The It's Innate! Podcast

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang
  • 4.0 (1)
  • Education
  • Updated Biweekly

Two opinionated developmental cognitive scientists wax theoretical about how infants and children acquire knowledge!

  1. 3d ago

    Episode 46: Walking the walk and talking the talk (with Kelsey West)

    This was a fun episode! In the first segment, we chat with Dr. Kelsey West about her journey in developmental science, the importance of mentorship and intellectual curiosity, the joys and challenges of doing science, navigating failure and imposter syndrome, and the developmental cascades framework, including a paper she co-authored on the topic with Dr. Josh Schneider. In the second segment, we chat about a paper Dr. West published in Developmental Science exploring the relation between infants' locomotion and parents verb use. Links Schneider, J. L., & West, K. L. (2025). A matter of time: Developmental cascades for developmental science. Infant Behavior and Development, 80, 102078. Link West, K. L., Saleh, A. N., Adolph, K. E., & Tamis‐LeMonda, C. S. (2023). “Go, go, go!” Mothers’ verbs align with infants’ locomotion. Developmental science, 26(6), e13397. Link Special Guest: Kelsey West.

  2. Sep 28

    Episode 45: A conversation with future luminaries #2: Candice Koolhaas and Quinn Pham

    On this episode of "A conversation with a future luminary", I had the opportunity to chat with two PhD students from the UMass Boston Early Minds Lab, Candice Koolhaas and Quinn Pham! In the first segment, we discuss everything from misconceptions about graduate school, to time management, and to how academic journeys can take on many different forms. During the second segment, we dive into Candice and Quinn's research. Candice's first-authored paper in Developmental Science spurred an interesting conversation about the working memory sampling-remembering trade-off in young children and how to accurately measure children's working memory by getting creative with the methodology. Next, we discuss Quinn's first-authored publication in Infant and Child Development which investigates episodic future thinking in 3-5-year-olds. In particular, we talked about the power of observation in learning and memory when it comes to others. For both studies, we chat about collecting data in a museum setting and the importance of the environment in cognition -- you won't want to miss this one! *Links * Koolhaas, C., Blaser, E., & Kaldy, Z. (2026). How much do you remember when it's up to you? Measuring memory use without response bias in young children. Developmental Science, 29(2), e70152. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/desc.70152 Pham, Q. A., & Blankenship, T. (2026). Personal and observational episodic memory support episodic future thinking for oneself and another in 3–5‐Year‐olds. Infant and Child Development, 35(4), e70128. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/icd.70128 Special Guests: Candice Koolhaas and Quinn Pham.

  3. Sep 10

    Episode 44: Staying ahead of the curv[ature deviance] (with Dave Sobel)

    What a jam-packed episode this was. We chatted with Professor Dave Sobel — Professor of Psychology at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, and Deon's former postdoc mentor — about everything from his participation in a cognitive science summer program during high school at Stanford University to early life tragedies to the inception of the world-renowned "blicket detector" to his enduring interest in poetry, among many other things. We may or may not have also chatted about his early life of crime. (It's not what you think, or maybe it is if you know Dave. Ha!) In addition to all of this, we also spoke with Dave about his recent Psychological Review paper entitled, "Using the dynamics of children's reaching to examine the role of inhibitory control in social cognitive development". In it, Dave discusses how a rarely used method called "reach trajectory tracking" can be used in real time to elucidate the mechanisms supporting inhibitory control as well as about how inhibitory control is comprised of separate processes (rather than a single, homogenous one). Links Sobel, D. M. (2026). Using the dynamics of children’s reaching to examine the role of inhibitory control in social cognitive development. Psychological Review. Advance online publication. Link Special Guest: Dave Sobel.

  4. Aug 27

    Episode 43: A conversation with a future luminary #1: Rachel Foster

    This week, we’re kicking off the first episode of our new series, “A conversation with a FUTURE luminary,” hosted by our editor, Jenna DiStefano! The series offers an inside look at life in graduate school while giving current graduate students a space to share their research. Jenna is joined by UC Davis Psychology PhD candidate Rachel Foster. In the first segment, Rachel shares her journey to academia, her experience with the graduate school application process, and what day-to-day life is like as a PhD student. In the second segment, Jenna and Rachel dive into Rachel’s research on delay of gratification and its sociocultural influences in childhood. They discuss exciting new work on how we measure delay of gratification, how habits around waiting develop, and when waiting may rely on effort_ful versus effort_less_ control. Along the way, they tackle some big questions: Is the marshmallow test still worth using? What does performance on the marshmallow test actually tell us about long-term outcomes? And how does a child’s sociocultural environment shape their ability, and willingness, to wait? Links Yanaoka, K., Foster, R., Michaelson, L. E., Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. (2024). The power of cultural habits: The role of effortless control in delaying gratification. Current Opinion in Psychology, 60, 101903. Link Yanaoka, K. *, Foster, R. *, Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. Effortful and effortless control: Children's behavior while delaying gratification reveals distinct roles of sociocultural norms and habits. Manuscript under review. *shared contribution Yanaoka, K., Michaelson, L. E., Guild, R. M., Dostart, G., Yonehiro, J., Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. (2022). Cultures crossing: The power of habit in delaying gratification. Psychological Science, 33(7), 1172-1181. Link Special Guest: Rachel Foster.

  5. Aug 14

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

    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.

  6. Jun 18

    Episode 41: "Friends / ones (our social cognition) can depend on" (with Ryan Lei)

    In the first half of this episode, Deon chats with Dr. Ryan Lei -- associate professor of psychology at Haverford College -- about his unique (and somewhat fortuitous) academic journey, what life is like as a professor at a Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC), and how SLACs differ from R1s. In the second segment, we talk about his 2020 Psychological Science paper, "The development of intersectional social prototypes", which explored whether children's ability to categorize faces by gender is impacted by the race of those faces. Plus, we spend quite a bit of time talking about the broader topic of "intersectionality" and "intersectional invisibility" and the implications each has for our everyday lives. And of course, there's lots of talk about mechanism! What a fun, jam-packed episode! Links Lei, R. F., Leshin, R. A., & Rhodes, M. (2020). The development of intersectional social prototypes. Psychological Science, 31(8), 911-926. Link Special Guest: Ryan Lei.

  7. Jun 9

    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.

  8. 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

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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
    2026
  • Episodes
    45
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The It's Innate! Podcast
  • Show Website
    The It's Innate! Podcast