newsletter: march 2025
meet this month's guest editor, Joseph Outa
🌱🌸🪺 🐝🪻
hi, it’s minjae! happy march!
I’m very excited to introduce this month’s guest editor, Joseph Outa!
🌱🌸🪺 🐝🪻
….want to be a guest editor for an upcoming newsletter?
shoot us an email, sign up via this google form, or DM us on twitter & we’ll tell you more!!
Joseph Outa
about me
I’m from Nairobi, Kenya, and I’m currently a second year PhD student in developmental psychology at Johns Hopkins University under Prof. Shari Liu. I use behavioral and computational methods to study the development of our common sense understanding of animate agents and inanimate objects.
Beyond science research, I have a casual interest in the history of religion and mythology. I also like to roller skate (my sensei is montre livingstone aka @dread_roller), make crafty things with cardboard (and also exploring collaging, see below), improvise music (lately, by hooking up my keyboard to a synth app), and going on nature walks (ideally, chillaxing on a tree). I like to visit thrift stores, and I’m looking to get better at sewing and upcycling clothes. As I write this, it’s finally warm in Baltimore, which means I can bring my beloved birkenstocks back to daily circulation.
Some of my recent creations:
📺 WATCHING 👀
I enjoyed checking out Cadillac Records, directed by Darnell Martin, a movie about some early figures who popularized blues and rock and roll.
Dancing Through West Africa by Chuck Davis, a documentary about traditional African dance and village life.
The Brutalist. Deeply thought-provoking and hauntingly beautiful, a fictional story about a Jewish family who escaped to America in WW2 times.
📚READING 🤓
Currently reading the Origins of the World’s Mythologies by Michael Witzel and The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade.
👂LISTENING 🎧
Lately I’ve been listening to jazz and jazz fusion style albums like jazz house and afro-cuban jazz:
Black Classical Music by Yussef Dayes.
Your Queen is a Reptile by Sons of Kemet.
Pirates Choice by Orchestra Baobab. Baobab are my favorite band, and my biggest regret is not being able to see the original group live (the original Senegalese band is from the 70s).
Thee Sacred Souls by Thee Sacred Souls. A great contemporary Soul band from the Daptone Records, a powerhouse label and home of the instrumental group The Dap-kings, instrumenters for legends like Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse.
I’m fond of this fun interactive timeline of African-American music from the Carnegie Hall: https://timeline.carnegiehall.org/timeline.
💻 PAPERS I’D LIKE TO SHARE 👇
Naive psychology depends on naive physics
Shari Liu, Joseph Outa, & Seda Akbiyik
Preprint (2024)
On the Role of Explanation-Seeking on Inferences and Learning in Early Childhood
Qiong Cao
Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (2024)
Tal Boger & Chaz Firestone
Journal of Vision (2024)
Bonobos point more for ignorant than knowledgeable social partners
Luke Townrow & Christopher Krupenye
PNAS (2025)
Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis
Dorsa Amir & Chaz Firestone
Psychological Review (Forthcoming)
✌✌✌
in support & science,
📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚
eliana hadjiandreou
ivy gilbert
jordan wylie
minjae kim
THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩
💎 awesome work by marginalia and affiliated scientists 💎
Yiyu Liu, Eden Moss, Fransisca Ting, & Daniel C. Hyde | Cortex (2025)
While pre-verbal infants may be sensitive to others' mental states, they are not able to accurately answer questions about them until several years later, an ability referred to as having a theory of mind. Here we ask whether infant social-cognitive sensitivity is subserved by the same brain mechanisms as those that support theory of mind in childhood. To do so, we explored the relationship between functional sensitivity of the right temporal-parietal junction to mental state processing in infancy, a region known to underlie theory of mind in older children, and explicit theory of mind reasoning in the same group several years later. In a small initial sample (N = 33), we find evidence of a longitudinal brain-behavioral link from infancy to childhood, providing preliminary support for a common mechanism for theory of mind across development. However, the brain metric that was predictive of individual differences was not the response to conditions that required tracking the beliefs, but instead, the response to a control condition where belief tracking was not obligatory to predict others' behavior. In hindsight, the ambiguity of this control condition may have best distinguished between infants who had different propensities to engage in belief tracking, suggesting a potential role for active experience in infancy contributing to individual differences in later theory of mind development in childhood. Given the exploratory nature of the study, other alternative explanations for these results must also be considered.
The memorability of voices is predictable and consistent across listeners
Cambria Revsine, Esther Goldberg, & Wilma A. Bainbridge | Nature Human Behavior (2025)
Memorability, the likelihood that a stimulus is remembered, is an intrinsic stimulus property that is highly consistent across people—participants tend to remember or forget the same faces, objects and more. However, these consistencies in memory have thus far only been observed for visual stimuli. Here we investigated memorability in the auditory domain, collecting recognition memory scores from over 3,000 participants listening to a sequence of speakers saying the same sentence. We found significant consistency across participants in their memory for voice clips and for speakers across different utterances. Regression models incorporating both low-level (for example, fundamental frequency) and high-level (for example, dialect) voice properties were significantly predictive of memorability and generalized out of sample, supporting an inherent memorability of speakers’ voices. These results provide strong evidence that listeners are similar in the voices they remember, which can be reliably predicted by quantifiable low-level acoustic features.
👓 OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 🚀
Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute – a summer program bringing together researchers from comparative psychology (animal research), developmental psychology, and machine intelligence. applications are reviewed on a rolling basis beginning 3/1
Essentialism in the Human Mind conference (4/26 @ UMass Amherst) – this two-day event will feature symposium-style talks, key discussions on essentialism, vision-planning sessions for future collaborations, and social events to build connections. registration deadline is 4/1
🌱 JOB-MARKET RESOURCES 🌱
no matter where you’re at right now – offer in hand, fingers-still-crossed, looking at post-docs, exploring options outside academia – we support you!
lab manager position in the Lab for Developmental Studies (Thomas Lab) at Harvard – Research in the lab is focused on exploring the cognitive development of infants and toddlers, with an emphasis on perception and knowledge of social relationships. The candidate will work in-person and will report directly to the P.I., a Professor of Developmental Psychology, and will be responsible for managing and overseeing the daily activities of lab spaces dedicated to running research studies with infants, toddlers, and children, and coordinating lab-wide testing. The position will provide ample opportunities for learning, professional development, and mentoring and could be a springboard for applying to PhD positions. Interested candidates should send a 1-2 page cover letter and CV to denisselopez@g.harvard.edu and eyu@g.harvard.edu with LAB MANAGER POSITION in the subject line. Review of applications will begin March 10th, 2025 with a tentative start date of July 1st, 2025.
lab manager position in the Morality Lab at Boston College – applications due 3/1 11:50PM EST
postdoc position at WU Vienna – background can be a PhD in Economics, Psychology, Marketing, Management, or related disciplines. German language skills are not necessary but a plus. applications due 3/5
research coordinator position in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford
research specialist position in the Crockett Lab at Princeton – applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis beginning 2/14
and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!