The It's Innate! Podcast

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang
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Two opinionated developmental cognitive scientists wax theoretical about how infants and children acquire knowledge!

  1. 6d ago

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

    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.

    2h 7m

  2. May 20

    Episode 39: Give-N you Bayes and Backpropagation (Pt. II)

    We're back with Part II. We continue our discussion of how to apply Bayesian models to number cognition, but in this segment we talk about another Lee and Sarnecka (2011) paper in which they show how the very same Bayesian model can be used to test two different theories of how children acquire number. We also talk about the strengths and weakness of large and small artificial neural networks, and Deon makes the case for why small models shouldn't be abandoned. We then talk a bit about what a model of the give-N task might look like and what role realism plays in the model. Links Lee, M. D., & Sarnecka, B. W. (2011). Number-knower levels in young children: Insights from Bayesian modeling. Cognition, 120(3), 391-402.Link

    2h 4m

  3. May 15

    Episode 38: Give-N you Bayes and Backpropagation (Pt. I)

    For the first time ever, Jenny and Deon recorded a two-part episode! This is Part I! In this episode, Deon introduces the basics of connectionist modeling and answers Jenny’s many questions about how these models work, how information can be represented in these systems (e.g., localist vs. distributed representations), and the role of theory in grounding decisions about which representation to use. They also discuss how connectionist models can model everything from simple problems like the Boolean AND function to developmental problems like the give-N task. Jenny and Deon also spend some time talking about Lee & Sarnecka’s (2010) Bayesian model of children’s give-N performance, Marr’s levels of analysis, why computational-level explanations alone are ultimately not enough, and what algorithmic- and implementational-level explanations provide that computational-level ones might not. Stay tuned for Part II! Links Lee, M. D., & Sarnecka, B. W. (2010). A model of knower‐level behavior in number concept development. Cognitive science, 34(1), 51-67. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01063.x Rogers, T. T. (2009). Connectionist models. Encyclopaedia of Neuroscience, L. Squire (Ed.), Oxford: Academic Press, 75-82. https://vanderbilt.box.com/s/momlzz9euvrd8bf4tfygozfqqks82on8

    1h 36m

  4. May 12

    Episode 37: From statistics to meaning (with Katie Graf Estes)

    This week, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Katie Graf Estes, a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. In the first segement, we discussed what type of person young Dr. Graf Estes was along with her journey through academia to where she is now. During the second segement, we dive into Dr. Graf Estes's 2007 Psychological Science paper "Can Infants Map Meaning to Newly Segmented Words?: Statistical Segmentation and Word Learning." Here, we talk about the creativity of the experimental design, along with what statistical learning means in the grand scheme of language and cognitive development. Links Estes, K. G., Evans, J. L., Alibali, M. W., & Saffran, J. R. (2007). Can infants map meaning to newly segmented words? Statistical segmentation and word learning. Psychological science, 18(3), 254-260. Link Special Guest: Katharine Graf Estes.

    1h 57m

  5. Apr 24

    Episode 36: The goldilocks of predicability (with Viridiana Benitez)

    This week we had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Viridiana Benitez, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. In the first part of the episode we talked with Dr. Benitez about her academic journey along with how she approaches mentorship. In part two, we turned to her recent paper in Current Biology entitled "Predictable Events Enhance Word Learning in Toddlers." This paper explores how environmental predictability can scaffold novel word learning in toddlers. Towards the end, we discuss the relationship between Dr. Benitez's work in predictability and her work in bilingualism. Links Benitez, V. L., & Saffran, J. R. (2018). Predictable events enhance word learning in toddlers. Current Biology, 28(17), 2787-2793. Link Special Guest: Viridiana Benitez.

    1h 40m

  6. Mar 19

    Episode 35: A 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 take on the cognitive sciences (with Richard Prather)

    In this episode, we were joined by Dr. Richard Prather, an associate professor in the human development department at the University of Maryland, College Park. In the first segment, we talk about Richard's academic journey, his approach to applying to college and then to graduate school, and how he landed on one of his major research topics -- numerical development. We also talk a bit about computational modeling at the end of this segment. In the second segment, we talk about how the cognitive sciences would benefit from adopting a more critical approach, what even is meant by "critical", how he'd respond to various potential critiques of the approach, whether this framework is feasible for junior scientists, and how he's applied it in his own work. Links Prather, R. W. (2023). A new path: Why we need critical approaches to cognitive and psychological sciences. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(2), 195–198. Link Special Guest: Richard Prather.

    1h 45m

  7. Mar 13

    Episode 34: "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

    1h 43m

  8. Feb 12

    Episode 33: Finding common ground (with Jenna DiStefano)

    This episode we introduce our new podcast editor Jenna DiStefano, a developmental psychology PhD student at UC Davis. During the first segement, we chat with Jenna about her research path, decision to apply to graduate school, and where her work is heading. In the second segement, we discuss Jenna's paper exploring contextual differences in infant-directed speech (IDS). Her paper analyzes how parents may talk differently to their infants depending on the context at-hand. We speculate about what makes IDS "special" and its role in language development -- is it the lack of "common ground" between a parent and infant? Is it emotion? Something else? Links DiStefano, J., Cohn, M., Zellou, G., & Estes, K. G. (2025). Prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech. Journal of Child Language, 1-23. Link Apfelbaum, K. S., & McMurray, B. (2011). Using variability to guide dimensional weighting: Associative mechanisms in early word learning. Cognitive Science, 35(6), 1105-1138. Link

    1h 31m
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Two opinionated developmental cognitive scientists wax theoretical about how infants and children acquire knowledge!

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  • Creator
    Deon Benton & Jenny Wang
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    39
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The It's Innate! Podcast
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    The It's Innate! Podcast