Moira (Molly) Dillon

Moira (Molly) Dillon

@moiradillon.bsky.social

Assistant Professor at NYU Psychology 👩‍🔬 🧠 investigating the origins and development of abstract thought

1.7K followers501 following50 posts

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

📣 New paper in Open Mind! How do our concepts of others’ minds connect to language and to where we expect others to look? 🤔 We link phenomenal vs. intentional mental states to gaze, one of our earliest social cues from infancy. Led by Mohit Mukherji! 🎉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

direct.mit.eduDescriptions of Phenomenal Versus Intentional Mental States Are Differentially Associated With Gaze DirectionAbstract. Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judg...
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Online Now: The cognitive origins of geometry

dlvr.itThe cognitive origins of geometryGeometry is often considered the paradigmatic model of abstract thought, with thinkers since at least Plato exploring its origins. A dominant hypothesis posits that a specialized, modular language of thought underpins our species’ unique geometric abilities. Challenging this view, I propose the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry, which suggests that human geometry is primarily rooted in navigation-like mental processes shared by humans and nonhuman animals and that these processes approximate Euclidean geometry. Drawing on infant studies, cross-cultural experiments, and cognitive modeling, I argue that humans access these primitive processes through natural language, enabling flexible application and supporting our capacity for formal learning. This perspective broadens our understanding of geometric cognition and the nature of the human mind.

Moira (Molly) Dillon reposted

Kempner Institute at Harvard University
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

In the first Kempner Seminar Series talk of the semester @moiradillon.bsky.social of New York University discusses the cognitive origins of spatial and social intelligence. Watch the talk: youtu.be/YcgOj1wZVkg #psychology #cogsci #KempnerInstitute

youtu.beDeveloping Intelligence: Insights from Spatial and Social Cognition with Moira DillonYouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University

Moira (Molly) Dillon reposted

MIT Press
@mitpress.bsky.social

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:

mitpress.mit.eduA conversation with the editors of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive ScienceEditors-in-Chief Michael C. Frank and Asifa Majid share their vision for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science as it surpasses 100 published articles.
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

I could not be more thrilled! 🧠 That the award is named in Lila Gleitman's honor makes it all the more meaningful. Thanks to the prize committee and to my lab @ldm-nyu.bsky.social, my colleagues, my mentors, and the NSF for their support. Thanks especially to all the infant and child participants! 👶

Cognitive Science Society@cogscisociety.bsky.social

Huge congratulations to @moiradillon.bsky.social, recipient of the 2025 Lila R. Gleitman Prize! She’s a Ph.D from @harvard.edu and an Assistant Professor of Psychology at @nyu.edu. Learn about all her career and academic achievements at cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-prize/ #GleitmanPrize

Moira (Molly) Dillon reposted

Nature
@nature.com

Nature research paper: Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics https://go.nature.com/40PT3pT

go.nature.comChildren’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics - NatureChildren who learn maths working in markets and children who learn maths only from school were both unable to transfer their skills to new contexts, highlighting a need to reconsider how maths is taught in school.
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

A systematic evaluation of a set of scenarios like these is possible and promises to inform our understanding of the foundational knowledge on which human social learning is built 👩‍🏫, as well as to aid the building of human-like artificial intelligence 🤖.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

Congratulations 🎉 to Shannon, for whom this is her first, first-author paper 📕, and to Deisy, who was an ICIS Founding Generation Fellow in the lab and then our lab manager 👩‍💻! Finally, thank you to the NSF and DARPA for funding our work and to all of the families 👩‍👦 who volunteered to participate!

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

We used highly minimal, procedurally generated displays to challenge infants' capacities for abstraction and to tightly match the displays across conditions. These displays can also be easily adapted to test computational models 💻 (keep an eye out for our future work!).

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

Infants expected an imitating agent to approach a target agent only when the imitator did not also have an object goal. Infants’ attribution of social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans’ early understanding of imitation.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. 👯‍♀️ In this paper, we asked what cues infants 👶 might use to infer that a social goal is driving an act of imitation.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

To do so, we tested 15-month-olds' expectations about whether an imitator would approach the agent it imitated when that imitation occurred in the presence vs. absence of intentional cues like obstacles, object goals, and efficient, causally effective action.

View full thread
View full thread
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

While adults showed a specific object-over-place bias in both extending novel noun labels and matching, they did not show this bias in extending novel nouns following prepositions. Young children showed this bias in extending novel noun labels only.

View full thread
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

To dissociate specific object and place information from more general figure and ground information, moreover, participants either saw scenes with both place information (a room) and object information (a block in the room), or scenes with two kinds of object information.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

We predicted that participants would think a novel noun label referred to object over place information. 🤔 In the place condition, this would mean the block in the front of the scene, but in the object condition, this would mean either the container or the block inside of it.

View full thread
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

Across six experiments, adults and 3- and 4-year-old children were asked either to extend a novel noun in a labeling phrase, to extend a novel noun in a prepositional phrase, or to simply match pictures. They were assigned to either an object or place condition.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

Young children rely on various intuitions and biases when learning new words. 💬 But most word-learning studies focus only on objects and/or object properties. Here we probed word-learning biases across domains: Are novel nouns more likely to refer to objects or places?

Moira (Molly) Dillon reposted

Mike Frank
@mcxfrank.bsky.social

Thinking about pros and cons of collecting data from kids online? Our meta-analysis is out today. Effects from online testing were slightly but not significantly smaller than matched in-lab effects: d = −.05 [−.17, .07]. By Aaron Chuey, Veronica Boyce, and Anjie Cao. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

direct.mit.eduConducting Developmental Research Online vs. In-Person: A Meta-AnalysisAbstract. An increasing number of psychological experiments with children are being conducted using online platforms, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual replications have compared the fi...
View full thread
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

When obstacles and goals are present, toddlers interpret imitative actions as instrumental rather than social, revealing early limits in understanding the social goals of imitation. Insights like these shape our understanding of human social learning 👩‍🏫 and AI development 🤖. 5/6

View full thread
Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. But, the social and instrumental goals driving imitation make them hard to pinpoint when observing actions alone. 2/6

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

Here we describe innovations for building thriving collaborations 🤝 between cognitive science labs and museums through common content, philosophy, and programming that impact both scientific theory development and museum practice.

Moira (Molly) Dillon
@moiradillon.bsky.social

University research labs have been collaborating with informal learning institutions more and more. Cognitive science labs 🧠, which focus on basic as opposed to applied research, can also benefit from such partnerships! But how can such partnerships start, grow, and thrive?