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Kosta Boskovic

@kostaboskovic.bsky.social
112 followers 180 following 29 posts

Psychology PhD student at the University of California, San Diego | curious about how humans develop abstract thought and language! kostaboskovic.github.io

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Reposted by Kosta Boskovic
Sophie Mazor @sophiemazor.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
So excited that this paper is out in the world!! psycnet.apa.org/record/2028-...
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Urvi Maheshwari ツ @urvi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
🎉🎉Also check out @kostaboskovic.bsky.social's recent Dev Psych paper if you haven't already for a super cool example of later-greater in the wild!!! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
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 ;)
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Awesome work led by @mohitmukherji.bsky.social!
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Rebecca Peretz-Lange @rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
💥New paper! Not “Born that Way”: Homophobic Social Preferences and Non‐Essentialism of Sexual Orientation in Childhood dx.doi.org/10.1111/sode...
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Caren Walker @carenwalker.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Hey! Come work with us. It's nice here.
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Education is what remains when you've forgotten everything you learned in school." Not much of a reprieve, but feels relevant.
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Who’s cutting onions 🥹
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Also, if anyone has tips for how to prevent OSF from messing with spacing, tables, etc. when generating your pre-print please let me know!
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
We know children make many inferences about others from their race and gender from early in development. But what about from their age, another highly salient and informative characteristic of people? We explore this question in a new pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Hope Kean @hopekean.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Now out in PNAS! 🥳 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language | PNAS
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and...
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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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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
"I used an LLM to help me write, but it was just to polish the style and grammar" is something you've probably come across, or done yourself. Many conferences and journals and teachers are ok with this. But does it...? Just focus on the style and grammar...?
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Ebru Evcen @ebruevcen.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
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.org
Conditional inference and access to alternatives: the role of QUD and speaker knowledge in conditional perfection
Abstract. Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Yes, this is something I’ve thought about! Would be very interesting to compare how an understanding of age develops in such societies
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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Age is correlated w/ lots of physical properties like size, facial morphology, etc., but it's not identical to them. How do kids come to understand it as a chronological process? @kostaboskovic.bsky.social explores the role of numerical cues in constructing a concept of age.
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
For those attending @socphilpsych.bsky.social this week, I will be presenting work which follows up on this paper's findings, asking when children represent age chronologically, in Friday's poster session! Stop by and take a peak at this paper on your travels over :)
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
With these findings, we open a new research area with many exciting questions: When is children's understanding of age represented as time spent alive? How do children use age to make predictions about others? Ongoing work in our lab explores these questions, and we hope others will too! 10/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Exp. 2: With this change, we found that children no longer showed a size bias. This suggests that young children differentiate age from size, and use size as a proxy for age only when more salient cues to age, such as facial morphology and numerical age, are unavailable or uninterpretable. 9/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Maybe young children in Exp. 1 who lacked number word knowledge responded based on size because the facial morphological cues to age were not salient enough. In Exp. 2, we paired an elderly person with a child in order to render these cues more salient. 8/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Left open in Exp. 1 is why children, particularly 3-year-olds, showed a size bias. Is it because they initially do not differentiate age and size, or indeed because they lacked other, interpretable cues to age? 7/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
We also found that children showed a bias to identify the bigger figure as older, though. Crucially, the ability to make use of numerical age cues over-rode this bias, suggesting children might default to size when numerical age cues are unavailable or they are too young to understand them. 6/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Exp. 1. With these modifications, we found that children as young as 4 years old could identify who's older, even when size and age cues were incongruent. 5/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Second, we provided some children with the numerical ages of the figures, and tested their number knowledge separately. This allowed us to ask whether children might only use size as a proxy for age in the absence of more reliable, interpretable cues, such as numerical age. 4/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
In the current study, we asked children who's older in an Age Judgment Task, with several crucial modifications. First, we employed subtler size differences than in previous work, as the larger differences employed in those studies may have cued children to respond based on size. 3/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Early studies suggested children don't differentiate age from size until 6 or 7 years old because they typically identify who is older based on who is bigger. Could these studies have masked children's understanding, though? 2/10
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
New paper with @drbarner.bsky.social out now in Developmental Psychology! Despite the importance of age in our social world, little is known about how children reason about it. Do children understand age as something distinct from size from an early age? 1/10 psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
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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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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Separating Cognitive Development From Language Development in the Acquisition of Negation Using International Adoption 
📣From Annika McDermott-Hinman, Samuel Zimmerman, Jesse Snedeker & Roman Feiman
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
Great tool for number researchers!
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
this is such cool work!
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Sophie Arnold @sophieharnold.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
New paper with @mohitmukherji.bsky.social, Mona Lebrun, and @marjorierhodes.bsky.social @JEP:G! Did you ever wonder whether saying things like “boys can wear dresses too” is effective at reducing stereotypical inferences? We find that they’re probably not—check out more here: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...
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Ebru Evcen @ebruevcen.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Urvi Maheshwari ツ @urvi.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Well, would ya look at that! NSF is going to send >10% of its current budget to industry (read: tech start ups) instead of universities…it’s as if the admin is trying to dismantle our basic science mechanism and use it as a start up fund for private companies 💁🏻‍♀️ www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/...
nsf.gov
NSF announces $1.5B NSF X-Labs initiative to pursue generational breakthrough science efforts
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jane-yang.bsky.social @jane-yang.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process actually look like? New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990
arxiv.org
Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos ...
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Rodney Tompkins @rtompkins.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
New review paper on the development of friendship psychology/ cognition (w/ @zoeliberman.bsky.social): By age 6, children appear to recognize friendship as a ranking-based relationship with outstanding social expectations and obligations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Young children's friendship expectations align with evolutionary frameworks
Across the lifespan, friends are critical social partners. Prominent evolutionary theories—such as the Banker's Paradox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996)—propo…
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Time to ask her "Can you give me maids-a-courting fish?" in a Give-N task 😂
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Someone told me recently that an LoT is any system that reasons probabilistically over input, so I think we've lost the plot
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Kosta Boskovic @kostaboskovic.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
New pre-print alert! How do children learn magnitude words like "long" and "high", which often denote multiple domains? With @urvi.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social, we find that children start with narrow meanings restricted to the labeled domain, before analogically extending osf.io/ucxra_v1
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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
There was also a chance to celebrate some good news with friends: UCSD decided to give me tenure and let me stick around! Photo credit: @carenwalker.bsky.social, Champagne credit: @adenaschachner.bsky.social
Raising a glass to being a tenured, associate professor at UCSD, starting this July.
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Bria Long @brialong.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position! If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit. Read more about our lab here! www.vislearnlab.org
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Gracie Zeller @graciezeller.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
The Cognitive Origins Lab is hiring a new lab manager! I can personally vouch that this is a great place to grow and do exciting research--I highly recommend applying if you want to do comparative work!
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Elliot Murphy @elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
Fellas, who has the best game in town?
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Jenny Saffran @jennysaffran.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
You won’t find a more supportive mentor/supervisor than Martin!
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Martin Zettersten @mzettersten.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...
employment.ucsd.edu
Laboratory Coordinator - 138788
Laboratory Coordinator - 138788 | Careers at UC San Diego
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Khuyen Le @knle.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
The role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inferences
When encountering a novel word, adults and children as young as 12 months old often reason that it refers to a novel object rather than one with an ex…
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Martin Zettersten @mzettersten.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461
apol-recruit.ucsd.edu
Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!
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Urvi Maheshwari ツ @urvi.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Counting without end: A cross-linguistic exploration of infinity beliefs in English and Hindi learners
Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes throu…
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