My research program investigates (i) the developmental processes behind early language and conceptual development, (ii) how children and adults generate explanations to interpret their social and physical environments and to predict and influence the thoughts and behaviors of themselves and others, under the shadow of cognitive limitations, (iii) how insights from these cognitive developmental processes can guide the design of advanced AI systems that reason more effectively and reliably about both physical and social worlds, and (iv) the role of AI as a mediating external communication tool, influencing human reasoning and its developmental trajectories.
Language Development
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Kobaş, M., Demir-Lira, Ö., Akman, İ., & Göksun, T. (2025). Spatial Language Development in Preterm and Full-Term Infants: The Role of Object Exploration and Parents’ Spatial Input. Journal of Child Experimental Psychology, 256, 106264.
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Doğan, I., Kızıldere, E., Kobaş, M.,Aktan-Erciyes, A., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., Akman, ., & Göksun, T. (2025). Early parental multimodal input is differentially associated with later vocabulary knowledge for preterm and full-term infants. Language Learning and Development, 1-27.
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Kobaş, M., Kızıldere, E., Doğan, I., Aktan-Erciyes, A., Demir-Lira, Ö., Akman, İ., & Göksun, T. (2022). Motor skills, language development, and visual processing in preterm and full-term infants. Current Psychology, 1-13.
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Kobaş, M., Aktan-Erciyes, A., & Göksun, T. (2021). Fine Motor Abilities and Parental Input of Spatial Features Predict Object Word Comprehension of Turkish-Learning Children. Infant and Child Development, 30(4), e2243.
Explanatory Reasoning & Causal Inferences
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Horne, Z., Kobas, M. , & Cimpian, A. (under review). Historical and Empirical Evidence for an Inherence Bias in Scientific Explanation.
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Kobaş, M., & Cimpian, A. (in preparation). Reconciling two competing views on the process of generating explanations: Rational inference vs. intuitive biases.
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Turan, E., Kobaş, M., & Göksun, T. (2021). Spatial language and mental transformation in preschoolers: Does relational reasoning matter?. Cognitive Development, 57, 100980
Artificial Intelligience & Machine Learning
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Schoenegger, P., Salvi, F., Liu, J., Nan, X., Debnath, R., Fasolo, B., Leivada, E., Recchia, G., Günther, F., Zarifhonarvar, A., Kwon, J., Islam, Z. U., Dehnert, M., Lee, D. Y. H., Reinecke, M. G., Kamper, D. G., Kobaş, M. , Sandford, A., Kgomo, J., … Karger, E. (2025). Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Human Persuaders. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662
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Ateş, T., Ateşoğlu, Ş., Yiğit, Ç., Kesen, İ., Kobaş, M. , Erdem, E., Erdem, A., Göksun, T.,& Yüret,D. (2022). CRAFT: A Benchmark for Causal Reasoning About Forces and interactions. 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.