Jenny Saffran

Breitfeld, @AnnaComptonn, & @jenny_saffran (2024): toddlers learned words better from adults who had previously behaved in an engaging way, suggesting that engaging social experience with speakers supports toddlers’ subsequent learning #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/in…

UW-Madison Psychology is hiring a new assistant professor in the area of computational approaches to language (broadly construed). Please share with interested parties! jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assistant…

Jobs: English; Computational Linguistics: Assistant Professor in Linguistics or Language Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison: As part of the University of Wisconsin RISE initiative (rise.wisc.edu) , Language Sciences… dlvr.it/TDv8rg

Early Caregiver Predictability Shapes Neural Indices of Statistical Learning Later in Infancy! Out today in Dev. Science 🙂 A team effort (!) w/ coauthors incl. @dcnlabcolumbia @laurel_joy_gd @SarahMcCormick1 Nwabisa Mlandu, Michal Zieff and @KirstyDonald onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/de…

💡 New open-access paper💡 in Dev Science with @TamarKushnir! Spoiler alert: 5-8 year old children recognize that not all issues have a simple solution, and humility > confidence when in comes to moral dilemmas! Read full text for free here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/de…

Happy to share our new perspective paper published in Child Development Perspectives @SRCDtweets with @vlbenite, titled "Concurrences across time and sensorimotor capacities promote infant learning"! Doi: doi.org/10.1111/cdep.1…

Funding opportunities for PhD students and postdocs via T32 "Cognitive Neuroscience of Communication." Details: cncct.research.uconn.edu

New paper out! We show how children really are little sponges, learning to the same extent regardless of whether we tell them to focus or not! And the fact that @MarlieTandoc managed to see this through from her lab-manager days will forever impress me!! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09…

Thrilled to share that our paper 'Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues', combining experimental data from children treated for congenital blindness and results of computational simulations, is now out in @ScienceMagazine! doi.org/10.1126/scienc… 🧵

Thanks for the lovely shout-out and for your excellent work on this topic, Louisa!

New paper out in Developmental Science with @bergelsonlab! We asked whether the acoustic properties of language input for individual words also predict age of production. TLDR: Yes – variability in how words sound predicts when kids first say them. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… (1/n)

UW-Madison is hiring 2 social psychologists! -1 tenure-track position (deadline: 9/15/24) -1 tenured/open rank position (deadline: 10/8/24) More info here: psych.wisc.edu/psychology-dep… Please RT and spread the word! Also happy to help with any questions.

Huge congratulations to the brilliant @NoraNewcombe, recipient of the 2025 David E. Rumelhart Prize! 🏅 Visit the #RumelhartPrize page to learn more cognitivesciencesociety.org/rumelhart-priz…

Announcing the launch of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: oecs.mit.edu! OECS is a freely-available, growing collection of peer-reviewed articles introducing key topics in cogsci to a broad audience of students and scholars.

Super excited that this study by infancy researchers extraordinare @m_zettersten and Haley Weaver is finally out. 5 years in the making and worth it (we hope)!

And which university is pictured on Nate Silver's post encouraging attendance at flagship state universities? Why, UW-Madison, of course!