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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

or just read co-lead author @esranur.bsky.social's lovely summary :) bsky.app/profile/esra...

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Now out online! Why do kids sometimes bomb possibility reasoning tasks and other times totally nail it? We review the lit and show how differences in a set of common ancillary cognitive demands in these tasks "push around" the age at which children succeed - psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

New from me and Jessica Applin! We find that infants' behavior in a cracker choice task is impacted by an agent’s partial knowledge of object quantity: infants choose based on the agent's (inaccurate) representation rather than their own 🤯 Now in press at JECP, preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Why do estimates of when kids can reason about multiple possibilities vary so widely? We argue it’s partly because common possibility reasoning tasks pile on ancillary demands that mask true possibility reasoning ability. psycnet.apa.org/record/2028-...

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Now out in an issue! Children find it easier to represent uncertainty about *what* an object is than *where* an object is, with interesting implications for both early possibility reasoning and object representations ~~ Check it out 👉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

direct.mit.edu

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

How do ancillary cognitive demands systematically shape young children's behaviors in a range of possibility reasoning tasks? Find out in our new paper, now in press at Developmental Psychology!

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

7/ This won't settle exactly when possibility reasoning "emerges." But it gives the field a sharper question to ask first: what else is this task demanding of a child, before we draw conclusions about what they understand?

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

6/ The telling pattern: strip one of those demands out of a task, and younger kids suddenly succeed. Add one back in, and success rates drop. That's not noise, it's a signature of how much a task is asking beyond "is this possible, or is it necessary?"

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

5/ Our answer: no task measures possibility reasoning in isolation. Every task also asks the child to do other things, track hidden objects, predict where a falling ball will go, coordinate two hands at once, parse a tricky question. A 3-year-old is still developing all of those skills too.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

4/ Here's the puzzle. Give young children two tests with the exact same logical structure — one outcome is guaranteed, the others are merely possible — and the same child can breeze through one and flounder on the other. Same logic, wildly different performance. Why?

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

3/ When do children start reasoning about what could happen vs. what must happen? Depending on which study you read, the answer is anywhere from infancy to age 5+. We argue much of that disagreement isn't about kids at all — it's about everything else our tasks quietly demand of them.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

2/ We analyzed the field's most widely used possibility-reasoning tasks and identified five hidden demands stacked on top of the actual question: physical reasoning, action planning, working memory, language, and temporal context.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

1/ New paper with Stephanie Alderete, Fei Xu and Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Many thanks to my co-author and advisor @levelsof.bsky.social and all the families who participated!

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Preprint is available here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

To test this, we adapted the 4-cups task (Mody & Carey, 2016) with 138 2-to-4-year-olds, and at every age, children were more accurate under identity uncertainty than location uncertainty. Whether uncertainty is about what something is or where it is shapes what young children can reason about.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Our hypothesis is that object indexes (Leslie et al., 1998) represent location necessarily, but identity only optionally (Kibbe & Leslie, 2011), so indexes should be able to carry uncertainty about identity but not about location.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize: Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP

socphilpsych.org

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

This is going to be an incredible event celebrating Alan Leslie's amazing career. Speakers include Susan Carey, Lisa Feigenson, Randy Gallistel, Ori Friedman, Zsuzsa Káldy, Ágnes Kovács, Sydney Levine, Sandeep Prasada, Brian Scholl, Luca Surian (and me!) Join in person at Rutgers or livestream

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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future 📣 Work by Esra N. Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

You can access the paper from our website as well www.bu.edu/cdl/files/20...

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Come check out work from my lab at @socphilpsych.bsky.social SPP 2025!

List of presentation sessions for talk (June 18) and posters (June 19 and June 20) from folks in the BU Developing Minds Lab.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

I have a 2 mo baby at home. And I have a job talk at Yale this Friday. What can help me?

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Hey, people who have kids, can you please share some info about staying in academia (job search mode) + being a mom? Thanks!

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I think coming from Turkiye or a different place/lens I never thought that we could say “i am not prepared” or I don’t know”.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I learned so much from my advisor. Preparing for this presentation. I remembered, one time she presented in our lab meeting and said. It’s not fully prepared and I did not practice. I was like.. look at her confidence. I mean.. can we even say that? Wow.. I said to myself.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Now I’m 29. And I’m still learning. I want to share what I’ve learned.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Then I got married. This time, I was 24. I had a Fulbright scholarship, and once again, I came to the U.S. This time, I wasn’t alone. But still, inside me, there’s a little girl who is growing up.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Even if I found WiFi, the internship was intense. At the Harvard lab, they had some free snacks and “oatmeal.” I survived on those for about 30 days. Haha! 😆

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I ate that for days at suhoor and iftar. I had no internet. I couldn’t explain my situation to anyone.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

He dropped me off at the house, but since I was new and shy, I couldn’t ask him where the market was. I was 21. You know.. I went out to find a market. I couldn’t find one. Thanks to my mom. She had packed bread and cheese in my luggage.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

When I first arrived in the U.S. for the internship, it was summer 2018. I didn’t have a SIM card, so I couldn’t use Google Maps. I think it was the last five days of Ramadan. A kind person picked me up from the airport, and I still thank him.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I know— Some will understand this post. Some won’t. But to everyone who supported me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope peace to all our hearts.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

What I want through these words is simply to let go of this pain in a peaceful, releasing way, like casting it into the calmness of an ocean. And to be able to say, “I had a voice too.”

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

So I wrote this not as a “statement,” but as a form of “goodbye.” I am someone who fears God. I would never want to wrong anyone. Even if someone hurt me, I never want to be unjust to them, nor do I want to be unjust to myself.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I studied psychology, and during this journey, I also went through therapy. I spoke, in many sessions, about the deep hurt that had built up inside me. My therapist told me that expressing these emotions and making sense of them is part of the healing process.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

There were some things I carried inside me for years. They hurt. The more I stayed silent, the heavier it got. And now, I realize that I need to speak what’s inside me in order to heal.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Let me end by saying this. When sharing this, I had no intention of targeting anyone, blaming, or shaming anyone.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

And now, I’m reclaiming that story. Despite being hurt, I know that the kindness I gave is written in God’s book. But I want to give voice to this lived experience.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

This isn’t a fairytale or a dramatic story. It’s the feeling of being unseen. I was hurt. Because while I was praying for her— “May you start a beautiful new life”— it feels like she erased my story.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I was the one who called her on her birthday back then. One week later, it was my birthday—but she didn’t call. Back in Turkey, she would contact me every day asking for advice, support. Where was she now?

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

And today, she’s recording videos, sharing her success story… But in that story, my name doesn’t exist. That breaks my heart deeply.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

A lesson about loyalty. And I’ve learned it in the most painful way. While I was being her friend, while offering free mentorship, I was tired, sleep-deprived. Most of the time, I postponed my own work to help her.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük @esranur.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I never expected anything in return. A thank-you wasn’t necessary. But not even receiving a thank-you… not even being mentioned… That really hurts. If you ask me, “Does being made to feel forgotten hurt that much?” Yes, it does. It really does. This became a life lesson for me.

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