Publications

Lab members in bold // *Equal authorship contribution

Under Review

  • Zettersten, M., Choi, K., Kirkorian, H., & Saffran, J. (in prep). Active sampling helps children learn new words by tuning their curriculum to past experiences. preprint
  • Alessandroni, N., Miller, R., Altschul, D. M., Barrett, L. P., Bazhydai, M., Elsherif, M. M., Espinosa, J., Gjoneska, B., Héjja-Brichard, Y., Mazza, V., Paukner, A., Pronizius, E., Proulx, M. J., Qadri, M. A. J., Reilly, O. T., Schwing, R., Sebastián-Enesco, C., Šlipogor, V., de Sousa, A. A., Visser, I., Yeager, J., Zettersten, M., Byers-Heinlein, K., Call, J., Chittka, L., Huber, L., & Prétôt, L. (under review). Flexible behavior or flexible methods? A cross-taxon review of experimental designs in reversal learning. preprint
  • ManyBabies 3 team (Stage 2 report under review). ManyBabies 3: A multi-lab study of infant algebraic rule learning. preprint
  • Schuwerk, T., Kampis, D., & the ManyBabies 2 team (Stage 2 report under review). Action anticipation based on an agent’s epistemic state in toddlers and adults. preprint

Accepted

  • Kosie, J.*, Zettersten, M.*, & the ManyBabies5 team. (Stage 1 registered report, in-principle acceptance). ManyBabies5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time. preprint

2026

  • Lupyan, G., Gentry, H., & Zettersten, M. (2026). How important is language for human-like intelligence? Perspectives on Psychological Science. preprint pdf

2025

  • Frank, M. C., Marchman, V., Bergey, C. A., Boyce, V., Braginsky, M., Kachergis, G., Mankewitz, J., Meylan, S. C., Prystawski, B., Ram, N., Sparks, R. Z., Steffan, A., Tan, A., & Zettersten, M. (2025). Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood. eLife. preprint
  • Sepuri, T., Zettersten, M., & Long, B.(2025). Examining the precision of infants’ visual concepts by leveraging vision-language models and automated gaze coding. Proceedings of 8th Annual Conference on Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Chen, J., & Lew-Williams, C.(2025). Children explore conservatively when learning novel word extensions. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Foushee, Ruthe, & Goddu, Mariel K. (2025). "Helpless" infants are active, goal-directed agents: Response to Cusack et al. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 587-588. preprint pdf
  • Campbell, E., Davis, C., Zettersten, M., Cooke, M., Houston, D., Caeslli, N., & Bergelson, E. (2025). Early production of imperceptible words by infants and toddlers born deaf or blind. Open Mind, 9, 475-500. pdf
  • Alessandroni, N., Altschul, D., Bazhydai, M., Brosnan, S. F., Byers-Heinlein, K., Call, J., Chittka, L., Elsherif, M., Espinosa, J., Freeman, M., Gjoneska, B., Güntürkün, O., Huber, L., Krasheninnikova, A., Mazza, V., Miller, R., Moreau, D., Nawroth, C., Pronizius, E., Ruiz-Fernández, S., Schwing, R., Šlipogor, V., Visser, I., Vonk, J., Yeager, J., Zettersten, M., & Prétôt, L. (2025). Challenges and Promises of Big Team Comparative Cognition. Nature Human Behavior, 9, 240-242. preprint pdf

2024

  • Schreiner, M., Zettersten, M., Bergmann, C., Frank, Michael C., Fritzsche, T., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hamlin, K., Kartushina, N., Kellier, D.J., Mani, N., Mayor, J., Saffran, J., Shukla, M., Silverstein, P., Soderstrom, M., & Lippold, M. (2024). Limited evidence of test-retest reliability in infant-directed speech preference in a large pre-registered infant sample. Developmental Science, 27(6), e13551. preprint pdf
  • Weaver, H.*, Zettersten, M.*, & Saffran, J. (2024). Becoming word meaning experts: Infants' processing of familiar words in the context of typical and atypical exemplars. Child Development, 95(5), e352–e372. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M.*, Cox, C.M.M.*, Bergmann, C.*, Tsui, A.S.M., Soderstrom, M., Mayor, J., Lundwall, R.A., Lewis, M., Kosie, J.E., Kartushina, N., Fusaroli, R., Frank, M.C., Byers-Heinlein, K., Black, A.K., & Mathur, M.B. (2024). Evidence for Infant-directed Speech Preference Is Consistent Across Large-scale, Multi-site Replication and Meta-analysis Open Mind, 8, 439-461. preprint pdf
  • Alessandroni, N., Altschul, D., Bazhydai, M., Byers-Heinlein, K., Elsherif, M., Gjoneska, B., Huber, L., Mazza, V., Miller, R., Nawroth, C., Pronizius, E., Qadri, M.A.J., Šlipogor, V., Soderstrom, M., Stevens, J.R., Visser, I., Williams, M., Zettersten, M., & Prétôt, L. (2024). Comparative cognition needs Big Time Science: How large-scale collaborations will unlock the future of the field. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews, 19, 67-72. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Bredemann, C., Kaul, M., Vlach, H., Kirkorian, H., & Lupyan, G. (2024). Nameability supports rule-based category learning in children and adults. Child Development, 95(2), 497-514. preprint pdf
  • Plate, R., Perkins, E. R., Waller, R., & Zettersten, M.(2024). Learning and generalizing associations between social cues and outcomes. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. preprint pdf

2023

  • Zettersten, M., Yurovsky, D., Xu, T. L., Uner, S., Tsui, A.S.T., Schneider, R. M., Saleh, A. N., Meylan, S. C., Marchman, V., Mankewitz, J., MacDonald, K., Long, B., Lewis, M., Kachergis, G., Handa, K., deMayo, B., Carstensen, A., Braginsky, M., Boyce, V., Bhatt, N., Bergey, C. A., & Frank, M.C. (2023). Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children’s word recognition. Behavioral Research Methods, 55, 2485-2500. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Cutler, M., & Lew-Williams, C.(2023). Active information-seeking in support of learning extensions of novel words. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. preprint pdf

2022

  • Koranda, M., Zettersten, M., & MacDonald, M. (2022). Good enough production: Selecting easier words instead of my accurate ones. Psychological Science, 33(9), 1440-1451 preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Pomper, R., & Saffran, J. (2022). Valid points and looks: Reliability and validity go hand-in-hand when improving infant methods. Infant and Child Development, 31(5), e2326. pdf
  • Wojcik, E., Zettersten, M., & Benitez, V. (2022). The map trap: Why and how word learning research should move beyond mapping. WIREs Cognitive Science, 13(4), e1596. pdf
  • Visser, I., Bergmann, C., Byers-Heinlein, K., Dal Ben, R., Duch, W., Forbes, S., Franchin, L., Frank, M. C., Geraci, A., Hamlin, J. K., Kaldy, Z., Kulke, L., Laverty, C., Lew-Williams, C., Mateu, V., Mayor, J., Moreau, D., Nomikou, I., Schuwerk, T., Simpson, E. A., Singh, L., Soderstrom, M., Sullivan, J., van den Heuvel, M. I., Westermann, G., Yamada, Y., Zaadnoordijk, L., & Zettersten, M. (2022). Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e35. [commentary on The generalizability crisis, by Tal Yarkoni] preprint pdf
  • Woodard, K., Zettersten, M., & Pollak, S.D. (2022). The representation of emotion knowledge across development. Child Development, 93(3), e237–e250. pdf

2021

  • Lupyan, G., & Zettersten, M. (2021). Does vocabulary help structure the mind? In Sera, M., & Koenig, M. (Eds.), Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology: Human Communication: Origins, Mechanisms, and Functions, Vol. 40 (pp. 160–199). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. preprint
  • Santolin, C., Garcia-Castro, G., Zettersten, M., Sebastian-Galles, N., & Saffran, J. (2021). Experience with research paradigms relates to infants’ direction of preference. Infancy, 26(1), 39–46. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., & Saffran, J. (2021). Sampling to learn words: Adults and children sample words that reduce referential ambiguity. Developmental Science, 24(3), e13064. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Bergey, C. A., Bhatt, N., Boyce, V., Braginsky, M., Carstensen, A., deMayo, B., Kachergis, G., Lewis, M., Long, B., MacDonald, K., Mankewitz, J., Meylan, S. C., Saleh, A. N., Schneider, R. M., Tsui, A.S.T., Uner, S., Xu, T. L., Yurovsky, D., & Frank, M.C. (2021). Peekbank: Exploring children’s word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. preprint pdf

2020

  • Benitez, V., Zettersten, M., & Wojcik, E. (2020). The temporal structure of naming events differentially affects children’s and adults’ statistical word-referent learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 200, 104961. preprint pdf
  • Byers-Heinlein, K., Bergmann, C., Davies, C., Frank, M. C., Hamlin, K., Kline, M., …, Zettersten, M., & Soderstrom, M. (2020). Building a collaborative Psychological Science: Lessons from ManyBabies 1. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 61(4), 349–363. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Potter, C., & Saffran, J. (2020). Tuning in to non-adjacencies: Exposure to learnable patterns supports discovering otherwise difficult structures. Cognition, 202, 104283. pdf
  • The ManyBabies Consortium (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1), 24–52. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Schonberg, C., & Lupyan, G. (2020). What does a radical exemplar view not predict? A commentary on Ambridge (2020). First Language, 40, 636–639. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., & Lupyan, G. (2020). Finding categories through words: More nameable features improve category learning. Cognition, 196, 104135. preprint pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Suffill, E., & Lupyan, G. (2020). Nameability predicts subjective and objective measures of visual similarity. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. pdf
  • Woodard, K., Zettersten, M., & Pollak, S. D. (2020). Developmental changes in children’s knowledge of facial configurations. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [accepted as a paper but published as an abstract] pdf

2019

  • Lewis, M., Zettersten, M., & Lupyan, G. (2019). Distributional semantics as a source of visual knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19237–19238. preprint SI pdf
  • Zettersten, M. (2019). Learning by predicting: How predictive processing informs language development. In Busse, B., & Moehlig-Falke, R. (Eds.), Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept (pp. 255–288). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., & Saffran, J. (2019). Sampling to learn words: Adults and children sample words that reduce referential ambiguity. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1261–1267). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society. pdf

2018

  • Zettersten, M., Wojcik, E. W., Benitez, V., & Saffran, J. R. (2018). The company objects keep: Linking referents together during cross-situational word learning. Journal of Memory & Language, 99, 62–73. pdf
  • Koranda, M.*, Zettersten, M.*, & McDonald, M. (2018). Word frequency can affect what you choose to say. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., Potter, C., & Saffran, J. (2018). Tuning in to non-adjacent dependencies: How experience with learnable patterns supports learning novel regularities. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. pdf
  • Zettersten, M., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Using language to discover categories: more nameable features improve category learning. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, Luke McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII). NCU Press.

2014

  • Hoehl, S., Zettersten, M., Schleihauf, H., Graetz, S., & Pauen, S. (2014). The role of social interaction and pedagogical cues for eliciting and reducing overimitation in preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 122, 122–133. pdf