"There are only so many experiments one can do!"

This was a special episode because, unlike most other episodes in which Jenny and Deon talk with other people about their work and scientific journeys, Jenny and Deon talked about their own work. In the first half, they discuss Jenny’s recent Developmental Science paper showing that children’s estimates of the number of dots in an array can be influenced by the gender of the person providing the estimate. They talk about the study, the surprising findings, and what they might mean for how social stereotypes shape children’s learning. In the second half, they talk about a paper that Deon published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that examined whether children can use a process called second-order correlation learning to make causal inferences in a task with multiple objects.

Links

Cracknell, K., Hauss, J., Chen, M., Sierp, R., Bian, L., & Wang, J. (2026). Children's Numerical Estimation Is Biased by Male Informants More Than Female Informants. Developmental Science, 29(2), e70124. Link

Benton, D. T. (2026). Second-order correlation learning in 2-to 4-year-old children, and its underlying mechanism. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 267, 106494. Link