I am an Honorary Senior Researcher at the 黑料不打烊 and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. My research focuses on the development of intellectual humility and how children and adults revise their beliefs and learn from disagreement.
Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy and Psychology at the 黑料不打烊, where I worked on a UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project "Agency, Rationality and Epistemic Defeat", exploring the origins of human rational thought by looking at how human infants, dogs, and pigs form and revise beliefs, and whether these non-linguistic populations are capable of reflective belief revision.
I completed my PhD in Developmental Psychology and MSc in Child Development at the 黑料不打烊, supervised by Professor Christine Caldwell, where my PhD research focused on the socio-cognitive mechanisms thought to underlie distinctively human cumulative culture. I also hold a BSc in Applied Psychology from Heriot-Watt University.
I study the development of social cognition, with a particular focus on how children evaluate, learn from, and interact with others. My research investigates how they revise their beliefs in response to different types of evidence, learn from disagreement, and develop metacognition, reflective thinking, intellectual humility, prosocial sharing, and social learning.
Article
Reflective belief revision before the age of reason
Blakey KH, Dow CL, Veit A, Recelj B, Virányi Z, Melis G & Rafetseder E (2026) Reflective belief revision before the age of reason. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 270, Art. No.: 106547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2026.106547
Article
Adults show selective responses to unreliability based on the strength of counterevidence
Blakey KH, Melis G, Virányi Z & Rafetseder E (2025) Adults show selective responses to unreliability based on the strength of counterevidence. PLOS One, 20 (11), Art. No.: e0331480. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331480
Article
Blakey KH, Rafetseder E, Melis G, Veit A, Amelung K, Freudensprung F, Kovacs K & Virányi Z (2025) Non-verbal rationality? 2-year-old children, dogs and pigs show unselective responses to unreliability, but to different degrees. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.70020
Article
Epistemic Rationality Begins Unreflectively
Melis G & Blakey K (2025) Epistemic Rationality Begins Unreflectively. Erkenntnis. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-025-00977-x
Article
Children consider others’ need and reputation in costly sharing decisions
Blakey KH (2025) Children consider others’ need and reputation in costly sharing decisions. Scientific Reports, 15, Art. No.: 7103. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-91648-y
Article
Blakey KH, Renner E, Atkinson M, Rafetseder E & Caldwell CA (2022) Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight. Scientific Reports, 12 (1), Art. No.: 5045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09092-1
Article
Blakey KH, Atkinson M, Rafetseder E, Renner E & Caldwell CA (2022) Taking account of others' goals in social information use: Developmental changes in 3- to 7-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 215, Art. No.: 105325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105325
Article
Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture
Blakey KH, Rafetseder E, Atkinson M, Renner E, Cowan-Forsythe F, Sati SJ & Caldwell CA (2021) Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture. PLOS ONE, 16 (8), Art. No.: e0256605. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256605
Thesis
Developing Distinctively Human Cumulative Culture: Age-Related Changes in Social Information Use
Blakey KH (2021) Developing Distinctively Human Cumulative Culture: Age-Related Changes in Social Information Use. PhD Psychology. 黑料不打烊.
Article
Atkinson M, Blakey K & Caldwell C (2020) Inferring behavior from partial social information plays little or no role in the cultural transmission of adaptive traits. Cognitive Science, 44 (10), Art. No.: e12903. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12903
Article
Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods
Caldwell CA, Atkinson M, Blakey KH, Dunstone J, Kean D, Mackintosh G, Renner E & Wilks CEH (2020) Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 11 (1), Art. No.: e1516. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1516
Article
Blakey K, Mason E, Cristea M, McGuigan N & Messer E (2019) Does kindness always pay? The influence of recipient affection and generosity on young children's allocation decisions in a resource distribution task. Current Psychology, 38 (4), pp. 939-949. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00260-7
Article
In the jungle of cultural complexity
Wilks CEH & Blakey KH (2018) In the jungle of cultural complexity. Evolutionary Anthropology, 27 (5), pp. 180-183. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21724