped! Led by Roberto Vargas, we looked at how a person’s geometry of concept relations aligns to their group identity and how this is impacted by information sources.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A 🧵 1/9

Informational ecosystems partially explain differences in socioenvironmental conceptual associations between U.S. American racial groups - Communications Psychology

Semantic associations between socioenvironmental and emotion concepts varied between non-Hispanic White Americans and Black/African Americans. These differences were partially mediated by the politica...

www.nature.com

2 11 19

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jan 1

one thing that helps me figure out which books to read is to look up suggestions for books similar to titles i enjoyed. i’m lucky to have access to a great catalog at our local library, i find reading on an e-reader much more convenient (as much as i love the experience of reading a physical book).

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Jan 1

getting back to reading for fun was my resolution for 2024 and i read 50 books this year! i did: an app to track my progress (StoryGraph); a kindle case with a strap for comfortable holding; and downloading more than 1 book at a time (so i could switch if i didn’t get into a book).

Reposted by Catarina Vales

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Dec 20

We tend to think of anti-vaxxers as affluent, White, crunchy granola-type moms. But that stereotype ignores how precarity creates vulnerability to anti-vaxx messaging.

Take Tara, whose daughter had a sudden shift in temperament not long after a routine vaccine. 🧵1/
open.substack.com/pub/jesscala...

The Lie That Won't Die

Why We're Still Talking About Autism and Vaccines

open.substack.com

2 42 120

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

all data and code are openly available on OSF!

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

… — replicating results from tasks that not not measure intended constructs does little to advance theory & failures to replicate may be due to the tasks lacking reliability (and not to the underlying hypotheses being incorrect).

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

in the discussion, we connect these results to the larger discussions in the field about replicability and open science.

we argue that the current standard of not examining psychometrics of cognitive tasks is a threat to developmental science…

1 1

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

we additionally did some (even cooler!) permutation analyses to see whether the results could be explained by participants randomly placing items on the board — spoiler alert, that seems unlikely!

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

we then used this measure to assess the psychometrics of the task, which showed appropriate construct validity (β = 0.40), internal consistency (r2 = 0.20), and test–retest reliability (r2 = 0.41; ICC = 0.56).

Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · Dec 17

to capture the structure of a child’s arrangement, we developed this (very cool!) measure that captures the number of clusters, the homogeneity of the clusters, and how well differentiated they are.