It's Innate!: Recent Episodes
Candace Lapan and Dr. Deon Benton
It's Innate! is a podcast created by, and intended for, developmental psychologists and everyday people with interests in understanding how infants and children acquire knowledge. Dr. Candace Lapan, Dr. Elena Luchkina, and Dr. Deon Benton host this podcast. Some of the issues and topics that are discussed on this podcast include: Can infants really add and subtract from birth or shortly thereafter? Do infants and children really understand that unsupported objects fall or that objects that are hidden continue to exist? Is the understanding that two people can have different beliefs really present from early in development? And what's all this talk about Baby Genius? Does it actually work? We tackle these issues (and more) on this podcast.
Debrielle Jacques join us in this episode to talk about her wonderful research on the relation between maternal alcohol dependence and harsh parental practices, including one possible mechanism by which the former leads to the latter. Plus, we talk about the critical role of and need for representation and diversity in science. Links Jacques, D. T., Sturge-Apple, M. L., Davies, P. T., & Cicchetti, D. (2020). Maternal alcohol dependence and harsh caregiving across parenting contexts: The moderating role of child negative emotionality. Development and psychopathology, 32(4), 1509-1523. Link to paper (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/abs/maternal-alcohol-dependence-and-harsh-caregiving-across-parenting-contexts-the-moderating-role-of-child-negative-emotionality/84FBFFCF641F06BDC0FD4ADFE88C797A) Intermission music brought to you by Dr. Dave Pizarro (@peez) - "Hot Vision" - link to his SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/peezismyname) Special Guest: Debrielle Jacques.
In this episode, Dr. Ashley Thomas from MIT joins the show to talk about her recent paper published in the premier journal Science called "Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships." As the title suggests, the paper explores whether infants can infer close or "thick" relationship between two individuals based on whether or not they share saliva. Ashley thinks that the answer is, Yes. We talk about whether this is really about saliva sharing, what implications this has for Stranger Anxiety, as well as whether the capacity to make this inference is—you guessed it—innate or learned. Plus, we open the episode by talking about what we consider to be some of the more controversial and thought-provoking papers that have recently been published in the developmental psychology literature. Listeners may be surprised to learn that Deon's and Ashley's views on cognitive development, among other things, may be more alike than they are different. Links Thomas, A. J., Woo, B., Nettle, D., Spelke, E., & Saxe, R. (2022). Early concepts of intimacy: young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships. Science, 375(6578), 311-315. Link to paper (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abh1054?casa_token=gUhQBeOoprkAAAAA%3Ag7SJFQp1PstaSFsDfSUjay9hNFoik6fy0ZB0c9QNnSIK5YNHJzkLpl3tNj-dxNH1ihsRAYw9F3BmfA) Intermission music brought to you by Dr. Dave Pizarro (@peez) - "Seven Minutes" - link to his SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/peezismyname) Special Guest: Ashley Thomas.
We're glad to be back with our 13th episode! In the first segment, we share our thoughts on what effect, if any, the pandemic has had on different aspects of infant and child development. In the second segment, we discuss David Peterson's paper (Peterson, 2016) in which he charges developmental scientists in general and infant researchers in particular of engaging in questionable research practices (QRPs) based on an ethnography of three infancy labs. Is this charge warranted? Is it overblown? Is Developmental Psychology doomed as a field? What, if anything, did he get right? What did he get wrong? We'll talk about it all in this episode. Stay tuned for more episodes! Links Peterson, D. (2016). The baby factory: Difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius, 2, 2378023115625071. Link to paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023115625071) Intermission music can be found here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY2NogGnMlg)
This was a fun episode to record. In the first segment, Candy and Deon introduce Dr. Elena Luchkina, the podcast's new third co-host, and chat with our guest, Dr. Fransisca Ting, about the transition from remote to in-person learning and teaching. You'll be surprised to find out that we've all had different experiences (who would've guessed?) and that our universities and colleges have taken different approaches (in some cases, at least). In the second segment, we chat with Dr. Ting about her wonderful chapter on infant morality and the evidence supporting four early-emerging moral principles, among other things. We also go back and forth about whether morality is learned and, if it is learned, how that might be accomplished. Here too it should shock absolutely no one that Deon and Candy argue that it's all learned—Elena might be on Deon's and Candy's side, but she also might not be (yet, at least). Plus, Fransisca may have converted Deon to nativism much to his chagrin, but Elena and Candy are all for it! Links Ting, F., & Baillargeon, R. (under revision). Principle and Concepts in Early Moral Cognition. Link to paper (http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/infantlab/articles/ting_buyukozer_dawkins_stavans_baillargeon%20(in%20press).pdf) Special Guest: Fransisca Ting.
We didn't mean to keep you waiting but, in this episode, Candy and Deon interview Dr. Meltem Yucel. We open the episode by discussing Meltem's outstanding work developing the useful tool Psych Research List (https://www.psychresearchlist.com/), which provides a hub of information on paid research opportunities as well as information on applying to graduate school. Then we talk about Meltem and Dr. Amrisha Vaish's recent paper which takes stock of the current literature regarding the development of forgiveness ellicitation. In other words, how in the world do we get people to forgive us? We discuss how children and adults garner forgiveness after the fact (e.g., apologizing), but also potentially before they even commit wrongdoing (e.g., "I don't mean to hurt your feelings but,"). Throughout, we consider how children come to engage in these different approaches to forgiveness, what their intentions are when they use them, and how they may be interpreted by others. Yucel, M., & Vaish, A. (2021). Eliciting forgiveness. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, e1572. Link to Paper (https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1572). Special Guest: Meltem Yucel.
After taking a semester-long hiatus, Candy and Deon are back! In this episode, they talk about classic work that examined how infants segment continous speech. Specifically, they discuss a classic paper published in Science by Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin, and Elisa Newport (1996) (as well as follow-up papers) that examined infants' ability to segment speech by tracking the internal statistics of that speech. This episode is unique and unlike other episodes in that Candy and Deon pick on their own kind this time—empiricists! Hide your natvisists, hide your empiricists—no one's safe! Links Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R., & Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological science, 9(4), 321-324. Link to paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9280.00063?casa_token=T4VNQ4qOl2gAAAAA:36_0vNs5tEvV4HiODHRkmnMbNGloBgpyNrkLBeUkS6vjDgpJ2064Gu4EhBbxEMH5kHp3BxxCPPhD1A) Pelucchi, B., Hay, J. F., & Saffran, J. R. (2009). Statistical learning in a natural language by 8‐month‐old infants. Child development, 80(3), 674-685. Link to paper (https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01290.x?casa_token=2C3OgU5ehYwAAAAA:rBz35ktN07q-0YIwTZ3SB5TJVO0AJqrQFOpi2jHP5-WAxvt_HWWb4wkcbFwnUW37FT6MSXQY3DwiFXul) Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928. Link to paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926?casa_token=n2JAFQNlB78AAAAA%3AT_W3rnZ6khYSilZigioasjQ9-JM8yKFsAVBNWmmXsQmSli-z_5NlCB-ZfNYvp6LymTdKbt9Qc_BKfeA) Slone, L. K., & Johnson, S. P. (2018). When learning goes beyond statistics: Infants represent visual sequences in terms of chunks. Cognition, 178, 92-102. Link to paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027718301367?casa_token=_aBgaLK_vBsAAAAA:_6w-B_Pu9Waiee29UKRVpQOcPgi5RfLzfJeyBKJJfHHcjJL3wdSqbd1Ff70s6QahIR7GE216QVA)
This was a fun episode to record with our latest guest, Dr. Charisse Pickron. In the first segment, we talk about politics and, specically, about what a Joe Biden presidency means and what another Donald Trump presidency would mean. Spoiler:We all agree that a second Trump term would be absolutely catastrophic. In the second segment, we talk with Charisse about her work on infant individuation of male and female faces as well as speculate on the processes and mechanisms that support such individuation. Links Pickron, C. B., & Cheries, E. W. (2019). Infants’ Individuation of Faces by Gender. Brain sciences, 9(7), 163. Link to paper (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/9/7/163) Special Guest: Charisse Pickron.
In this episode, Candy and Deon talk with Lisa Scott about her work on the role of labels on category learning in young infants, in addition to what the mechanism is that enables labels to exert their influence on category acquisition. Plus, we open the episode by discussing student feedback. Do we disregard all feedback? Do we consider some and ignore others? Do we use feedback to improve future courses? We conclude by asking Lisa about her views on innateness as well as whether her research is relevant to the debate between nativists and empiricists. Links Pickron, C. B., Iyer, A., Fava, E., & Scott, L. S. (2018). Learning to individuate: The specificity of labels differentially impacts infant visual attention. Child development, 89(3), 698-710. Link to paper (https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cdev.13004) Special Guest: Lisa Scott.
Candy, Deon, and Jonathan open this episode by talking about #kindscience. For example, should scientist even worry about being kind? What does #kindscience even look like? And is it even possible to be kind to other scientists if your theoretical perspective is at odds with their own? In the second half of the episode, Jonathan talks about his work in Psychological Science on an understudied, but important, aspect of infant causal perception—namely, their sensitivity to certain physical constraints on causal events. Candy, Deon, and Jonathan then go back and forth about whether infants' sensitivity to these constraints is innate and what the mechanism may be that support such sensitivity. Links Kominsky, J. F., Strickland, B., Wertz, A. E., Elsner, C., Wynn, K., & Keil, F. C. (2017). Categories and constraints in causal perception. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1649-1662. Link to paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617719930?casa_token=ScSGGE_ORkgAAAAA:lngL_o_Kpj0Mece4Mh68ESIPEUbgv0uYQ7JXRqMS53H_QXADYVM4egBMvJxNg0emk0raeoHz5TZE) Special Guest: Jonathan Kominsky.
Candy, Deon, and Melis begin this episode by discussing how they've gone about conducting research with children during the pandemic. Then, in the second half of the episode, Melis talks about her work in Child Development that examined children's developing understanding of academic performance. Specifically, she argues that children consider a person's effort and intrinsic skill when evaluating and interpreting their performance, which is at odds with a classic view that maintained that children only considere effort when evaluating performance. Links Muradoglu, M., & Cimpian, A. (2020). Children’s Intuitive Theories of Academic Performance. Child development, 91(4), e902-e918. Link to paper (https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/cdev.13325?casa_token=cddCbyvCRTAAAAAA:mxuSZCIV2EXBGM10bjQpItdgyoB1P6fPBlhbb-C3Xe4y_VifdDO-6heikBmLdec4xw8v9hmXYOI26L0) Special Guest: Melis Muradoğlu.
Candy and Deon open the episode by introducing the guest for this episode, Dr. Janet Boseovski, and then discuss life as first-generation academics. Spoiler. It's difficult, but there may be advantages! In the second half of the episode, Candy and Deon discuss Janet's work on the "positivty bias" in children, including the mechanism (or mechanisms) that may yield such a bias. In particular, Candy, Janet, and Deon discuss what is meant by "positivity bias" as well as why and how it emerges. Links Boseovski, J. J. (2010). Evidence for “rose‐colored glasses”: An examination of the positivity bias in young children’s personality judgments. Child Development Perspectives, 4(3), 212-218. Link to paper (https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2010.00149.x?casa_token=QcmT_ZAkbioAAAAA:-M6A-F90h14gjoOfKZ8P3h5vW-sSw-NMXff-x71BWzZgxW3BfdduEyJJGq1MOMYZ2JeG4-VcjfwVII8) The music used during intermission was created by David Pizarro of the Very Bad Wizards (https://www.verybadwizards.com/) podcast. The particular sample used is called "Murgatroyd." Special Guest: Janet Boseovski.
Candy and Deon begin the episode by discussing their respective plans for teaching this fall. Specifically, they discuss whether they'll be teaching fully in person, fully remotely, or some combination of both. Note that since recording this episode, Deon has decided that he'll teach fully remotely—in the episode he was leaning toward a hyflex approach. In second segment, Candy and Deon discuss Kiley Hamlin's classic study on infants' developing sociomoral evaluations as well as a recent replication attempt of the original study by Schlingloff, Csibra, and Tatone (2007). Candy and Deon also discuss whether the data reported in either the original study or replication attempt support the claim that infants possess a "innate moral core" (Hamlin, 2013). And in an episode first Candace and Deon actually disagree about something! Does this spell the end for this nascent podcast? Links Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450(7169), 557-559. Link to paper (http://minddevlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Social%20evaluation%20by%20preverbal%20infants.pdf) Schlingloff, Csibra, & Tatone, D. (2020). Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of Hamlin et al. (2007). Royal Society Open Science, 7(4), 1-7. Link to paper (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.191795)
In this episode, we talk with the esteemed Dr. David Rakison about his research on categorization in older infants and young children. We then ask David to give us his hot take on the term innate and what evidence he'd need to convince him that something is, in fact, innate. We also discuss what the term mechanism really means as well as how to identify one when you see it. We also spend some time talking about how David teaches students to think about mechanism as well as the larger debate between nativists and empiricists. We conclude this episode by having David talk about his upbringing, what got him into psychology in the first place, and what he'd be doing if he weren't a developmental psychologist. There's even a brief discussion on the psychology of murder! PS. Deon woud like to apologize for the quality of his audio. He hopes to have this issue fixed by the next episode. Special Guest: David Rakison.
Candy and Deon begin this episode by discussing a recent email exchange between Jonathan Kominsky and Martin Packer about whether studies that use puppets are really testing young children's theory of mind rather than, for example, their "theory of puppets." Spoiler: Candy is less optimistic that they are; Deon is much more optimistic that, at the very least, they are approaching the question in the right way . Candy and Deon then discuss a seminal paper by Wynn (1992) that examined 5-month-olds' capacity to add and subtract small numbers. Specifically, they discuss whether the claim "that infants are able to compute the precise results of simple additions and subtractions" (Wynn, 1992, p. 749) is supported by the data. Candy and Deon discuss why they think that the claim is not supported by the data and then go on to discuss some mixed evidence for this claim from follow-up replication attempts. Links Cohen, L.B., & Marks, K.S. (2002). How infants process addition and subtraction events. Developmental Science, 5(2), 186-201. Link to paper (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.595.5099&rep=rep1&type=pdf) Simon, T.J., Hespos, S.J., & Rochat, P. (1995). Do Infants Understand Simple Arithmetic? A Replication of Wynn (1992). Cognitive Development, 10, 253-269. Link to paper (https://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/DoInfantsUnderstandSimple.pdf) Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature. 358, 749-750. Link to paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/358749a0)
During the first half of their very first episode, Candy and Deon introduce themselves, discuss why they chose to start this podcast, and share why they'd even dare to name their show the It's Innate! podcast given the longstanding and often contentious debate in the developmental literature surrounding this term. During the second half of the episode, Candy and Deon discuss Candy's research with young children. This research examined the role of social comparison on children's self-evaluations. Spoiler alert: It turns out that, to everyone's absolute surprise, children very much dislike being outperformed by novices. Following this discussion, Candy and Deon turn their attention to Deon's recent work in which he examined how a novel mechanism, called second-order correlation learning, might support young children's causal inferences. Candy and Deon conclude by discussing how second-order correlation learning can be leveraged to support children's developing theory of mind, on the one hand, and to mitigate possible racial bias in children, on the other hand. Links Benton, D. T., Rakison, D. H., & Sobel, D. M. (2020, April 15). When correlation equals causation: A behavioral and computational account of second-order correlation learning in children. Link to paper (https://psyarxiv.com/jt5xg/) Lapan, C., & Boseovski, J. J. (2017). When peer performance matters: Effects of expertise and traits on children's self‐evaluations after social comparison. Child development, 88(6), 1860-1872. Link to paper (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c084bab8a79b1771102eee/t/5bbd44efe79c7056b9de894c/1539130611053/when-peer-performance-matters-effects-of-expertise-and-traits-on-children%27s-self-evaluations-after-social-comparison.pdf)