Colloquium
Lightning Talks session
The first colloquium will take place on Wednesday, October 1, at 3:45 pm in Building 420, Room 040. We will hear from our PhD students and postdocs in our annual Lightning Talks. Please join us right before at 3:30 pm for cookies, coffee, and conversation! A reception will follow the session in the Psychology Lounge. Please see the attached flyer for details. We will have the following speakers:
Samah Abdelrahim - PhD Student
Unmasking Development in the Shape Bias
The shape bias is a foundational concept in early word learning, yet its literature is characterized by significant variability and inconsistent developmental findings. A recent meta-analysis confirmed this, finding massive variability across studies, no clear evidence that the bias changes with age, and a potential publication bias. This raises a critical question: is the bias itself unstable, or is our view of it obscured? We explored this question in an experiment with the full range of 2- to 5-year-olds. A mixed-effects analysis revealed a very nuanced developmental increase in the shape bias that was masked by item-level variance, mirroring the meta-analysis heterogeneity. We also found that its application is not fixed but is strategically adapted based on the conceptual context of the learning task. Our findings support that the shape bias is not an unreliable fluke but a robust and developing strategy, often hidden by methodological complexities.
Hyunwoo Gu - PhD Student
What makes a visual search difficult?
Human intelligence balances deliberate control with automatic processes. Visual search of simplified arrays has provided well-controlled ways to study this tension, but the extent to which they cooperate or conflict in natural contexts is not known. Using metamer synthesis and a stimulus-computable framework, we show that the mismatch between goal and salience drives predicts search time in naturalistic scenes.
Rhana Hashemi - PhD Student
What’s more compelling than getting high?
The adolescent drive to become is a powerful yet untapped resource for behavior change. Punitive responses to substance use, however, often backfire by entrenching “bad kid” identities and blocking this developmental process. This research program introduces the ‘Possibility Architect’: an adult who offers a positive vision of who a student might become, harnessing adolescents’ motivation to reorganize their behavior in pursuit of a desired future identity.A multi-method arc of studies tests this theory in the high-stakes context of adolescent substance use: it first establishes the causal power of this figure on young people’s substance use intentions, then validates an intervention to overcome the key barrier of teacher stereotypes, and finally lays the groundwork for a randomized controlled trial to assess real-world behavioral change.Ultimately, this work goes beyond the substance use problem space to reframe self-regulation in adolescence, not as an individual battle of willpower, but as a profoundly social process shaped as much by how others see us as by how we see ourselves.
Jackie Lisnek - Postdoc
Bridging Individual and Systemic Racism
Despite increasing discourse on structural racism, many people continue to struggle with understanding how individuals and institutions perpetuate racism in tandem. I test a novel intervention designed to highlight this interconnectedness. Participants exposed to the intervention reported greater perceived responsibility at both institutional and individual levels, increased frustration, stronger motivation to take action, and greater support for anti-racist policies. These findings suggest that people often treat individual- and structural-level racism as competing explanations rather than interconnected forces. When the link is made explicit, however, understanding improves. I will also share ongoing work at Stanford that examines how people perceive racist incidents across both levels, investigating how perceptions shift when individual- and institutional-level racism are presented simultaneously and how experiences of threat shape these judgments.
Peter Zhu - PhD Student
Young children are curious about what others think about them
Learning about the self is one of the most challenging goals that young children face. Yet, much of the prior work on early learning and curiosity has focused on children's tendency to attend to and explore the external world. Are children actually curious about themselves? In this talk, I'll present a series of studies that investigate whether children actively seek information about what others think of their performance. In all, these studies aim to provide an understanding of how others' beliefs shape the way children navigate the world and learn about themselves.