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Catarina Vales

@cvales.bsky.social
132 followers 137 following 23 posts

developmental scientist. not-that-kind-of-doctor. coffee lover. cat person. parent. she/her.

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Reposted by Catarina Vales
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 21/07/2026
1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
arxiv.org
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
really great time to remember principle #1 of herb clark’s paper “everyone can write better” don’t be pedantic. hcitang.org/uploads/Grad...
screen grab of the first page of a paper titled “everyone can write better (and you are no exception)” authored by herbert clark
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Reposted by Catarina Vales
Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
some professional news in this CMU story about our laboratory school 😊 www.cmu.edu/dietrich/new...
cmu.edu
Carnegie Mellon’s Children’s School Is a Caring Community for Groundbreaking, Interdisciplinary Research - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University
Take a look inside CMU's Children's School, a laboratory school where thoughtful education and unparalleled research create an atmosphere like no other.
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
excited to share this work at #cogsci2025, Fri at 1p!
oral presentation titled “racial
diversity and racial representation in U.S. children’s books” to be presented by Catarina Vales on Friday 8/1 at 1p (Pacific time) during the CogSci 2025 conference.
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Reposted by Catarina Vales
Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose. www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
I love—em-dashes.
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
if (like me) you’d like to remove the AI preview when doing a google search, adding “-ai” to your search should do the trick!
results of a google search “raising happy children”, with the AI overview at the top. results of a google search “raising happy children -ai”, with no AI preview.
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Rebecca Spang @rlspang.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
IU has the oldest Folklore Department in the country--no longer a major. Cognitive Science? gone! PhD programs also sacrificed. Full list here: www.in.gov/che/files/In...
in.gov
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 25/06/2025
Or here's a thought--maybe we could hire more actual human teachers, pay them better, make class sizes smaller, build in more paid prep time, and generally just invest in education instead of investing in AI.
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
“It is destabilizing, frustrating and enraging to feel like my daughter, who wasn’t even 18 months old, has done more for public health than some people who are now currently in charge of it” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
theguardian.com
A ‘war on children’: as US changes Covid vaccine rules, parents of trial volunteers push back
Frustration and anger mount as Trump administration contemplates new trials and restrictions for Covid vaccines
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Reposted by Catarina Vales
Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
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Sylvia Perry @sylviapperry.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
I wrote a piece for @sciam.bsky.social about why White parents should be talking to their kids about race and racism. It was so great to work with @megha.bsky.social on this piece! Please share! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...
scientificamerican.com
Why It’s Important to Talk about Race with Children
Children start learning about race and racism as early as preschool. Talking about race early, however difficult, will help them become more antiracist
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CMU Neuroscience Institute @cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Developmental psychologists and statisticians team up to investigate the accuracy and reliability of research tools used to assess how children learn. Read more about how CMU researchers statistically evaluate spatial arrangement tasks with nontraditional data in this featured article! #research
cmu.edu
Developmental Psychologists and Statisticians Come Together To Ensure Research Tools Measure Up - Neuroscience Institute - Carnegie Mellon University
Developmental Psychologists and Statisticians Come Together To Ensure Research Tools Measure Up
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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Fellow academics, I know that it can feel like capitulation to think about focusing on your work in the face of so many attacks on us right now. Remember that knowledge is the enemy of ignorance & ignorance is the tool of tyranny. Doing our work is now a form of rebellion. Keep rebelling.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 31/01/2025
Don’t fall into the trap of normalizing any of this with this sort of language that we’ve seen from so many universities, falsely equating the current situation with other presidential transitions This is unprecedented, unconscionable, and deliberately disruptive. Have the backbone to say that.
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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
New lab paper just dropped! Led by Roberto Vargas, we looked at how a person’s geometry of concept relations aligns to their group identity and how this is impacted by information sources. www.nature.com/articles/s44... A 🧵 1/9
nature.com
Informational ecosystems partially explain differences in socioenvironmental conceptual associations between U.S. American racial groups - Communications Psychology
Semantic associations between socioenvironmental and emotion concepts varied between non-Hispanic White Americans and Black/African Americans. These differences were partially mediated by the politica...
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 20/12/2024
We tend to think of anti-vaxxers as affluent, White, crunchy granola-type moms. But that stereotype ignores how precarity creates vulnerability to anti-vaxx messaging. Take Tara, whose daughter had a sudden shift in temperament not long after a routine vaccine. 🧵1/ open.substack.com/pub/jesscala...
open.substack.com
The Lie That Won't Die
Why We're Still Talking About Autism and Vaccines
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
so excited to share this paper where we evaluated the psychometrics of the spatial arrangement method to study children’s semantic structure! open access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Strengthening Developmental Science With Psychometric Evaluations: An Examination of the Spatial Arrangement Method as a Measure of Semantic Structure in Children
Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challengin...
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Daniel Engber @engber.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
gift link: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
theatlantic.com
The Fraudulent Science of Success
Business schools are in the grips of a scandal that threatens to undermine their most influential research—and the credibility of an entire field.
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Reposted by Catarina Vales
Yuko Munakata @yukomunakata.bsky.social · 03/08/2024
1/ When we partnered with 6th grade teachers to support students' executive functioning and math learning, I was struck by what the teachers wanted to know: What could be done about student procrastination? go.nature.com/3Yug81z #PsychSciSky
go.nature.com
Mutual implications of procrastination research in adults and children for theory and intervention - Nature Reviews Psychology
Procrastination is often viewed as innocuous as long as deadlines are met but it is associated with negative life outcomes. In this Review, Mahy et al. bring together procrastination research in adult...
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 23/07/2024
President Venn Diagram xkcd.com/2962
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 28/06/2024
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.edu
Conducting Developmental Research Online vs. In-Person: A Meta-Analysis
Abstract. 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...
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 08/02/2024
Hey cognitive development folks - anyone tried having 5-8 year olds do online tasks with either mouse/trackpad responses or arrow key responses? Do you have an opinion on the issues with either? Trying to design tasks for kids on different platforms (inc. computer as well as tablet).
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Jared Medina @jaredmedina.bsky.social · 22/01/2024
Are you an undergrad interested in post-bac programs in cognitive and brain sciences? @sparksociety.bsky.social will hold a webinar on Jan 30 at 4pm with reps from Columbia, MIT, Delaware and Pitt discussing their programs. See the flyer below for more details. Feel free to DM me with any questions.
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Catarina Vales @cvales.bsky.social · 05/01/2024
developmental folks: can you share studies looking at psychometric properties of *cognitive tasks* with children participants — any aspect of validity or reliability? extra points for participants in the 3-8y range. thanks!
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Ed Yong is offline @edyong209.bsky.social · 11/12/2023
I wrote an op-ed for the NYT about what reporting on long COVID has meant to me—how I approached it, the impact it had, and how it taught me to be a better journalist. This piece is sort of a manifesto for a journalism grounded in compassion, rigor, and care. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist
Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force that it is often caricatured to be.
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Sylvia Perry @sylviapperry.bsky.social · 01/12/2023
Sharing our new paper out in SIPR: Understanding the challenges and opportunities of talking to children about race and racism in child-facing institutions Led by Leigh Wilton with Jessica Sullivan & Analia Albuja Grateful to be a part of it! spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
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Cate Denial @cjdenial.bsky.social · 19/11/2023
We created the standards against which we’re comparing these students, and are trying to maintain them as if social trauma hadn’t occurred. We can change the way we thinking about progress and schooling to be much more humane.
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Martha W. Alibali @marthaalibali.bsky.social · 02/10/2023
Job alert! I am seeking a 50%-time project manager for a new NSF-funded project on how simple card games can promote learning about biological variability--with a focus on relational language & gesture in caregiver-child interaction during play. More info: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/researc...
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