The It's Innate! Podcast - Episodes Tagged with “Cognitive Science”

Episode 42: Change starts with believing that things can be different (with Tamar Kushnir)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

What a lovely episode! We began by chatting with Professor Tamar Kushnir about her childhood, her love of math, her academic background, and how she got involved with research in the first place. We then spent some time talking about what it was like training under the world-renowned developmental scientist Alison Gopnik and being surrounded by the likes of Josh Tenenbaum, Dave Sobel, Tom Griffiths, among others. She shares how she dealt with the imposter syndrome that came from that experience but also how working with folks like that was extremely formative for her career.

In the second segment, we turn our focus to one of her recently published papers in Cognition entitled "Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision". That discussion largely focused on how 4- to 8-year-old children believe that others find it is easier to change a weaker belief than a stronger one, but that how all of that depends on the type of belief a person has (e.g., whether the belief moral, social, or factual in nature). Deon and Tamar then have a friendly back-and-forth about whether the findings can be boiled down to associative learning. Tamar makes a convincing case why they cannot (at least entirely).

Links

Li, P. H., Soter, L. K., & Kushnir, T. (2026). Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision. Cognition, 276, 106668. Link Special Guest: Tamar Kushnir.

Episode 40: Mind o̶v̶e̶r̶ Matter? (with Shari Liu)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we were joined by none other than the inimitable Dr. Shari Liu. We chatted with Shari about her recent paper in Nature Reviews Psychology entitled How Physical Information Is Used to Make Sense of the Psychological World.

In both the paper and the episode, Shari makes the case that infants and children make sense of other people's minds by considering the physical world in which those minds are embedded. Shari argues that this is achieved via two separate, but interacting, domain-specific systems: naive physics and naive psychology. Along the way, Deon and Jenny pepper Shari with questions about how her account differs from other nativist approaches to cognitive development and whether various "deflationary" findings pose challenges for the existence of these systems, but Shari handles them with great aplomb.

Links

Liu, S., Karakose-Akbiyik, S., Outa, J., & Kim, M. J. (2026). How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world. Nature Reviews Psychology, 5(1), 59–73. Link Special Guest: Shari Liu.

Episode 25: Something to pique your curiosity (with Gert Westermann)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0400

In the first half of this episode, Jenny and I chat with Dr. Gert Westermann about his rather circuitous journey in cognitive science as well as about the role of modeling in the cognitive sciences and an early encounter with nativism in a language class. In the second half, we talk about how curiosity might develop. We center the discussion on a somewhat recent paper, which was led by his then postdoc Dr. Katie Twomey, in which they propose a theory of how curiosity works mechanstically. He talks about how when this proposal was implemented in a computational model, it was able to account for existing infant categorization data. This episode was such a joy to record.

Links

Twomey, K. E., & Westermann, G. (2018). Curiosity‐based learning in infants: A neurocomputational approach. Developmental science, 21(4), e12629. Link Special Guest: Gert Westermann.