Urvi Maheshwari ツ

Urvi Maheshwari ツ

@urvi.bsky.social

Psych PhD candidate in overdrive at UCSD, interested in conceptual development & change 🌎 📚 • https://urvi-maheshwari.github.io

348 followers646 following69 posts

Pinned

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social in Cognitive Science! We explored how kids learn the “later-greater” principle — the idea that numbers that come later in a count are greater in magnitude. Turns out this simple property governing the count system doesn't come easy! dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs... 1/6

dx.doi.orgOne, Two, Three, Four… What's More? Successor Relations, not Mappings to Approximate Magnitudes, Support Learning the Later‐Greater PrincipleAs we count up, number words that occur later in our count denote greater quantities. Here, we tested whether children's understanding of this “later-greater” principle originates from associating nu...
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Not sure what’s going on in the dev-cog-sci bsky industrial complex but seems like a good time to express wonder & gratitude for all that’s fun and interesting about concept dev & learning — as constructs+questions but also as the process that makes grad school so much fun!!

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Tobias Gerstenberg
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.social

I'm very excited to share a new preprint with you all (5 years in the making). "Making good decisions with counterfactuals" with Ricky Ma, Scott Mueller, and Thomas Icard. We investigate how people combine experimental and observational data to make decisions. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

The co-first author of this beautiful paper on exploration & modal reasoning @sophiemazor.bsky.social is on bluesky!! You should go follow her for your daily dose of awesomeness!!! 🧠🧠🤓🤓

Yu Kanazawa@knzw783.bsky.social

👧🔍🧠 🔓 Andreuccioli, L., Mazor, S., Begus, K., Bonawitz, E., Denison, S., & Walker, C. M. (2026). Children’s exploration distinguishes necessary and merely possible outcomes. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

doi.orghttps://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002269

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Kosta Boskovic
@kostaboskovic.bsky.social

An absolutely *beautiful* paper by @urvi.bsky.social on a property of the count list that seems so trivial yet is quite difficult to discover! And yes, as things that come later, like first year project papers, are greater, they are very deserving of a party ;)

Urvi Maheshwari ツ@urvi.bsky.social

New w/ @drbarner.bsky.social in Cognitive Science! We explored how kids learn the “later-greater” principle — the idea that numbers that come later in a count are greater in magnitude. Turns out this simple property governing the count system doesn't come easy! dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs... 1/6

dx.doi.orgOne, Two, Three, Four… What's More? Successor Relations, not Mappings to Approximate Magnitudes, Support Learning the Later‐Greater PrincipleAs we count up, number words that occur later in our count denote greater quantities. Here, we tested whether children's understanding of this “later-greater” principle originates from associating nu...
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

We found some interesting? weird? maddening? results. Kids could make comparisons like 24 vs 26 and 26 vs 28 w/o the ANS but couldn't do so when decade labels (28 vs 30) were implicated. In essence, their success was explained by their knowledge of the +1 relations b/w units (e.g., 4, 6, 8) 5/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

This paper is PACKED with lots of other info that I won't get into here, but I am *beyond delighted* to share it! It was my first pancake - a little wonky & rough around the edges but still served hot and delicious (hopefully)! You should read it because I had a REAL party to celebrate the work. 6/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Following weber’s law, we reasoned that it’s possible to compare sets of 4 v 6, but this seems a lot harder when the comparison is 24 v 26 dots. The logic goes: kids should succeed at both 4 vs 6 and four vs six by relying on non-symbolic number or a principle (as previous studies show). 3/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

But larger numbers may be conclusive: If kids judge that twenty-six > twenty-four but can’t discriminate 26 v 24 objects, they’re likely using a principle to do so. And if kids are unable to make either judgment accurately, this probably means they don't know that later numbers are greater 4/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

In two studies, we compared two possibilities: (1) kids rely on analogical mappings b/w number words and sets to grasp LG: six = 6 dots, four = 4 dots, 6 dots > 4 dots, ergo six > four. Or (2) kids use the +1 relations b/w number words to infer LG: six comes after four, ergo six > four. 2/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Stumbled on THREE parts of the Story of Civilization in Julian of all places!?! Bought with a big bucket of salt re: Eurocentric, great-man historical perspectives ofc, but the former history student AND stealthy thifter in me are both delighted!!! In the market for parts 1-7 if anyone has leads!

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Michelle Greene
@mgreenephd.bsky.social

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 The visual system tunes itself to the statistics of its input. How do individual experiences differently tune vision? In this work, @bjbalas.bsky.social and I examined how one individual difference—height—changes the visual diet and how this affects perception. 1/

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Lots of good stuff in here. 5th year me needs this advice just as much as 1st year me did!

Kensy Cooperrider@kensycoop.bsky.social

It's "advice to grad students" season! Here's a post I wrote several geological epochs ago, in 2019. My advice gets harder and harder to follow every year (even for me). But I think that means it gets better and better? kensycooperrider.com/blog/advice-...

kensycooperrider.comAdvice to a young scholar — Kensy CooperriderTen tips for young scholars on doing good work (and living well at the same time).

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

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

Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

dlvr.itThe nativist–empiricist debate is brokenThe nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

POV: I returned to a months-old draft having totally forgotten about the placeholder joke title I gave it. But somehow it aptly summarizes my current feelings too 🤷🏽‍♀️

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Ebru Evcen
@ebruevcen.bsky.social

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

doi.orgConditional inference and access to alternatives: the role of QUD and speaker knowledge in conditional perfectionAbstract. Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Mike Frank
@mcxfrank.bsky.social

Researchers learn about the world in part by randomly deciding to do things to their participants. Why is randomization — the move at the heart of the experimental method — even allowed? Ch 4 of Experimentology is about research ethics. 🧵 experimentology.io

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

David Barner
@drbarner.bsky.social

Aside from testing the MR view, we offer a new theoretical take on why kids fail. Kids conceptualize the goal of object retrieval tasks exactly as adults do betting. When we bet on horses, we don't spread bets across all options, but try to pick a winner. When FORCED to spread bets, kids succeed.

Urvi Maheshwari ツ@urvi.bsky.social

New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

osf.ioOSF
View full thread
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Here we asked kids to choose 2 locations for a reward from 3 locations, where 1 was impossible. Critically, kids were required to make both choices before knowing the outcomes of either choice, reducing the possibility of sequential simulation. 5/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

If minimal representers, one they commit to 1 exit of the Y-tube, they should choose randomly b/w the 2nd Y exit & the impossible tube. But if they reason about possibilities, they should choose both exits of the Y. We found that even 2½yos chose both ends of the Y, ignoring the impossible tube! 6/6

View full thread
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Critically, minimal representers believe that only 1 exit of the Y-tube is possible, and the other is impossible. On prior tests, kids don't appear to make a conceptual distinction b/w the 2nd exit of the Y-shaped tube (to which they have not committed) and a separate "impossible" tube (Fig). 3/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

But in these tests, rather than knowing that the goal is to maximize rewards, kids may think that they have to correctly guess an object’s location. These diff. goals might yield diff. behaviors on Y-tubes. The 1st predicts use of 2 hands, but the 2nd predicts use of 1 hand under the “best bet”. 4/6

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

On the minimal view, when reasoning about the existence of a reward in 1 of 2 locations, 3yos commit to 1 location for the reward in a pair, only considering the 2nd location when they have evidence that their 1st choice is wrong. This might explain why kids fail the 3-cups, but not a Y-tube. 2/6

View full thread
Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Our point: cross-linguistic differences b/w groups are graded, rather than as binary. Instead of asking whether innumerate groups can represent exact number or not, the literature shows that there are subtle differences in how languages encode number, with downstream consequences for learning 4/5

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

This paper appears as a chapter in an edited collection by David Purpura, titled “The Intersection of Language and Mathematics: Theories, Empirical Evidence, and Future Directions” w/ several other interesting contributions! 5/5

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Past studies w/ innumerate and semi-numerate groups tell us that learning language for large numbers is necessary for the ability to express exact number knowledge. But these studies don’t explain the precise role that language plays in the origin of this knowledge. 2/5

Urvi Maheshwari ツ
@urvi.bsky.social

Languages goes well beyond simply labeling numbers, and provides multiple conceptual resources: in morphology, words, & syntactic rules. Here, we discuss current & historical variability in how languages encode number at multiple levels, & how this variability impacts children learning to count! 3/5

Urvi Maheshwari ツ reposted

Adena Schachner
@adenaschachner.bsky.social

New paper in Child Development! When we enter others' homes, we learn about them from the placement of their belongings. This requires integrating multiple social factors (social context, pref). We find 6+yo succeed at integration & 'read the room' in this way! academic.oup.com/chidev/artic...

academic.oup.comReading the room: Children integrate multiple social factors to predict and interpret objects' locationsAbstract. Adults infer social information from objects' locations by integrating multiple causal factors, which is often challenging for children. To test