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

This was a special episode because, unlike most of our other episodes where we talk with other people about their work and scientific journeys, Jenny and I talked about our own work. In the first half, we 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. We talk about the study, the surprising findings, and what they might mean for how social stereotypes shape children’s learning. In the second half, we 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. We also talk about how mechanistically such an ability might emerge in the human mind.

Link to Jenny's paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/desc.70124

Link to Deon's paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096526000469