Dream team: Tracey Mills (@traceym.bsky.social), Nicole Coates, Alessandra Silva (@alessandra-silva.bsky.social), Kaylee Ji, Steve Ferrigno (@sferrigno.bsky.social), Laura Schulz, Josh Tenenbaum.

Our results highlight program learning as a powerful, potentially distinctive, and early-emerging ability that humans deploy to learn structure. Our comparative/developmental results also raise many exciting questions—check out our paper for those + some speculations :). osf.io/preprints/ps...

We compared various Bayesian learning models with each population. The main takeaway: children as young as 4-years-old showed adult-like program induction on our task. Monkeys and 3-year-olds mostly used local extrapolation.

In contrast, despite extensive training on algorithmic patterns, the monkeys relied on a simpler local linear extrapolation to make predictions. Interestingly, 3-year-olds mostly used this same strategy—and their accuracy across patterns correlated with monkeys much more than with adults.

Consistent with a program-learning account, older children and adults' initial predictions typically show early multimodal uncertainty, but converge on the true pattern after only a handful of observations.

We found striking differences across both development and species in our task. Below are some examples of predicted continuations on various sequences in each population.

If participants are learning structured programs in an expressive “Language of Thought”, they should (1) be able to learn the sequences we tested by the final timepoint; but (2) show patterns of multimodal uncertainty reflective of possible algorithms that are consistent with the sequence so far.

One possibility is that we can “learn by programming” rapidly inferring structured algorithms to model our observations.

Our paper tests this ability in adults, 3-7yo children, and two rhesus macaques. Participants predicted how 2D sequences would unfold starting from the first few timepoints.

People seem wired to uncover hidden structure: we pick up the rules of games after a few turns, see figures in clouds and constellations, and riff on songs. What are the computational mechanisms that make this rapid structure learning possible?

Very excited to share a new preprint that’s been brewing for a long time! This work was led by the exceptional @traceym.bsky.social, and made possible by a developmental + comparative + computational dream team.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

New work with @samcheyette.bsky.social & Susan Carey testing the memory architecture used when learning/producing center-embedded sequences. Adults don't use Push-Down Stacks as is often assumed, instead they rely on a Queue-like memory architecture onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Oh man I came across that years ago, it's nuts - was published in Science too!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions.

Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though.

We will persist.

There are so many ways one could provide context for this data.

For example, in the last five years universities have received 52-55% of their research funding from the federal government. That's the lowest percentage since the 1950s. 1/x ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/high...

1. Quick—which of these shapes is different from the others?

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...

hopefully my first and last ever mildly political post. from here on out it's memes and papers

"this rendition emphasizes her eyes, carefully positioned to create the illusion of a gaze that follows you"

and ascii mona lisa

I am proud to report that humans still have the upper hand on palindromes

Come join the Cognitive Origins Lab at UW-Madison! We are hiring two full time lab managers to start this summer! One specializing in child development and one in non-human primate cognition. Application links below.

Human behavior is hierarchically structured. But what determines *which* hierarchies people use? In a preprint, we run an experiment where people create programs that correspond to hierarchies, finding that people prefer structures with more reuse.

arxiv.org/abs/2311.18644

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