Publications
PDFs of these articles are posted for individual, non-commercial use to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly work. They are intended for teaching and training purposes only. Articles may not be reposted or disseminated without permission of the copyright holder. Copyright holders retain all rights as indicated within each article.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Lin, Y. Bochynska, A. Dilks, D. D., & Dillon, M. R. (in review). Scene and heard: spatial layout and language support young infants’ categorization of places.
Yasuda, S., Li, W., Martinez, D., Lake, B. M., & Dillon, M. R. (invited revision). 15-month-olds’ understanding of imitation in social and instrumental contexts. [preprint]
Dillon, M. R. (forthcoming). Infant Geometry. In S. P. Johnson (Ed.), Handbook of Perceptual Development. Oxford.
Lin, Y. & Dillon, M. R. (2024). Seeing the Forest but Naming the Trees: An object-over-place bias in learning noun labels. Open Mind, 8, 972-994. doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00154 [pdf] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Li, W., Yasuda, S., Dillon, M. R., & Lake, B. M. (2024). An infant-cognition inspired machine benchmark for identifying agency, affiliation, belief, and intention. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. [pdf] [preprint] [Conference Proceedings]
Dillon, M. R. (2024). Divisive language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47, e124. doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23003047 [pdf] [preprint] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R. & Lawrence, C. R. (2023). Common content, philosophy, and programming support thriving collaborations between cognitive science labs and museums. Mind, Brain, and Education, 18, 28-34. doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12397 [pdf] [preprint] [Publisher’s Page]
Lin, Y. & Dillon, M. R. (2023). We Are Wanderers: Abstract geometry reflects spatial navigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153, 386–398. doi.org/10.1037/xge0001504 [pdf] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Lin, Y., & Dillon, M. R. (2023). Young children and adults extend novel nouns to objects not places. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 45. [pdf] [Conference Proceedings]
Stojnic, G., Gandhi, K., Yasuda, S., Lake, B. M., & Dillon, M. R. (2023). Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines. Cognition, 235, 105406. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105406 [pdf] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Media coverage: NSF Science Now; WNYC Radio/Gothamist; The Daily Beast; The Jerusalem Post; NYU News; Washington Square News; Science Daily
Huey, H.*, Jordan, M.*, Hart, Y., & Dillon, M. R. (2023). Mind-Bending Geometry: Children’s and adults’ intuitions about linearity on spheres. Developmental Psychology, 59, 886-892. *Indicates shared authorship [pdf] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Bochynska, A. & Dillon, M. R. (2022). Young children’s drawings and descriptions of layouts and objects. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 3691-3695. [pdf] [OSF] [Conference Proceedings]
Hart, Y., Mahadevan, L. & Dillon, M. R. (2022). Euclid’s Random Walk: Developmental changes in the use of simulation for geometric reasoning. Cognitive Science, 46, e13070. doi:10.1111/cogs.13070 [pdf] [Supplement] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Bochynska, A. & Dillon, M. R. (2021). Bringing Home Baby Euclid: Testing infants’ basic shape discrimination online. Frontiers in Psychology, 20, 6002. [Special Issue: Empirical Research at a Distance: New Methods for Developmental Science] doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734592 [pdf] [Supplement] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Gandhi, K., Stojnic, G., Lake, B. M. & Dillon, M. R. (2021). Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB): Discerning the goals, preferences, and actions of others. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 34. [pdf] [Supplement] [arXiv:2102.11938] [Conference Proceedings]
Dillon, M. R. (2021). Rooms without Walls: Young children draw objects but not layouts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150, 1071-1080. doi:10.1037/xge0000984 [pdf] [Supplement] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Morfoisse, T., Gureckis, T., & Dillon M. R. (2020) Pictorial depth cues in young children’s drawings of layouts and objects. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2412-2418 [pdf] [OSF] [Conference Proceedings]
Dillon, M. R., Izard, V., & Spelke, E. (2020). Infants’ sensitivity to shape changes in 2D visual forms. Infancy, 25, 618–639. doi: 10.1111/infa.12343 [pdf] [Supplement] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Media coverage: Harvard Brain Science Initiative
Dillon*, M. R., Duyck*, M., Dehaene, S., Amalric, M., & Izard, V. (2019). Geometric Categories in Cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 1236-1247. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000663 *Indicates shared authorship [pdf] [Supplement] [OSF] [Publisher’s Page]
Hart, Y., Dillon, M. R., Marantan, A., Cardenas, A., Spelke, E. S., & Mahadevan, L. (2018). The statistical shape of geometric reasoning. Scientific Reports, 8, 12906. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-30314-y [pdf] [Supplement] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R., & Spelke, E. S. (2018). From map reading to geometric intuitions. Developmental Psychology, 54, 1304-1316. doi:10.1037/dev0000509 [pdf] [Supplement] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon*, M. R., Persichetti*, A. S., Spelke, E. S., & Dilks, D. D. (2018). Places in the brain: Bridging layout and object geometry in scene-selective cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 28, 2365-2374. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhx139 *Indicates shared authorship [pdf] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R., Kannan, H., Dean, J. T., Spelke, E. S. & Duflo, E. (2017). Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics. Science, 357, 47-55. doi:10.1126/science.aal4724 [pdf] [Supplement] [Social Science Registry] [Publisher’s Page]
Media coverage: Nature; BBC World Service; The Wire; The World Bank; Boston Globe; MIT News; NYU News; Science Daily
Dillon, M. R., & Spelke, E. S. (2017). Young children’s use of surface and object information in drawings of everyday scenes. Child Development, 88, 1701-1715. doi:10.1111/cdev.12658 [pdf] [Supplement] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R., Pires, A. C., Hyde, D. C., & Spelke, E. S. (2015). Children's expectations about training the approximate number system. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33(4), 411-418. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12118 [pdf] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R., & Spelke, E. S. (2015). Core geometry in perspective. Developmental Science, 18(6), 894-908. doi:10.1111/desc.12266 [pdf] [Publisher’s Page]
Dillon, M. R., Huang, Y., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Core foundations of abstract geometry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(35), 14191-14195. doi:10.1073/pnas.131264011p [pdf] [Supplement] [Publisher’s Page]
Media Coverage: Boston Globe, Harvard Gazette
Reilly, B. J., & Dillon, M. R. (2013). Virtuous Circles of Authorship Attribution through Quantitative Analysis: Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot. doi:10.1353/dph.2013.0001 Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2(1), 60-85. [pdf] [Publisher’s Page]
Yoshioka, T., Dillon, M. R., Beck, G., Rapp, B., & Landau, B. (2013). Tactile localization on digits and hand: Structure and development. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1653-1663. doi:10.1177/0956797613478617 [pdf] [Publisher’s Page]